She kissed him like a woman trying to forget.
When he finally drew back, it was slow. Reluctant. Their foreheads touched, breath mingling in the cold air, not ready to break the fragile silence.
The ship bell rang—three sharp chimes for final boarding. JingYi stepped back, the distance already feeling like a league. His hand lingered on hers for one last, warm beat. When it fell away, she curled her fingers into a fist, as if she could keep this feeling.
“Farewell, Lord Wulfbane,” she whispered, the title a shield.
She turned toward the gangplank. It creaked beneath her, the wood groaning with age and tide. Her right foot dragged slightly with each step. She clutched the rail, not for balance, but for courage. Haorán followed behind her at a respectful distance.
Halfway up, she paused.
Just once—just once, she looked over her shoulder.
At the bottom of the gangplank, he stood, a lone figure against the sea. The wind tore at his hair and cloak. But it was his eyes she noticed most. They were fixed on her. Fierce. Unwavering. Already haunting her memory.
She turned back toward the ship, spine straight, and kept going.
It would be so easy—so terribly easy—to cling to that kiss. To treat it as a promise, to believe it could rewrite their beginning. But she knew better. It was a seal. A perfect, painful full stop to the sentence of them. A gift of a clean ending, so she could dare to dream of a clean beginning someday, elsewhere.
Later, as the shape of Terresard blurred into the horizon, JingYi stood at the ship’s stern and watched.
Tremore had cracked her open. It had scooped out her insides and, in the same brutal hands, helped her heal. It had given her a taste of a love so profound it demanded she become someone worthy of it—not in his eyes, but in her own.
The tears finally came. They spilled past her lashes before she could stop them, hot and unchecked, as though the last dam within her had broken. She wept until her shoulders trembled, until her breath caught on the salt-stung air.
Behind her, Haorán spoke gently, his voice a familiar anchor in the wide, open sea. “It’s not too late. If you wish to stay, just say the word.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a trail of salt on her skin. She stared out at the horizon where land had shrunk to a single smudge of grey.
“No,” she said. “This is the only way it should be.”
He said nothing more, but he stood beside her, silent and solid.
Together, they watched the last sliver of Tremore fade into blue.
CHAPTER 62
ALEXANDER
Alexander remained on the pier long after the ship had vanished into the horizon, until even the sails were no more than a seagull’s memory against the steel-grey sea. And still, he stood.
The space where her vessel had been was now empty water, a hollow in the world that pulled the air from his lungs. He had agreed to this distance, this harsh, necessary separation. Yet watching it solidify felt less like a strategy and more like a slow unravelling of his soul. Each crash of waves against the pilings chanted the two truths that had become his prison:You love her. You let her go.
It was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Harder than the two-story fall. Harder even than bearing his family’s disgrace.
He’d known it was coming the moment she’d shattered in his arms—not just from the pain of her wounds, but from the sheer relief of beingseen. He had felt her, in that embrace, trying to memorize him. As if she were saying goodbye.
In the raw quiet after, with her sleeping in his arms, he had pieced together the truth she couldn’t yet fully voice. She wasn’t leaving him. She was fleeing the ghost of the woman who had been shipped away as a political placeholder. She needed to facethe land that had exiled her, to dig into the poisoned soil of her family’s betrayal and their silence. She needed to discover if anything of her old self remained, or if she could build something entirely new from the ashes.
She needed to do it alone. Not as Lady Wulfbane, but as JingYi.
And he needed to break the marriage clean—like a bone that must be shattered completely to set straight, to heal stronger than before.
Still, a primal part of him had raged against letting her go. It urged him to corner her, kiss her, keep her in his bed and pleasure her until she forgot her own name. Until his child grew in her womb and bound her to him by something stronger than her doubt.
But that was the fear of the hollow man he’d been before her. She hadn’t fallen in love with that man. She’d fallen in love with the man she believed he was: honourable, steady,good. To chain her with love, however desperately given, would be to betray that man.
So he’d given her the only gift she’d accept from him: his blessing on her solitude. His faith in her journey. His silence, even when the rest of him wanted to beg her to stay.