Page 155 of Split or Swallow

A small smile.

“Not tonight, Tem.”

They walked slowly amongst the graves. For once, Tem was content to let Leo lead. He seemed to know where he was going, although she couldn’t imagine who would be buried here. His mother, the queen, was the only person in his immediate family who was dead. Surely the royals had their own crypts deep beneath the castle. There would be no reason to bury the queen amongst the villagers.

Eventually, they stopped. But not at a grave.

Instead they had ascended the hill overlooking the graveyard, where a bench sat beneath a drooping willow tree. Leo’s gaze was trained on the trunk. Tem squinted to see what he was looking at. Two letters were carved into the whorled wood:

E + L.

Something tugged at Tem’s heart.

“‘E’ and ‘L’?” Tem whispered, although she already knew.

Leo stared at the tree, his eyes unfocused.

“Evelyn and Leo,” he whispered back.

Evelyn was not a mistake.

“Who was she?”

“She was…important to me.”

Tem squeezed his hand.

“What happened to her?”

Leo’s jaw tightened. He turned to face Tem.

“A prince is allowed to bed whoever he likes before the training. It’s encouraged, actually—the more the better. But relationships are forbidden. I’m supposed to save commitment for my wife. So when I met Evelyn, I figured she would just be another girl in my bed. But she wasn’t. She was…” he paused, and Tem could see the pain in his eyes. “…everything.”

A long moment passed before he spoke again:

“We used to meet there—” he gestured at the bench, “—to talk for hours. I’d never talked to anyone like that before. In the castle, everyone talks at me. Evelyn talked to me. And she listened. I think that’s why I fell in love with her. Then my father found out.”

The tug on Tem’s heart intensified.

“What did he do?” she asked despite herself.

“He didn’t approve. He never does. Evelyn came from a family of fishermen. Her parents were dead; her aunt had raised her. She was a year older than me, so she wasn’t eligible for the training. He told me I had to end it.”

“And did you?”

“No,” Leo said simply. “I didn’t.”

Tem turned that information over in her mind. Leo had courted a girl—a girl his father didn’t approve of—a girl just like Tem. She understood now why Maximus was so against their relationship, why he insisted on keeping them apart. This was a pattern for Leo. It begged the obvious question:

“So…what happened?”

Leo sighed. “We made plans to run away.”

That shocked Tem.

“You were going to leave your family for her?”

“Evelyn was my family.”