Page 39 of Revert (The Royal Chronicles #4)

My throat tightened, heart stuttering as I looked away. That was what Father used to tell me during the long hours I’d spent by his bedside. I had no memory of ever sharing something so tender with Castiel. For him to know it, I would have had to trust him deeply.

Then I saw the tree. At first, it looked like any other in the grove—its bark mottled with age, branches half-bare. But something about it kept drawing my gaze, a quiet pull in my chest, as though my heart remembered something my mind could not.

I stepped closer. Carved low on the trunk where the ivy hadn’t reached, were two names. His…and mine. No titles, no symbols of alliance or duty—just Castiel and Bernice , joined by a small, crooked heart.

I reached out, fingertips brushing the weathered carving. The letters had softened with time, but were still legible. Not written for performance or show, not meant for anyone to see at all. A secret, carved in a place only we would return to.

“We used to sit beneath this tree,” I whispered. “Before the court, before the masks. We’d talk for hours about everything…and sometimes about nothing at all.”

The ache bloomed sharp and bittersweet. The words hadn’t come from memory, but from somewhere deeper. As if the roots of that forgotten joy were still buried inside me, waiting for the right moment to bloom again.

I stared at the carving in disbelief before turning to him. He said nothing, but his expression held no surprise or perplexity…as though he had known long before I did that these names were here. “Where did they come from?” I asked.

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, his gaze lingered on the tree with a kind of reverent sadness, a silence filled with things unspoken.

“Magic is imperfect,” he said at last. “Especially the most complex spells. Even when they do what they’re meant to, they always leave traces behind—fragments in memory, echoes in the world, shifts from the way things once were. Clues, if you know where to look.”

“Then how come I haven’t noticed them?”

“Because your focus has been on a different kind of investigation,” he replied. “Or perhaps you’ve been too afraid, choosing not to see.”

Instinctively, my hand rose to the scar above my heart, the one his sword had left behind, a relic of a different timeline etched into my skin. I unconsciously rubbed my fingers over it as I stared at another kind of mark carved on the tree.

I wanted to dismiss it, claim it had been etched by someone else. But I couldn’t mistake the handwriting—the elegant, slightly angular way he always signed his name that I had seen in countless court memos and handwritten invitations. And my own, which I knew intimately.

I traced my fingertip over each letter: B.E.R.N.I.C.E.

With each stroke, something tugged at the edge of my mind, the shape of a memory struggling to form from the fog. But something—either within me or a force beyond me—kept it blurred, like trying to peer through a clouded window pane, as if a buried part of me was afraid to examine it too closely.

A flicker of memory stirred—one of laughter and warmth, of sunlight caught in leaves and the hush of a moment shared beneath the trees. I remembered his arms wrapped around me from behind, the steady weight of him grounding me as we stood before the tree that would become ours.

My voice, light with mischief, suggesting we carve our names into the bark to mark it as our secret place. His answering smile, the way it softened his whole face. He drew a dagger from his belt, but instead of carving the names himself, he handed it to me.

Our fingers brushed in the exchange, and the heat of that touch lingered longer than it should have.

My hand trembled slightly as I took the blade, my heart fluttering as I etched each letter into the bark—his name beside mine.

A permanent claim in an impermanent world.

The air had felt sacred, as though even the wind held its breath to witness something being born.

I blinked rapidly, breath shallow as I came back to the present. Castiel was studying me, his expression unreadable save for the intensity in his gaze…like he already knew what I’d seen, and was only waiting for me to remember.

“You shouldn’t try to hold onto it,” he said quietly. “Some things are better let go.”

“But I need to.” The truth I’d been circling was so close. Just a little further, and I could almost grasp it. And yet something—whether my own fear or some lingering thread of magic—still held me back. “What am I remembering?”

“Something you need to forget. Please, Bernice.” He began to pull his hand away, deliberately untangling our fingers in achingly slow movements, like someone releasing something they still longed to hold.

“Shouldn’t cherished things remain protected?” I whispered.

A faint crease appeared at the corner of his brow—pain or hesitation, I couldn’t tell—before he slowly reached for my hand.

His thumb brushed gently over the knuckles where I’d clenched them, a grounding tether.

“Perhaps,” he said after a long moment, “It’s by forgetting that we protect them.

That way they can never to be taken away. ”

He started to pull back, but I seized his hand, keeping him there.

I studied him in the silence that followed, my fingers still wrapped in his.

Perhaps it’s forgetting that protects them .

But I couldn’t believe that was true. Because in remembering whatever it was that stirred in the deepest parts of me, I didn’t feel shattered.

I felt whole .

And for the first time, I understood something I had refused to name.

Not just in the strange warmth that bloomed in his presence, or the way I caught myself searching for him in every room.

Not just in the ache that twisted through me when I thought he’d betrayed me, or even in the way I had fought so hard not to feel the emotion concealed in my heart.

Beneath the fear had always been a tender emotion, born not in obligation or fate, but the kind born from stolen moments.

These memories—if that’s what they were—weren’t from my first life, nor were they part of the past I remembered in this timeline.

They came from somewhere else entirely, as if they had simply always been there, dwelling quietly in my heart all along, waiting to be rediscovered.

I couldn’t change what had happened between us in the past, nor did I know what the future would bring. But I could choose my present, and do my best to seize the future that waited to be written…one I wanted to write only with him.

I reached for his face, my hand trembling slightly as I cupped his cheek. “I don’t know everything yet, and I won’t pretend to understand all that we were. But I know what I feel now…and I don’t want to keep running from it, especially not you.”

His breath hitched as I stood on tiptoe and leaned forward. “No, Neese, we mustn’t.” He gently but firmly pushed my cradling hand away. But for all his insistence, he couldn’t disguise the raw longing in his voice, the need…the same I impossibly shared.

My own breath caught at the nickname, one I’d only ever allowed those dearest to me…and one I had no memory of sharing with him. I was certain no one had called me that since I’d left my family and kingdom behind.

“Why not?” I asked softly.

“Because…” His voice frayed. “Why would we have had endure all that agony apart, only for him to take you from me again?”

I had no idea of what he meant, no memory of the pain he spoke of. But whatever that past held, I was done with being a prisoner to it.

All I could see was the war taking place in the dark, beautiful eyes I was certain I had once dreamed of and spent hours gazing into—a battle that raged between longing, restraint, and the desperate desire to protect me.

But I didn’t want protection, not when my heart was aching with a loneliness I hadn’t even realized had been consuming me until now, an emotion I knew only he could quench.

My hand rose instinctively back to his cheek. This time he didn’t push me away. My heart stirred as his eyes fluttered closed and he leaned against it like someone starved for warmth, as if he couldn’t help himself, regardless of the cost.

“I have to know, Castiel. Please.” There was only one way to know for certain what this new yet familiar feeling was, an emotion that felt impossible and undeniable all at once.

His eyes widened, wonder breaking over his face like dawn. The stillness around us deepened, as though even the ruined garden had gone silent to listen…yet this time he didn’t pull away. Slowly, I rose on my toes and kissed him. Not with hesitation, but in choosing.

For all his resistance, his reaction was instantaneous and desperate, kissing me as if finally being granted breath after years of drowning. His fingers threaded through my hair as if they had always belonged there, his other hand found my waist and held me tightly, as though afraid I might vanish.

The way we kissed was with the familiarity in coming home, as if we’d done this countless times before…

even though, for all I remembered, this was our very first. I wrapped my arms around his neck, drawing him closer, anchoring myself in the warmth of him that felt like both an ending and a beginning, fitting together like something long lost, finally restored.

The kiss deepened, both desperate and reverent, an unspoken vow as well as a memory reclaimed. In that moment, time ceased to exist. When we finally pulled apart, I lingered in the hush that followed, my forehead resting gently against his. Our breath mingled in the stillness.

He was the first one to pull back, breath unsteady, his holding mine with a mixture of longing and regret. His hand slipped from my waist with visible reluctance, as if the act of stepping away hurt more than he could admit.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” he said, voice low and strained.