To Love, Once Again

Chapter 55

Sera can hear her heart pounding in her ears as Lucien cages her in..

They're surrounded empty pots and dirty pans, dry onions and leeks hanging from the ceiling with a tub of peeled potatoes in one corner of the kitchen.

Her eyes begin to flutter closed and her lips part, ready for his kiss.

Lucien's warm thumb tilts her chin up, and Sera leans forward as their lips meet, sharing a sweet kiss. With one touch of his lips on her own, Sera could feel her breath hitch, her cheeks growing hot like a live wire.

Tenderly engaging her parted lips with Lucien's, she responds to the kiss, but pulls away. Before she loses herself in the orphanage kitchen, of all places.

Cupping her hands around the back of Lucien's thick neck and craning her neck up at him, Sera asks.

"But that wish....it was never a promise between us, was it?"

Why had Lucien done this much for her?

"On that day you made your wish, I promised you in my heart to fulfill it."

Oh Lucien. Sweet, romantic Lucien. It was moments like this, when Lucien would share his sweetness with her...it would make Sera feel so violently, so deeply for this wounded man. He was a wounded man, she knew. Yet, she needed to understand the depths of the scars in his heart. Sera wanted to unravel more of the mystery that was Lucien. The fact that he chose her to love, her, an outsider, from a different world no less, never ceased to amaze her.

"I wanted to leave your mark for you, so that you knew that all this"

Lucien gestures around the room.

"It was real."

"That I"

Pounding his chest, Lucien clenches his fingers into the fabric of his rough shirt, over where his heart lay.

"was real"

No one, not even Sera herself, could tell them that what they had between them was some kind of illusion.

Only Lucien knew that mark that Sera had left on himself was more than enough. The light she breathed into him had unstained the dark emotions of loneliness, reaching further to the ripped and dirtied corners of his heart.

This desire to leave a mark on the world had been a new concept to him. He was born with the role of a Prince weighing heavily upon his shoulders, where, as he grew older, his actions created a larger impact on the world around him. It was the exact opposite of what he'd experienced.

Lucien hadn't cared, rebellious and angry at the environment, busy focused on fighting and killing, wanting to disappear. Yet Sera was the one who taught him to use what he had for good. What use was power and authority when it stayed unused?

It was a struggle when she left.

Though he could have left her mark by burning the world to ashes around him, destroying everyone and everything, he hadn't.

Because his infant son was still here.

Leo was the crystallization of the love that Sera and Lucien had shared was still here. Leo was the reason that small, indivisible, buried shred of hope that believed she would come back to him still existed.

Laying her hand over his clenched fingers, Sera softly uncurls them, one by one, relaxing them and pulling the hand so that it sits on her waist.

"It was all real, then." Somehow, this affirmation relieved Sera.

Sera leans her head against his hard chest, relaxing against the thick muscle as he breathes. So he'd taken care of Grandma Rosie's beloved orphanage, kept her program alive, all for Sera, to fulfill her wish. Swallowing the lump in her throat, Sera continues.