The word came out stripped of everything. No anger. No authority. Just raw, unprocessed shock, her voice the voice of a girl rather than a princess.
He was simply there. As if he had always been there. As if walls and distance and three days meant nothing at all to him, which— she was beginning to understand— they did not.
Her mind lurched backward.
The garden. The stone bench warm under the late afternoon sun, and then his hands, and then— nothing. A blankness. The next thing she remembered was this ceiling, this bed, this room, Marlin's careful hands and quiet voice telling her she had been unconscious and that her mother was deep in seclusion and could not be disturbed.
'Three days.'
