The Smile Beneath the Sand

Chapter 12

Livia

After that, everything changed.

Not loudly. Not in ways others could name.

But the world I moved through no longer fit me the same way.

I did not step onto the balcony again.

The first day I avoided it, I told myself it was accidental. The second day, deliberate. By the third, the thought of standing there—of looking down at the sand where he fought, where he bled—made my chest ache so fiercely I had to stop walking and steady myself against the wall.

I could not watch him be consumed by the thing that had made us impossible.

So I stayed away.

The house noticed.

It always did.

My father noticed most of all.

He said nothing at first. Only watched me with that careful, assessing gaze he used when calculating risk. He noted my silence at meals, the way my appetite faded, the way my hands stilled in my lap as if I were holding myself together by force alone.

“You no longer watch the training,” he said one evening, not accusing—concerned.

“I grew tired of it,” I replied.

It was not a lie. Just not the truth.

He frowned. “You never tire of things so easily.”

I did not answer.

What could I say? That I had been held by a man the world called a beast, and that his arms had felt more like home than this house ever had? That every stone corridor echoed with memory now, every quiet moment burned with absence?

I did not speak because if I did, I would not stop.

So I withdrew.

I moved through my days like a ghost—present, obedient, untouched. Servants watched me with soft concern. Some offered quiet smiles, others small kindnesses they pretended were nothing. They understood more than my father ever could.

No one spoke his name to me.

No one needed to.

The memories stayed.

They lived in my body, not my mind alone. In the way I still reached for warmth in my sleep. In the way silence now felt louder than noise ever had. In the way my heart lifted painfully whenever I heard steel ring in the distance—and then sank with guilt for still listening.

We had done the only thing we could do.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

We had chosen memory.

It should have been enough.

I told myself that daily. Repeated it like a prayer. Memory was safer. Memory did not risk his life, did not invite punishment, did not tear open wounds that would never be allowed to heal.

Memory was all we were permitted.

But wanting does not obey permission.

Some nights, I lay awake staring at the ceiling, imagining his cell—small, quiet, solitary. Imagining him lying there with the same restlessness clawing at his chest. Knowing, without needing proof, that he remembered too.

That he burned too.

The knowledge was both comfort and cruelty.

Because it meant I was not alone.

And because it meant this was not finished.

I pressed my hand to my heart, breathing through the ache, trying to be grateful for what we had been given instead of grieving what we were denied.

One night. Two days. A lifetime of memory.

It should have been enough.

But every part of me—body, soul, breath—wanted more.

And wanting more, I knew, was the most dangerous thing of all.