Chapter 104: Chapter-104

The ceiling above him was painted with delicate murals—clouds and birds and what might have been angels or might have been something else entirely, all rendered in soft blues and whites and golds. Beautiful work. The kind of thing you commissioned from a master artist and then never looked at because you got so used to it being there.

He blinked a few times, trying to clear the sleep from his eyes, and slowly pushed himself up onto his elbows.

His hair—gods, his *hair*—was an absolute disaster. He could feel it without even looking. Hopelessly tangled, sticking up at angles that defied both gravity and common sense, strands falling across his forehead and into his eyes in a way that would have mortified him if anyone important was there to see it. He raised one hand and tried halfheartedly to smooth it down, fingers catching in the knots, and immediately gave up. Lost cause. Complete lost cause.

He looked, objectively, like he’d been dragged through a hedge backward and then left to dry in the sun.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

His head turned toward the sound.

The balcony doors.

Someone was knocking on the balcony doors.

At this hour.

While he looked like this

He stared at the doors for a long moment, his sleep-fogged brain trying to process this information and coming up with absolutely nothing useful.

Then, slowly—still moving like someone who wasn’t entirely awake, like his body was operating on muscle memory while his mind tried to catch up—he swung his legs out from under the covers.

His bare feet touched the floor and he hissed slightly at the temperature. Cold. The stone was *cold*, shocking against his sleep-warm skin, and for a moment he just sat there on the edge of the bed, toes curling against the chill, trying to decide if whatever was making that noise was worth getting up for.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Apparently it was persistent enough that he didn’t have a choice.

He stood, swaying slightly as the world tilted and then righted itself, and padded barefoot across the room.

He was wearing the sleep clothes he’d changed into the night before—loose linen pants that were slightly too long and dragged at his heels, a simple shirt that had twisted around his torso while he slept and now hung off one shoulder at an angle that was probably supposed to be artfully disheveled but just looked messy. The fabric was soft and worn and comfortable, but it absolutely was *not* appropriate for receiving visitors.

Not that he was thinking about that.

He was barely thinking at all, honestly. Just moving forward on autopilot, driven by curiosity and the vague sense that ignoring persistent knocking was probably rude, even if he had no idea who would be knocking or why.

He reached the balcony doors and fumbled with the latch for a moment—his fingers still clumsy with sleep, not quite coordinating properly—before finally managing to push it open.

Cool morning air rushed in immediately, crisp and fresh and carrying with it the scent of flowers and dew-damp grass and something else, something green and alive that made his lungs expand despite himself.

It woke him up a little more—not fully, not completely, but enough that the fog started to lift around the edges, enough that he blinked a few more times and actually *looked* at where he was instead of just existing in it.

The balcony was small but elegant. Wrought iron railing painted white, a few potted plants arranged artfully in the corners, the stone beneath his feet still cool from the night but warming slowly in the morning sun.

The sky was painted in soft pastels—pale pink bleeding into lavender bleeding into the fading deep blue of night, all of it layered like watercolors. Beautiful. Objectively, genuinely beautiful in a way that would have stopped him in his tracks if he’d been more awake.

He stepped out fully onto the balcony, the stone cold and smooth beneath his bare feet, and looked around.

Nothing.

No one.

No bird pecking at the glass, no servant balanced precariously on a ladder, no obvious explanation for the knocking.

He frowned, confused, and was just about to turn around and go back inside—write it off as a dream or a bird he’d missed or his sleep-addled brain inventing sounds—when something told him to look *down*.

So he did.

And his entire world stopped.

His breath didn’t just catch—it seized. Like someone had reached into his chest and grabbed his lungs and squeezed, hard, until there was no air left and no room to take more in.

His hands flew to the railing, gripping it with sudden, desperate force, knuckles going bone-white instantly as he leaned forward, eyes going so wide it almost hurt.

The gardens below—

The gardens—

They weren’t gardens anymore.

They were something else entirely. Something impossible. Something that looked like every fairy tale he’d ever heard as a child had come to life overnight and decided to exist in the same space at the same time.

*Thousands* of flowers.

That was his first coherent thought. Not hundreds. Not dozens. *Thousands*. Maybe tens of thousands. More flowers than he’d ever seen in one place, more than should have been physically possible to arrange in a single night, covering the entire courtyard below in a carpet of color so dense and vibrant it almost didn’t look real.

But they weren’t just scattered randomly. They were *arranged*. Deliberately. Meticulously. With a level of precision and artistry that made his chest ache just looking at it.

Spirals of white roses wound through paths of golden marigolds, creating patterns that drew the eye inward, pulling his gaze deeper into the design. Trails of crimson poppies cut through beds of deep blue forget-me-nots like rivers of fire and water flowing side by side. Clusters of pale pink peonies formed delicate borders around sunbursts of bright orange marigolds that radiated outward like captured pieces of the sun itself.

Lavender and jasmine and honeysuckle and a dozen other flowers he couldn’t name all woven together into something that looked less like a garden and more like a *masterpiece*. Like someone had taken all the beauty in the world and condensed it down into this single space and then arranged it with the kind of care usually reserved for religious icons.

The whole thing looked like it had been painted by someone who understood color on a fundamental level—how shades played against each other, how light moved through petals, how the human eye tracked patterns and found meaning in symmetry.

It was breathtaking.

It was overwhelming.

It was *impossible*.

And at the very center of it all, spelled out in letters so large they had to be fifteen feet tall each, formed entirely from thousands upon thousands of white and gold blooms arranged with perfect precision, were two words:

**MARRY ME**

The letters were *enormous*. Undeniable. Impossible to miss. Each one must have taken hundreds—maybe thousands—of individual flowers to create, every petal placed deliberately, every color chosen to contrast perfectly against the green grass beneath.

From where he stood on the balcony, the words were the first thing his eyes found, the focal point around which everything else orbited.

MARRY ME.

Not a question.

A declaration.

A promise.

A *vow*.

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