# Chapter 25
The King summoned Angelo alone, three days before his scheduled departure, to the same study where so much of this story had already unfolded.
"You're leaving," the King said, without preamble.
"My orders require it, Your Majesty."
"I know." The King gestured toward a chair. "Sit."
Angelo did.
For a long moment, the King said nothing, simply studying him with the same careful attention he had shown from the very first meeting, months earlier.
"I asked you a question once," the King said finally. "By the lake. You may not remember the exact words."
"I remember," Angelo said quietly. "You told me your time was growing shorter. That you wished to see Elena safe and happy before you passed."
The King nodded slowly. "You've kept that promise more fully than I ever expected when I made it. Beyond anything I had the right to ask of you."
"I didn't do it as a favor, Your Majesty. Or an obligation."
"I know why you did it." The King's eyes were steady. "That is precisely why I am about to ask you something considerably more difficult."
Angelo waited.
"My daughter loves you," the King said simply. "I have watched it grow for months, the way only a father can watch such things — quietly, carefully, hoping I was wrong, and knowing, eventually, that I wasn't."
"Your Majesty—"
"Let me finish." The King held up a hand. "You are a soldier from a country with no throne, no titles, no history intertwined with ours. By every tradition this family has followed for generations, you are an impossible match for a princess of Valoria."
Angelo said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would contradict a truth so plainly stated.
"And yet," the King continued, "I have never in my life seen my daughter as certain of anything as she is of you. And I have never seen a man protect this family — my wife, my daughter, my son, even a kingdom he owes nothing to — with the complete, unselfish loyalty you have shown since a Friday afternoon in Sanjara that none of us asked for."
The King leaned forward.
"So I am asking you directly, Lieutenant Sanchez. Not as a king. As a father running out of time." His voice, for the first time, trembled slightly. "Do you intend to marry my daughter?"
Angelo felt the weight of the question settle over him entirely — not fear, but something close to it, mixed with a certainty he hadn't fully allowed himself to name until this exact moment.
"Yes," he said. "If she'll have me. And if a kingdom can accept a soldier with nothing to offer but his word."
The King's eyes were bright, and for the first time since Angelo had known him, the composed monarch allowed himself to simply be, for a moment, an old man deeply relieved.
"Your word," the King said quietly, "has already proven itself worth more than most crowns I've encountered in eighty years of living beside them."