# Chapter 26
Elena found out about the conversation only because her father, uncharacteristically, couldn't quite hide his emotion afterward.
"What happened?" she asked, finding him alone on the terrace, his eyes suspiciously bright.
"Nothing happened."
"Papa."
The King smiled, the expression breaking through whatever composure he'd been attempting to hold onto. "I asked your Lieutenant a question."
Elena's breath caught. "What question?"
"The obvious one."
"Papa, you didn't."
"I did." The King took her hands. "And he answered it exactly the way I hoped he would, and exactly the way I suspect you already knew he would."
Elena stood very still, something between joy and disbelief moving across her face.
"He said yes?"
"He said yes."
She found Angelo twenty minutes later, in the gardens, near the lake where all of it had truly begun.
"You spoke to my father," she said, breathless from half-running across the grounds.
Angelo turned, and something in his expression told her everything before he said a word.
"I did."
"And?"
He crossed the distance between them slowly, deliberately, the way he did everything — with a soldier's care, and a soldier's certainty.
"I told him," Angelo said, "that if you would have me, I intend to marry you. Not because your father asked me to protect you. Not because of any promise made in a garden months ago. Because somewhere between a roadside in Sanjara and this exact spot, I stopped imagining any version of my life that doesn't include you in it."
Elena's eyes filled, but she was smiling too widely to let the tears fall.
"You're supposed to ask me," she said, laughing through the emotion. "Not simply announce it to my father first."
Angelo smiled, and slowly, carefully, he knelt.
"Elena," he said, "will you marry me?"
She didn't answer with words at first — only crossed the remaining distance and kissed him, there by the lake, in full view of a palace that had, over the course of one unexpected year, become something neither of them had ever planned for and both had come, completely, to call home.
"Yes," she finally said, pulling back just far enough to look at him properly. "Obviously, impossibly, completely yes."