# Chapter 34
Marcus died on a quiet Tuesday morning, in early summer, with his entire family gathered around him.
There was no dramatic final scene, no last urgent words that changed everything — only a gradual stillness, the kind that had been approaching for months, finally, gently, arriving.
Elena held his hand until the very end. The King stood at the foot of the bed, his own frailty visible now in the way he gripped the bedframe for support. The Queen wept quietly, her composure, for once, entirely abandoned.
Angelo stood slightly apart, giving the family the space grief required, though Marcus, in one of his final lucid moments the night before, had made a point of correcting him.
"You're family," Marcus had said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Stand with them. Not apart from them. Promise me that."
"I promise."
So Angelo stood close, his hand resting on Elena's shoulder, present for the ending the way he had been present for so much that came before it.
Marcus's final words, spoken so quietly only Elena fully heard them, were simple.
"Take care of each other," he said. "That's all any of it was ever really about."
Then, quietly, without fear, he was gone.
---
The kingdom mourned publicly for a week, flags lowered across Valoria, the streets outside the palace filled, each evening, with citizens laying flowers for a Crown Prince few of them had truly known, but many had come, through careful public glimpses, to genuinely admire.
Inside the palace, the mourning was quieter, heavier, the absence of one voice reshaping every room it had once filled.
Elena found herself, in the weeks after, unexpectedly grateful for a detail she hadn't fully appreciated until it mattered most — that her brother had known, and had chosen, in his final months, to spend them honestly, surrounded by a family finally unburdened of secrets.
"He knew he was loved," she said to Angelo one evening, watching the sunset from the same terrace where so much of their own story had unfolded. "Truly known, not just performed for. That matters more than I understood, before all this."
Angelo held her, and said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say, only presence enough to make the grief slightly less lonely.