No flowers for the dead - Chapter 27: Chapter 27

Elara was four when she first asked what her father used to be.
They were in the garden. Alina was painting, barefoot on the stones, while Elias knelt beside Elara, helping her plant marigolds in a crooked clay pot.
“You used to be rich,” she said, staring at him with all the blunt honesty of a child.
Elias laughed. “Who told you that?”
“Mommy said you had a tower.”
Alina looked up from her canvas, wide-eyed. “I said you worked in a tower.”
Elara frowned. “Did you leave it there? The tower?”
Elias paused.
And in that pause lived everything he had once been.
The ruthless heir. The weapon his father forged. The man who broke hearts and signed death sentences in ink and charm.
He didn’t miss it.
“I traded it,” he said softly.
“For what?” Elara asked.
“For you,” he said. “And your mom.”
Elara blinked. Then smiled. “That was a good trade.”
And somehow, that was enough.
⸻
That night, after Elara had fallen asleep with dirt under her fingernails and a flower tucked behind her ear, Elias found Alina in the kitchen, leaning against the counter.
“I wasn’t sure what to say,” she murmured.
“You said exactly what she needed.”
They stood in silence for a moment before Alina looked up.
“Do you ever miss it?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant.
“No,” Elias said. “I miss pieces. Moments. But I don’t miss the man I was.”
Alina stepped into him, arms wrapping around his waist. “He was still worth saving.”
“Only because of you.”
⸻
The next morning, they received a letter. Handwritten. Sealed in wax.
It came from one of the few surviving members of Elias’s family—a cousin who had stayed in the shadows, inherited nothing, built a modest life somewhere on the outskirts of legacy.
The message was simple:
They’re selling the estate. The final one. Thought you should know. Thought maybe you’d want to say goodbye.
Elias held the envelope for a long time.
Alina didn’t press.
She simply said, “If you want to go, we’ll go.”
⸻
They left Elara with her godmother for the weekend and flew in under borrowed names. No guards. No entourage. Just the two of them and a suitcase filled with clothes that didn’t scream power.
The estate was smaller than Elias remembered.
Or maybe he’d just grown bigger without it.
The windows were shuttered. The halls were empty. Dust clung to the walls like regret.
“This is where you were raised?” Alina asked.
“No,” Elias said quietly. “This is where I was trained.”
⸻
They walked through the dining room where silence had been a rule.
Through the study where Elias had first learned to forge his father’s signature.
Through the courtyard where blood had once been scrubbed from the stone.
But when they reached the gallery—long abandoned, untouched—Alina paused.
There, in the center, was a photograph.
Small. Black and white.
A boy with haunted eyes, no more than ten.
Alina picked it up and turned to Elias.
“I think,” she said softly, “you were always trying to leave.”
He took the frame from her hands and stared at it for a long, long time.
Then he set it down. Facedown.
And walked away.
⸻
They stayed one night. Ate nothing from the kitchen. Slept on a mattress they carried into the smallest guest room.
That night, Alina whispered:
“We don’t owe this place anything.”
And Elias whispered back:
“I know. But I needed it to know that I don’t belong here anymore.”
⸻
The next morning, they didn’t say goodbye to the house.
They just walked out, boarded the plane, and flew home—where Elara was waiting with paint on her cheeks and a new drawing in her hands.
It was them.
The three of them.
Smiling, beneath a tree with crooked branches and bright orange marigolds.