The Walls of the Past
The black SUV climbed the winding road, Los Angeles a glittering carpet far below. Sebastian kept his hand on Oliver’s shoulder, the boy’s head lolling against his side, half-asleep. The motion of the car, the hum of the armored chassis, the quiet voices of Beckett and his team in the front—it all cocooned them in a tense, mobile silence.
Evangeline sat across from him, her knees pressed together, her gaze fixed on the city lights blurring past. She hadn’t spoken since they left the hotel. The words they’d exchanged hung between them, heavy and incomplete. He watched the way her fingers worried the strap of her bag, the pulse beating a quiet rhythm at her throat. She was still in shock. They all were.
The gate to the estate was a slab of iron set into a hillside, a monolith that slid aside with a mechanical groan. Beyond it, a driveway of pale gravel coiled through cypress trees toward a sprawling, low-slung house. It was all sharp angles and glass, a brutalist monument to privacy, overlooking the city like a silent king. Price didn’t matter. Anonymity did.
Beckett killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was thick, broken only by the chirp of a distant cricket. He turned, his face a mask of professional calm. “The perimeter is secure. Motion sensors, thermal cameras, a twenty-four-hour rotation. No one gets within a hundred meters without me knowing.”
Sebastian nodded, opening the door. The night air was cool and carried the scent of eucalyptus. He helped Oliver out, the boy blinking sleepily. “Where are we?” Oliver asked, his voice small.
“A fortress,” Sebastian said, managing a thin smile. “Your new temporary kingdom.”
A housekeeper—a silent woman with a worn face—had left a spread on the kitchen island: cold cuts, fruit, bread, a pitcher of water. She had vanished before they arrived. Sebastian poured Oliver a glass and watched some of the tension drain from the boy’s shoulders as he ate. Evangeline stood by the window, looking out at the dark city, her reflection a ghost in the glass.
Beckett gestured to the hall. “Your rooms are at the end. Adjoining. For safety, it’s easier to have you two in the same zone.”
Evangeline turned, her expression unreadable. “Fine.”
Sebastian picked up Oliver’s bag. “Come on, champ. Let’s find your bed.”
The rooms were simple, elegant. A muted palette of grays and blues. The adjoining door was a solid slab of oak, currently open, revealing the corner of a second bed. Oliver claimed the larger of the two in one room, bouncing on the mattress once before flopping onto his back.
“This is a good bed,” he announced, yawning.
Sebastian pulled a book from Oliver’s bag—a worn graphic novel about a Martian explorer—and sat on the edge of the mattress. He read two pages aloud, but Oliver’s eyes were already closing. Sebastian gently closed the book, watching his son’s breathing even out, his face softening in sleep. He looked so small in the vast bed. So fragile.
A lump formed in Sebastian’s throat. He swept a hand over Oliver’s hair, a whisper of a touch, before moving to the doorway. He hesitated, then pulled the door until it was ajar, an inch of light spilling into the hall from the bedroom.
Evangeline was still by the window in the living room. She hadn’t moved. He walked to the counter, poured himself a glass of water, and drank it slowly, watching her.
“Beckett says it’s safe,” she said, not turning around. “As safe as it gets, anyway.”
“The Pembertons don’t know about this place,” he said. “It’s not in any of the corporate records. I’ve kept it off the books for years.”
She finally turned. Her face was pale in the dim light, her eyes shadowed. “You planned for this. For running.”
“I planned for a lot of things.” He set the glass down. “Not for you. Not for Oliver.”
She flinched at the name. “You saw the test results. You knew. He’s been looking for me, Seb. He found me three years ago, when we were living in that apartment in Burbank. He came to the door, holding a picture of you. He asked if I knew you.” Her voice cracked. “I told him I didn’t. I lied to my own son.”
Sebastian crossed the room, stopping a few feet away. The space felt like an ocean. “You were protecting him.”
“I was lying to him.” She hugged her arms around herself. “I’ve spent seven years telling him a story. That you were a man who couldn’t stay. That you had other things to do, more important places to be.” A bitter laugh escaped her. “And now I have to tell him the truth. That his father is a prince, and that some people want him dead.”
“He doesn’t have to know that part, not yet.”
“Then what does he have to know? That you’re… a prince?” She stumbled over the word, as if it were a foreign object in her mouth. “That you’re not an American? That you left because your family was… what, ordering you to?”
Sebastian’s silence was a slow, tightening coil. He looked at the window, at his own reflection imposed over the glittering city. “It wasn’t an order,” he said, his voice low. “It was a promise. A threat.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He finally met her gaze, and the mask he’d worn for years—the confident actor, the charming rogue—fell away. He was just a man, exhausted and raw, carrying the weight of a decade of choices. “I wrote to you. After I left. Every day for three weeks. I tried to call. My father’s people intercepted the calls. They took the letters. I didn’t know until it was too late.”
Evangeline stared at him, her face draining of color. “You… wrote to me?”
“I tried to explain. I had to go home. My father was dying, and he demanded my return. He said if I didn’t, if I stayed with you, he would make you a problem. He showed me a file, Evangeline. It had your name on it. Your mother’s address. Your childhood home. Photos of you walking to class.” His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “He said, ‘Choose your life, or choose hers.'”
The air in the room grew thin. Evangeline reached behind her, bracing herself against the window sill. “So you chose.”
“I chose to keep you alive. I knew the moment I stepped on that plane, they would control everything. The media. The narrative. They would make me a ghost in your world. They’d bury the story so deep that you’d think I was a coward, or a liar, or dead.” He took a half-step closer. “I made them promise. To leave you alone. To never touch you. In exchange for my obedience. My silence.”
“Your silence,” she repeated, the words tasting like ash. “You let me think… you let me raise our son thinking his father abandoned him.”
“I didn’t know about Oliver.” The confession was a wound, raw and aching. “I swear to you, Evangeline. If I had known, nothing would have kept me away. Not my father, not the entire Pemberton empire. I would have burned it all to the ground.”
She was crying now. Silent tears tracked down her cheeks, and she made no move to wipe them away. “He looks like you,” she whispered. “Every time he smiles, it’s you. And I hated you for it. I hated you for making me love him, because it hurt so much to see you in his face.”
Sebastian closed his eyes, the sound of her voice a knife in his ribs. He had rehearsed this speech a hundred times in his head, but the reality of it—her tears, her words—was a wrecking ball. He had been so careful, so methodical, a puppet dancing to his father’s strings. And the one time he’d acted selfishly, the one time he’d chosen his own desire… it had created Oliver. And his father’s freedom had been the price.
“Evangeline,” he began.
“No.” She held up a hand. “Don’t. I can’t—I need to think.” She brushed past him, her shoulder grazing his arm, and walked down the hall toward her room. The door closed with a soft click.
Sebastian stood alone in the living room. The ticking of a clock on the mantel was deafening. He walked to the window, his reflection a ghost in the glass, and stared out at the sprawling city. Somewhere down there, a world was waiting for him to fail. Becket was right; the walls of the past were closing in.
Later, Rosa emerged from her own room, wrapped in a plush robe. She padded quietly to the kitchen, her eyes finding Sebastian. She didn’t say anything. She just moved to the stove, put on a kettle, and began to make tea. The mundane action, the domesticity of it, was an anchor in the storm.
When the tea was steeped, she brought a cup to him. He took it, the warmth seeping into his hands.
“She’s in shock,” Rosa said softly. “She needs time.”
“We don’t have time.”
Rosa gave her a long, steady look. “You have tonight. Tomorrow, you have Oliver. That’s what matters.” She left him then, padding back down the hall, a silent guardian of her friend.
Sebastian drank his tea alone. The hours crawled by. He checked on Oliver, who had kicked off his blanket and was sprawled across the bed. He pulled the cover over him, his hand lingering on the boy’s shoulder for a long moment. He walked the perimeter of the living room, testing the locks, memorizing the angles. The city glowed below, a thousand blinking eyes.
The adjoining door was still open. He could see the foot of Evangeline’s bed, the edge of a lamp casting a weak pool of light. On a whim, he stepped through. Her door to the hall was closed. The room was empty. On the dresser, half-hidden under a stack of her travel documents, he saw the corner of a photograph. He pulled it out.
It was old, faded, creased from years of being kept in a wallet. Him and Evangeline, on a pier in Malibu, the sun setting behind them. She was laughing, head tilted back, caught mid-moment. He had his arm around her waist, a grin on his face. He remembered that day. They’d eaten ice cream, and she’d stolen his. It was the day before everything ended.
He ran a thumb over the image, the scent of her perfume—jasmine and bergamot—ghosting from the paper. She had kept it. Through seven years. Through moves and a child and a narrative of abandonment, she had kept this single photograph.
He put it back, carefully, exactly where he’d found it.
He returned to the living room, sitting in the dark, the silence broken only by the occasional hum of the air conditioning. He was still awake at dawn when the first gray light crept over the hills.
Oliver found him in the kitchen, rubbing his eyes. “Daddy?”
The word, spoken so naturally, sent a tremor through Sebastian’s chest. “Hey, champ. You sleep okay?”
Oliver nodded, crawling onto the stool beside him. “Can I have cereal?”
Sebastian fetched a box of oat rings and poured a bowl. He watched Oliver spoon the cereal into his mouth, crumbs scattering on the counter. The boy was a whirlwind of simple existences—hunger, sleep, the morning question. He looked at Sebastian with his mother’s eyes, clear and curious.
“Is Mom okay?”
Sebastian chose his words carefully. “She’s… thinking about grown-up things. She’ll be fine.”
“Are you going to stay?” Oliver asked, the question so direct, so guileless. It was like a punch to the gut.
Sebastian blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Mom said you couldn’t stay before, because you had to go somewhere. But now you’re here. Are you going to stay forever?”
The question hung in the air, a simple, terrifying demand. Sebastian thought of the photograph in his hand, the signature on the cablegram, the way Oliver had made room on the bed. He thought of burning anything Pemberton loved to ash if they touched a single hair on his son’s head. “I won’t let them hurt him,” Sebastian said. “Not while I’m alive.”
Evangeline appeared in the doorway. She was paler, dark circles under her eyes, but her gaze was steady. She met Sebastian’s eyes, and something passed between them—not forgiveness, not yet, but a crack in the wall. She had heard his words.
Oliver, oblivious to the undercurrent, put his spoon down. He looked at his father with the full, unflinching trust of a seven-year-old. “So will you stay with us? Forever?”
The contract of his old life, the signature on the cablegram, the legend of the Prince—it all unraveled in that quiet kitchen. There was no Pemberton empire worth his silence. No secret worth his son’s question.
“Stay with us,” Oliver said. Sebastian knelt and answered, “I promise you, son—I am never leaving again.”