Emilie of the Royal Heart

Chapter 60: The Prince's Gift, Very Confusing

She walked the perimeter of the ballroom three full times until she couldn't hold herself back any longer. Emilie rushed through the crowd and the deeper she plunged, the more the nobles parted for her either with confusion or disgust. As the next song ruptured through the air, Emilie burst out of the room and into the much emptier hallway.

Her slippers slipped across the polished floor and she nearly stepped on her skirts, but she grabbed bunches of the fabric in her hands just in time. With fistfuls of her dress, she dashed down the corridor. The place Aurora had told her to meet him was a hall tucked behind the ones that connected to the ballroom.

When she turned the corner, breathing hard, she froze in the hallway. Her dress fell out of her weakened fingers.

Aurora leaned against the wall some distance away from where she was. He didn't notice her yet. As he waited, he turned his head up to the ceiling. His crown tilted off kilter and he sighed as he adjusted it.

"I'm-" Emilie called out to him, then immediately cut herself off as though her fear dropped a cleaver.

It was enough to get his attention. Aurora pushed away from the wall and pivoted to face her. The wings of a hummingbird could not have matched the speed at which Emilie's pulse thrummed to be in this hallway alone with him.

He said nothing and he didn't move toward her, but Emilie knew from the start she would be the one to make the first step when he asked her here. Her approach was painstaking and slow, but each step felt like stepping deeper and deeper into ice cold water. By the time she reached Aurora, she was shivering.

"Are you finally going to take back what you said this morning?" she whimpered.

Aurora swallowed. He stared at her. He took another breath. And he sighed, "I have something for you."

"I hope it's an apology," she crossed her arms.

"Something like that, I guess."

He reached inside his dress coat and when his hand came out, his fingers curled around a thin, leather bound book. Emilie saw his hand tremble as he kept it close to his chest and then it shook when he offered it to her. She squinted her eyes at him with confusion, but when she let her eyes flick down to the little folder of papers and grasped onto it, her heart sank.

"This... this is a passport," she whispered. Aurora's hand quickly let go of it like it was poisonous to him, leaving it to lightly rest in her palms.

"Yes. This will get you across the border to Zuhia," he explained.

"But..."

She had many questions. She was happy to finally get what she wanted, but she couldn't be happy about it because of everything else. If her heart was a garden, there was one beautiful flower blooming among a thousand dead flowers.

"Wh-why... h-how..." she faltered, unable to focus on one thing to say until she pressed a hand to her forehead, "I th-thought... I thought there was no way to expedite the approval process. I haven't... I haven't done half the things I needed to get this."

"I pulled some strings and... all you really needed were two signatures," he scratched the back of his neck.

"Y-you..."

"You should have it."

The pit in Emilie's gut was deep, but Aurora seemed like the only one in the world who could dig deeper. Emilie sniffed and she wiped a tear from her eye.

"E-Elias knew you were going to give me a passport?" she choked out. It was the only other thing she could say to circumvent the part that festered at the center of it all.