EPILOGUE - MASON

 

My mother… God, I’m almost afraid to say this. But… she’s responding to the treatment. Lyssa and I joined her in Sweden a few weeks after I rode in on my white fucking Mercedes and saved the princess.

Or drove her Mercedes and became the villain in her stepfather’s tragic fairytale.

I’ll take it.

We couldn’t leave earlier because Baylor stole her passport right out of her apartment that day he was waiting for us. So we had to put in for a replacement.

Lyssa was livid. She raged, and ranted, and kicked, and screamed, and cursed, and…

And I loved every fucking minute of that tantrum.

I hope she never stops being wild. I hope it’s genetic and tied to the X chromosome so she passes it on to all our future princesses and they will grow up mouthy, and strong-willed, and brave.

“You’re brave,” I say, tugging her up close to me.

She hums out her agreement and snuggles deeper into the covers.

I tell her this all the time now. Every night before bed. Every morning when she wakes up. Because I said it to her in the car as we were driving away from the estate that day and she told me later that she didn’t hear it. And it broke my heart.

So I tell her all the time now.

She told me bits and pieces of what happened with her stepfather over the years. It took her a while because I wasn’t ready to hear it all and she wasn’t ready to tell it all.

But there’s healing in truth.

Maybe there was a way to put Baylor on trial and maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it wasn’t worth it. Maybe dragging Lyssa into a very public, very humiliating scandal wasn’t what justice looked like in her case.

So remember when I said I was the good guy but I know lots of other guys like me who… aren’t?

Yeah. That’s how we got justice.

Don’t worry about Baylor. His punishment wasn’t just the humiliation of defeat.

When Lyssa asked me about my job I told her I was one of the good ones.

And I am.

Even though all my bad-guy friends got a little richer about two months ago when Baylor mysteriously went missing, I’m still one of the good ones.

We decided to stay in Sweden. I want my mom to be near her doctors. She’s not cured, or anything. It’s just borrowed time. But we all agree it’s worth the debt.

Besides, there’s a little prince on the way and she wants to meet him.

But there was one mystery left to figure out. Something I couldn’t quite piece together. Why was Lyssa giving that guy money in the club?

I already knew it wasn’t drugs. If Lyssa was strung out on drugs she’d have been in withdrawal that first week we spent together.

It was kids.

Little kids who would not, under any circumstances, ever end up at a country estate run by sick fucks like Baylor and his friends. She was using all her allowance to save kids from the threat of sex trafficking.

When I walked in to her life she was truly wild. Wild the way she was meant to be. She was getting better and learning how to be herself after many years of manipulation.

And then I broke her.

But that’s not the reason I want her with me now.

It’s not guilt.

It’s just love.

The fairy tale is never perfect. It’s dark, and filled with horrors and setbacks. It has a journey built in to it. The princess must live in hell first. And the prince must walk through that hell if he wants to save her. I never knew I was a prince until I met my wild princess. She made me this man I am today.

And as they make this journey, this princess and her prince—first separate, then together—they learn things.

They learn that they are stronger than they thought.

That some things are worth fighting for, to the death.

And that if they do that. If they face the truth together then they get—

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Lyssa asks me, turning over in bed and prying my eyes open with her fingertips.

I smile and kiss her lips as I reach down to caress her swelling belly.

Then say, “A happy ending.”