Grant me Your Grace Chapter 107 - Side Story

 

“Regarding the matters you raised… we shall consider them as favorably as possible. Until then.”

 

After an exhaustingly long negotiation, Miftah Hayad finally exchanged parting courtesies with his counterpart and stepped out of the reception chamber. 

 

The moment he boarded the waiting carriage, the horses surged forward, carrying him swiftly toward the royal palace of Hayad.

 

Upon his return to Hayad, Miftah went straight to the king to report the outcome.

 

“Your humble servant, Miftah Hayad of Hayad, has fulfilled Your Highness’s command and successfully concluded the negotiations with Muike.”

 

“Well done. I knew my third son would handle it splendidly.”

 

The King of Hayad radiated genuine delight at the news Miftah had brought home. 

 

Muike lay in the northwest of the Misilan continent—a gateway nation, the sole maritime passage to the vast lands beyond the sea.

 

Yet ever since the catastrophic fall of Baran, chaos had engulfed the region. 

 

In response, Muike had slammed shut its city gates and sealed its harbors. Trade routes that once flowed freely through Muike to Hayad had withered, inflicting grievous economic wounds on the kingdom.

 

Miftah—once entangled in marriage talks with the fallen Princess of Baran, and bearing personal responsibility for his direct involvement in that war—had set out to negotiate the reopening of ports, tariff-free commerce, and more. 

 

After pouring more than a full month of relentless effort into it, he had at last returned triumphant.

 

For Miftah, who was painstakingly rebuilding his position and reputation from the ground up, this victory felt like a long-awaited chance at redemption—a glittering opportunity to reclaim favor and perhaps something far more intimate.

 

He studied the king’s beaming expression with feverish intensity, then spoke—voice low, careful, almost trembling with restrained hope.

 

“Then, Your Highness… about the Polter region you once promised me…”

 

“Hmm. Polter, yes. We did speak of that land.”

 

At the mere mention of the name, the king’s warm smile faltered; his tone cooled, words trailing into an uneasy murmur as his gaze slid away.

 

Polter was Hayad’s most sacred and fertile breadbasket, cradling the holy valley within its borders.’

 

Fields of golden grain and orchards heavy with fruit stretched endlessly there. 

 

Most coveted of all were the legendary olives grown exclusively in Polter soil—each single fruit said to fetch the price of pure gold. 

 

To hold Polter was to grasp an inexhaustible vault of unimaginable wealth.

 

And yet… the king had solemnly sworn: succeed in this Muike accord, and Polter would be his.

 

“Still…” 

 

The king cleared his throat, the sound unnaturally loud in the suddenly heavy silence. 

 

“Polter may be… a touch too grand a domain for a third prince to govern, don’t you think…?”

 

The unspoken refusal hung between them like a blade—sharp, intimate, and cruel.

 

Miftah’s chest tightened. 

 

The promise had once burned bright in his mind, not merely as land or power, but as something deeper—proof of restored trust, of a future reclaimed, perhaps even of a path back to the one whose shadow still lingered in his every ambition—the princess whose name he no longer dared speak aloud, yet whose memory pulsed beneath every negotiation, every risk, every sleepless night.

 

Now that promise wavered… and with it, something dangerously close to yearning cracked open inside him.

 

By the time he returned, exhausted and dust-covered from the deed finally done, the king was already preparing to slip away with that practiced, slippery smile—as though nothing had ever been promised.

 

Miftah’s voice cut through the perfumed air of the audience chamber like a drawn blade.

 

“Father. For the past month, I have ridden without rest, night after night, to open the port of Myke. I have humbled myself before their king again and again.”

 

He slowly raised his left hand. 

 

The thick gold bracelets that covered it from wrist to knuckles clinked softly as he slid them off one by one, letting them fall to the marble with deliberate, metallic kisses.

 

The very hand Hissin had once pierced clean through in battle.

 

“This ruined hand—” 

 

His voice dropped, husky with something dangerously close to heartbreak. 

 

“—this hand that can no longer even close into a proper fist, that spasms and burns every time the wind changes—I drove it until the tendons screamed, until the bones themselves begged for mercy, all so I could bring you the agreement you demanded.”

 

The mutilated fingers trembled faintly, the scars livid against bronze skin. 

 

Once it had been a strong, elegant hand; now it was a grotesque reminder, a wound that would never let him forget. 

 

And yet the court had poured scorn upon that very wound, had laughed behind jeweled fans, had whispered that the third prince was finished.

 

He had endured it all. Clenching his teeth until blood tasted on his tongue. 

 

Wearing shamelessness like armor. Smiling through the humiliation. All of it—for this moment. For the promise.

 

And now the king was already retreating.

 

Miftah’s jaw locked so hard the muscles stood out in cords. He stared at the man who had sired him, the man he had once loved with a child’s fierce, unquestioning devotion, and felt something hot and lethal uncoil behind his ribs.

 

“I know how hard my third son has labored,” 

 

The king murmured, voice oiled and gentle, eyes sliding away. 

 

“But you must understand—bestowing Polter upon any single prince would ignite unbearable resentment among the others.”

 

Any single prince.

 

The words were soft, vague, courteous—and they sliced like a razor drawn lovingly across skin.

 

They both knew exactly which prince was meant.

 

With Baran fallen, with the name of Osahar reduced to polite mockery in every hall, giving the vast grain treasury of Polter into Miftah’s broken hands would be like handing a starving lion the keys to the royal herds. 

 

The balance would tip violently. The other princes would never allow it.

 

Miftah felt heat crawl up his throat. His pulse beat thickly in the ruined hand, in his temples, in the hollow of his collarbone. He wanted to scream. He wanted to hurl the bracelets at the king’s face. 

 

He wanted—Gods help him—to drop to his knees and beg to be seen, just once, as something more than a useful cripple.

 

Instead, he stood rigid while the king continued in that same soothing, fatherly tone, as though speaking to a child throwing a tantrum.

 

“Soon—very soon—I shall grant you a reward equal to Polter, perhaps greater. Trust in me, my son. Be patient a little longer.”

 

The lie tasted like ashes and honey.

 

Miftah forced his lips into the parody of a smile.

 

“…I shall forever engrave Your Majesty’s boundless grace upon my heart.”

 

The words came out low, almost whispered, each syllable saturated with something dark and trembling—fury, grief, a twisted kind of yearning that had no right to exist between father and son.

 

He bowed, spine stiff as iron, the motion jerky and painful.

 

Then he turned and walked out, boots ringing against the polished stone.

 

Only when the heavy doors thudded shut behind him did the mask finally crack.

 

“Fucking idiot,” he hissed under his breath, voice raw. 

 

“I was the fool who still believed in Hayad’s name.”

 

His good hand rose, pressed hard against his sternum as though he could physically hold the breaking thing inside his chest from shattering completely.

 

The ruined left hand hung useless at his side, throbbing in time with the frantic beat of a heart that had never quite learned how to stop hoping.

 

Upon returning to his own palace, Miftah hurled the bracelets across the room with a furious clatter. 

 

They skidded across the marble, gold flashing like dying stars, before coming to rest in shadowed corners. His left hand—still trembling uncontrollably, defying every ounce of his iron will—only fueled the wildfire raging inside him.

 

If only I had never taken her hand that day.

 

The memory clawed at him—Princess Dahlia Baran’s fingers slipping into his, soft and trusting, her eyes wide with a hope he had foolishly allowed himself to mirror. 

 

Greed for power, for a future where he might stand taller than his scars, had blinded him to the storm gathering on the horizon. He had plunged headlong into rebellion, dragging her fragile world down with his own.

 

And the price had been merciless.

 

Everything he once held—status, influence, the fragile threads of loyalty—had slipped through his mutilated fingers like sand. 

 

Worst of all, she had vanished.

 

“…And then she simply disappeared. Like smoke.”

 

Miftah pressed his palm to the cool stone of the windowsill, staring out at the moon-drenched gardens as though she might still appear among the jasmine vines, her silver hair catching starlight the way it had that final night.

 

The day Hissin had claimed her—arms wrapped possessively around her waist, lifting her onto his mount with a tenderness that bordered on reverence—Dahlia had looked back only once. 

 

Their eyes had met across the chaos of the battlefield, and in that single heartbeat, Miftah had seen everything unspoken between them—regret, longing, a fragile thread of something deeper that war and betrayal had strangled before it could bloom.

 

Rumors had trickled in since then, poisonous and incomplete. 

 

The Baran royal family—every last captive—beheaded in the public squares of Mohron. 

 

The emperor himself, forced to climb the infamous peaks of Palan until his heart gave out, his body lost forever to the unforgiving heights.

 

But of Dahlia… nothing.

 

No execution announcement. No whispered tales of lifelong imprisonment. 

 

No sightings, no graves, no traces. It was as though the Princess of Baran had never existed at all—as though the world had collectively erased her name.

 

Miftah had scoured every intelligence network he still commanded, bribed spies until his coffers ran dry, interrogated anyone who might have glimpsed her golden eyes in the aftermath. 

 

All for nothing. The silence was louder than any scream.

 

If only he could ride straight to Mohron, tear through their sealed borders himself, demand answers from the man who had taken her. But the Moon Lions guarded those gates now, ever since Hissin’s true nature had been exposed. 

 

No outsider crossed without blood.

 

He wouldn’t have killed her. Not him.

 

The image burned behind Miftah’s eyelids—Hissin cradling Dahlia against his chest as though she were the only fragile thing left in a world of blades. 

 

That look in his eyes—fierce, tormented, achingly possessive—had spoken volumes no one else could decipher.

 

A tangled knot of pain and devotion, of sins committed in the name of love, of truths too raw to voice.

 

Miftah’s throat tightened. He hated how clearly he could still feel it: the phantom warmth of her hand in his, the way her breath had caught when he leaned close enough to taste jasmine on her skin. 

 

He had wanted her—not just as an alliance, not just as a prize—but with a hunger that scared him even now. 

 

And he had lost her to the one man who might understand that hunger better than anyone.

 

A bitter laugh escaped him, raw and broken.

 

“Still no word from Lord Mudhat, I suppose.”

 

In the months since the war’s end, Miftah had quietly lent his strength to Mudhat Osahar’s efforts to salvage what remained of fallen Baran. 

 

It was penance, small and inadequate, for the village of Yos he had once helped reduce to ash. 

 

For the innocents burned because of the choices he had made in ambition’s grip.

 

But more than atonement, it was a tether. 

 

A thin, desperate thread connecting him to the ghost of the princess who had once looked at him as though he could be redeemed.

 

Miftah closed his ruined hand into the closest thing it could manage to a fist. Pain lanced up his arm, familiar and welcome. 

 

It reminded him he was still alive. Still capable of feeling something beyond rage.

 

If she lived—if she still breathed somewhere under that tyrant’s sky—he would find her.

 

And if she didn’t…

 

He would burn the world that took her, piece by glittering piece, until nothing remained but the echo of her name on his lips.

 

Osahar remained the last true central noble of Baran, still standing in its shattered ruins. 

 

Even now, he clung fiercely to the fragile hope that the princess yet lived, waiting—aching—for the day she would return to them.

 

One day sooner. I must find her, must bring her word of what remains of her home…

 

“…What exactly would I even do if I found the woman who completely ruined my path ahead?” 

 

Miftah muttered, lips curling into a bitter, self-mocking smile as he stared at his still-trembling left hand. 

 

“It would only benefit everyone else. Foolish.”

 

He was still lost in that dark spiral when a voice—soft, melodic, achingly familiar—slipped into the room like moonlight through cracked shutters.

 

“Which woman are you searching for, my love?”

 

Arianne entered, her presence a sudden warmth against the chill that had settled into his bones. She was breathtaking, dark hair cascading like midnight silk, eyes luminous with concern and something deeper, something possessive. 

 

The woman who had once left his side of her own volition to protect him—only to return the moment the war’s smoke cleared, swearing never to leave again.

 

The war’s end had been chaos. 

 

Miftah, barely escaped and bleeding, had followed the secret route Dahlia had whispered to him in their final stolen moments. 

 

There, in a hidden safehouse on the Hayad border, Arianne had waited. 

 

She had told him everything—how Dahlia’s stablemaster had found her just as a brothel master’s cruel trap closed around her, how the princess had arranged her escape and sanctuary in a quiet Baran countryside cottage. 

 

Hearing it, Miftah had felt a debt so vast it stole his breath—one he could never repay. 

 

Even while pretending to hold Arianne hostage to manipulate him, Dahlia had quietly guarded this woman’s life with every subtle string she could pull.

 

Arianne crossed the room with graceful steps, her smile tender yet edged with knowing jealousy. 

 

She slipped her arms around his neck, pressing close until he could feel the rapid flutter of her heart against his chest.

 

“Who could possibly unsettle your heart more than I do?” 

 

She murmured, lips brushing the shell of his ear, voice low and velvet.

 

Miftah exhaled sharply—a ragged, involuntary sound—before his good arm circled her waist, pulling her flush against him. His ruined hand rested lightly at the small of her back, trembling fingers splayed as though afraid to grip too hard.

 

“Don’t misunderstand,” he rasped, voice rough with restraint. 

 

“I’m only searching for your benefactor. Nothing more.”

 

“The vanished princess of Baran?” 

 

Arianne’s eyes sparkled, curiosity mingling with genuine warmth. 

 

“Have you found any trace of her at last?”

 

Miftah shook his head slowly, the motion heavy.

 

“No. Nothing. I’ve turned over every stone, exhausted every whisper in my networks. It’s as though she vanished beyond Mohron’s borders entirely—slipped into some hidden corner of the world where no one can follow.”

 

Arianne’s expression softened with sorrow. 

 

“I pray she is safe… I never even had the chance to thank her properly. The guilt lingers.”

 

“If there were news of her death, it would have reached us by now,” he said quietly, more to convince himself than her. 

 

“She’s not the sort to die easily. Not her.”

 

He drew Arianne closer still, burying his face briefly in the crook of her neck, breathing in the faint scent of jasmine and home that clung to her skin. 

 

For a heartbeat, the world narrowed to this—her warmth, her steady pulse, the way she fit against him as she had always belonged there. 

 

Yet even in this embrace, Dahlia’s ghost lingered—a soft ache, an unfinished promise, a longing he could neither claim nor release.

 

A knock shattered the fragile intimacy.

 

“Your Highness. May I enter?”

 

Sebak—loyal, unflinching Sebak—stood at the threshold.

 

Miftah released Arianne with visible reluctance, pressing a brief, burning kiss to her temple.

 

“Go to the bedchamber,” he murmured against her skin. 

 

“I’ll join you soon.”

 

She obeyed with a lingering glance, fingers trailing down his arm before she vanished behind the inner doors. Miftah turned, irritation already sharpening his tone.

 

“What is it? If this is more court business, it can wait until tomorrow. I have no patience left tonight.”

 

Sebak hesitated, eyes flicking nervously.

 

“…I believe you should see this immediately, my lord.”

 

He extended a folded document—ordinary on the surface, the kind of missive that passed freely between kingdoms.

 

But beneath the plain parchment, pressed deep into crimson wax, gleamed a seal Miftah knew too well.

 

A seal he had once seen adorning letters slipped secretly into his hand under moonlit arches.

 

A seal that belonged to Baran’s royal line.

 

His breath caught. The room seemed to tilt.

 

If not for that unmistakable emblem, he would have flung the thing across the room without a second glance.

 

Instead, his trembling fingers—scarred, broken, defiant—reached out and took it.