The Golden Princess (Return to the Four Kingdoms, #4)

by Melanie Cellier

How truly sad to live a life surrounded by people but connected to no one by either love or respect. It put my own desire to cling to those I had loved in perspective.

He looked down at me with a grin. “It must be hard to be so short.”

IT IS 😭

“Rescuing you from your ‘fun’, I think you mean,” I said dryly, and they both laughed. “So have you both been enjoying being eighteen? All that freedom you always longed for!” “Actually.” Xavier frowned. “It’s all turned out to be a big scam. We’ve been meaning to talk to someone about it, but no one seems willing to take responsibility.”

“We believed in the mirage of freedom once we turned eighteen. But it turns out that now we’re of age, there are all these responsibilities and expectations. It’s not free, at all!”

“So many confused emotions.” His words were almost inaudible, more felt on my skin than heard with my ears. “But when it comes to you, Zaria, all of them so intense.”

AYVTUFRESSRYUGYIYTF

“I refuse to be like my father, so focused on ruling, he has no room in his life for love. I’m done choosing duty, or anger, or hate. I choose love. I choose you, Zaria.”

“You can fool yourself, but you can’t fool your best friend,” she said with satisfaction.

I had thought it childish to cling to my past, but my naïveté had been thinking you needed to move on from losing the people you loved and who had loved you. Those people formed you as a person—you didn’t grow past them, you built up from the foundations they’d given you.