The Palace DNA Files: The Children of Prince Adrian

Prologue – “I Have To Do This”

“This is not a surprise to anybody,” Prince Adrian said, staring straight into the camera. “It’s really sad that it’s got to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, for my wife’s, and for my son’s as well. Because I could see where this was headed.”

The recording was never meant for the public.

It was meant for a therapist, then a lawyer, then for a small circle of people who understood what it meant to be born into a life where you owned nothing—not even your own story.

Yet three years later, those words would echo in every news bulletin as the kingdom tried to process what the palace had just done.

In 2026, Westmere Palace released DNA-related documents linked to Adrian’s children, Leo and Aria.

Not rumors.

Not anonymous leaks.

Not tabloid speculation.

Official papers.

Stamped, archived, and suddenly, shockingly, public.

The move detonated years of whispered doubts about their mother, Lady Serena, and her pregnancies.

It wasn’t just a scandal.

It was a question.

Whose blood, exactly, ran in the veins of the two children standing sixth and seventh in line to the throne?

And why was the palace choosing to answer that question now?

 

Chapter 1 – The Release

The statement arrived like any other press bulletin: embossed crest, formal language, time-stamped from the Office of the Sovereign at Westmere.

But the content was unlike anything the monarchy had ever released.

Within minutes, every network cut to special coverage.

“We interrupt this program for a breaking announcement from Westmere Palace,” one anchor said, trying—and failing—to keep her voice even. “The palace has taken the unprecedented step of releasing authenticated documentation related to the parentage of Prince Adrian’s children, Leo and Aria.”

The PDF, attached to the digital version of the statement, was only seven pages.

Seven pages that, in a single afternoon, managed to shake the foundation of a thousand-year-old institution.

The palace called it “clarificatory genetic evidence.”

The press called it DNA proof.

The public called it betrayal.

In the official briefing room, Sir Julian Ashcroft, the King’s senior private secretary, stood behind the podium, eyes fixed on the teleprompter, though he knew every line by heart.

“For years,” he read, “Westmere Palace has chosen not to engage with public speculation surrounding the births of Lord Leo and Lady Aria of Halewood. However, in light of persistent misinformation and recent legal developments, His Majesty King Edmond has authorized the release of limited genetic documentation confirming their direct biological relationship to Prince Adrian of Arendale.”

A murmur rippled through the press.

“Furthermore,” Ashcroft continued, “the documentation addresses circulating claims regarding the use of surrogacy in the conception and birth of Lord Leo and Lady Aria. In the interest of their future legal security within the line of succession, we provide the following clarification…”

He paused.

A half-second too long.

“Both children,” he said carefully, “are confirmed to be genetically related to Prince Adrian. As regards the maternal lineage, the palace will not comment further, except to state that all applicable laws of succession were observed at the time of their births.”

It was a masterclass in saying almost nothing—and yet saying too much.

Because “maternal lineage” is exactly where the kingdom’s ugliest questions lived.

With that sentence, the palace had done the one thing it had refused to do for seven years.

It had stepped onto the battlefield.

Not to protect.

To defend itself.

Leo was eight.

Aria was six.

Their names, faces, and futures now hung from a phrase that wouldn’t stop repeating in headlines and talking points.

DNA proof.

Chapter 2 – The Doubts That Never Died

Lady Serena had never been a quiet figure.

Before she married into Arendale’s royal family, she was an actress, activist, and the star of a legal drama that had made her a household name in three continents.

She knew lighting.

Angles.

How to control the story.

The monarchy despised that.

They preferred their women either saintly or silent.

Serena was neither.

From the moment her engagement to Prince Adrian became public, she collided with the palace’s expectations in small, almost trivial ways—until they weren’t trivial at all.

She spoke openly to magazines about being “madly in love.”

She walked ahead of Queen Eleanor once at an event, unsure of the choreography.

She held hands with Adrian in public, laughed too loudly at engagements, looked directly at cameras when she was supposed to pretend they weren’t there.

Individually, none of it was fatal.

Together, they formed a portrait the British press—and the older courtiers—could not forgive.

Then she got pregnant.

Or so the palace said.

The speculation wasn’t immediate.

It trickled.

A few blogs, a couple of anonymous forum posts, then grainy photos analyzed and re-analyzed by people who had no business talking about pregnancy but felt entitled to because it was hers.

The first oddity wasn’t visual.

It was chronological.

Leo was officially born on 6 May, at St. Catherine’s Private Hospital in London.

For weeks before, palace correspondents had been primed for a home birth at Halewood Cottage, the couple’s newly renovated residence.

The narrative shifted overnight.

Instead of Halewood, the labor suddenly took place in a facility miles away.

Instead of a long, exhausting process, Adrian wrote in his memoir years later that within two hours of Leo’s birth, they were back at Halewood.

Two hours.

From a first birth in a hospital on the other side of the city.

To recovery.

To discharge.

To transport.

To home.

The math didn’t add up for a lot of people.

Doctors interviewed anonymously said it was “unusual.”

Conspiracy theorists called it impossible.

The palace shrugged and said nothing.

Then it bungled the announcement.

Serena was said to be “in labor” hours after Leo had already been born.

Time, once reliable, seemed elastic whenever the palace spoke about that morning.

When Leo was finally presented to the world, it wasn’t on the hospital steps like other royal babies.

He appeared in the echoing marble of Westmere’s green drawing room, two days later, his parents stiff, the atmosphere weirdly formal.

Serena’s belly looked… different.

Smaller, sharper, as if whatever had filled it was already gone and a costume had been discarded.

Within days, eagle-eyed reporters noticed something else in the paperwork.

The birth certificate for Leo, registered at the civil office, had been amended days after filing.

Serena’s name was changed.

The original entry, “Rachel Serena Hart,” was altered to “Her Royal Highness Lady Serena of Halewood.”

A technicality, palace officials said.

A nothing.

But in royal matters, paper trails aren’t trivia.

They’re ammunition.

By the time Aria was born two years later in California—far from palace control, far from British midwives and the eager lenses of the press—the speculation had hardened into doctrine for a certain corner of the internet.

Leo and Aria had not been “born of Serena’s body.”

They had been carried by a surrogate.

Or surrogates.

Maybe one of Serena’s friends.

Maybe a stranger.

Maybe someone the palace had hidden in plain sight.

No one could prove it.

No one could disprove it.

The monarchy did the only thing it knew how.

It refused to explain.

 

Chapter 3 – The Video That Backfired

Silence, for a while, worked.

Other scandals took over.

Other royals misstepped.

The world lurched from crisis to crisis.

Then, in mid-2025, Serena did something that no one—least of all the palace—expected.

On 4 June, she posted a video.

No press release.

No coordination with Westmere.

Just a simple caption on her personal channel:

“A moment that changed everything.”

The clip opened in what was clearly a hospital room.

White walls.

Monitors.

Sterile light.

Adrian and Serena danced slowly, barefoot on the polished floor, wires trailing from Serena’s wrist.

She wore a loose gown.

Underneath it, a rounded bump pressed against the fabric.

The camera panned as Adrian spun her carefully, laughing.

There it was.

The belly.

Undeniable.

Heavy.

Prominent.

Serena’s face glowed.

No makeup.

No posing.

Just a woman, a man, a baby almost ready to arrive.

The internet erupted.

For some, it was the proof they’d been waiting for.

She had been pregnant.

She had carried at least one of the children.

The clip was time-stamped.

Geotagged.

Dated.

The monitors in the background showed the name “Halewood Maternal Unit.”

“It’s over,” said those who’d defended her from the beginning. “The surrogacy rumors can finally die.”

They didn’t.

If anything, they mutated.

Critics zoomed in.

They said the bump sat wrong.

Too high.

Too stiff.

They insisted she moved too easily, without the physical heaviness of a late-stage pregnancy.

Some claimed the entire scene was staged long after the fact.

Others pointed out that even if the video was real, it didn’t specify which pregnancy it represented.

Leo?

Aria?

A child that hadn’t survived?

Everything became evidence.

Everything became doubt.

Even the laughter, that small, private joy, was dissected like a crime scene.

The palace said nothing.

Again.

Serena never posted another video like it.

Chapter 4 – Exit From the Crown

To understand why Westmere eventually broke its silence, you had to go back to the moment Adrian and Serena walked out.

When they left, they didn’t slip quietly into the background.

They slammed the door.

In early 2020, they issued a late-night statement on their own website, announcing that they would step back as “senior members of the royal family” and seek “financial independence.”

Behind palace walls, it landed like an act of war.

Westmere’s response, drafted over sleepless nights by exhausted aides and a Queen who had outlived too many family crises, was polite, measured, and brutal between the lines.

No half in, half out.

No working-royal-lite.

No use of the royal machinery to build a private empire.

Either you are in or you are out.

Adrian chose out.

Serena had seen it coming.

She wasn’t willing to become another decorative orbiting body around his brother, Crown Prince Rowan, and his perfectly groomed wife, Princess Alina.

Adrian wasn’t willing to let her stand alone.

In the negotiations that followed, proposals flickered and died.

One month of royal duties per year, the rest in America? No.

Partial use of royal titles with strict guidelines? No.

An agreement allowing them to attend major events but pursue media contracts? Absolutely not.

The monarchy had one non-negotiable rule.

You do not monetize your royal status.

That’s exactly what Adrian and Serena wanted to do.

And did.

Within months of relocating to the coastal town of Montara in California, they signed a massive content deal with a global streaming platform, launched a production company, began a podcast, and secured speaking engagements worth more per night than most citizens made in years.

To the palace, it was proof they’d been planning this long before they announced it.

To their supporters, it was liberation.

To their enemies, it was betrayal.

Their involvement with political figures in the United States only deepened the divide.

They spoke on voting.

On social justice.

On reforms that, in Arendale, the monarch was constitutionally barred from commenting on.

Royal tradition demanded neutrality.

Adrian and Serena demanded relevance.

“There is no version of this story,” an aide later said bitterly, “where they could have what they wanted and stay inside. The Crown doesn’t bend that far.”

So it didn’t.

It broke instead.

Chapter 5 – Building an Empire in Exile

Freedom was expensive.

The couple grew their empire quickly because they had to.

Security.

Staff.

Property.

Lawyers.

A lifestyle built on royal subsidy had been replaced overnight with a lifestyle that needed to pay for itself.

Adrian leveraged his military experience, launching a global veterans’ games series that brought him into contact with politicians, celebrities, and corporate leaders.

Serena leaned into media and lifestyle.

She sold hope.

Healing.

Reinvention.

Their first documentary, telling “their truth” about the royal family, set viewership records and unleashed a storm of analysis, outrage, and admiration.

Adrian’s memoir, Spare Heir, did the same.

He wrote about sibling rivalry, panic attacks, nights he couldn’t sleep in the silence of palace corridors.

He wrote about racism directed at Serena.

He wrote about his father, King Edmond, as a man who loved the institution more easily than he loved his second son.

He wrote about wanting to be “just Adrian” and never being allowed.

The book reignited every simmering feud.

It also sold millions.

In Montara, the couple’s house became a fortress and a stage.

Drone photos of their garden.

Leaked images of their driveway.

Paparazzi camping outside in SUVs.

Serena launched a lifestyle brand, Étoile, combining household items, wellness products, and aspirational content.

Her podcast, Blueprint, focused on women rewriting their lives.

Some episodes were sharp and insightful.

Others felt like carefully curated branding.

Spotify dropped the partnership after one underperforming season.

Another platform picked her up within months.

Every success came with a backlash.

Every stumble came with glee from people who’d decided long ago that they despised her.

Through it all, Leo and Aria grew.

First steps.

First words.

First day of school.

First time they heard their parents’ names in a stranger’s angry voice.

They did not ask to be royal.

They did not ask to be symbols.

They were born into both, without consent.

Chapter 6 – Inside Westmere

While Adrian and Serena built their empire under the Californian sun, Westmere Palace became a quieter, more defensive place.

Queen Eleanor died in 2023.

Her son, Edmond, became king.

He was the monarch who would eventually sign off on the DNA release.

He did not do it lightly.

In the early years of his reign, Edmond tried to slim down the monarchy.

Fewer working royals.

Fewer balcony appearances.

More targeted charity work.

The public, exhausted by scandals and strapped by economic hardship, seemed to prefer it.

Rowan, Alina, and their three children—George, Charlotte, and Louis—were the future everyone could see.

Polished.

Predictable.

Unthreatening.

Adrian and Serena were the future the palace wished would stop haunting them.

They remained sixth and seventh in line to the throne.

By extension, so did Leo and Aria.

Every constitutional scholar, every royal historian, every gossip commentator knew the implications.

If something catastrophic happened to Edmond and Rowan’s family line, the crown could theoretically land on the head of one of Adrian’s children.

And over those children floated a question the palace refused to dispel.

Were they, by the arcane standards of royal succession, legitimate?

The rule was simple and brutal.

For a royal child to stand in the line, they needed to be born of the body of a royal mother or a woman married to a prince.

Surrogacy, in the strictest interpretation of archaic legal texts, complicated things.

Adrian and Serena had never publicly admitted to using a surrogate.

They had never publicly denied it either.

As long as the palace remained silent, any future legal challenge could tear the kingdom apart.

“Your Majesty,” Sir Julian Ashcroft had said, in a private meeting with Edmond, “if someone pushes this into court in twenty years, we will look like we colluded in an enormous fraud. Whether or not Serena carried those children, we have a duty to clarify what we know. Now. While you are still on the throne.”

Edmond stared at the folder on his desk.

“I am not putting my grandchildren’s blood on television,” he said.

“With respect,” Sir Julian said quietly, “you may not have a choice.”

Chapter 7 – The Trigger

The choice arrived in the form of a lawsuit.

Not from Adrian.

Not from Serena.

From a businessman named Charles Gray, a distant cousin who had once nursed dreams of hereditary titles that never materialized.

He filed a petition in the Court of Royal Affairs alleging that the continued inclusion of Leo and Aria in the line of succession constituted “a constitutional risk” given “credible doubts” about their eligibility.

The petition itself was doomed; the court rarely entertained challenges from so far outside the inner circle.

But the filing gave hostile MPs and agenda-driven think tanks something to latch onto.

They began to demand transparency.

Parliamentary questions.

Editorial campaigns.

“Why,” one columnist wrote, “is the crown willing to subject these children to years of whispered suspicion instead of producing clear evidence of their parentage? Unless, of course, there is something to hide.”

Behind the scenes, the pressure grew.

Legal advisers urged action.

Communications chiefs warned that failing to respond would make the monarchy look weak and evasive.

Edmond hesitated.

He’d spent half his life watching his mother weather storms by saying nothing.

But this wasn’t about personal embarrassment.

It was about the line.

The Crown’s coldest logic won.

“Prepare the documents,” he told Sir Julian. “Not everything. Only what is strictly necessary.”

“What about Prince Adrian and Lady Serena?” Julian asked. “They will see this as an attack.”

Edmond looked out the window, down at the crowds thronging the palace gates, selfies and Union flags and protest banners all jumbled together.

“Everything I have done for that boy,” he said quietly, “he has interpreted as abandonment or control. This will be no different. But I will not leave this grenade for Rowan’s children to step on.”

The order was given.

The vault was opened.

The documents were selected.

And the seven-page dossier was born.

Chapter 8 – The Files Themselves

The palace did not release raw genetic code.

It released conclusions.

Summaries written by medical experts consulted at the time of the births.

The first page confirmed what Sir Julian had said at the podium:

Leo and Aria were each a 99.9% match to Prince Adrian.

The next pages addressed “maternal contributions.”

The language was deliberately opaque.

No names.

No nationalities.

Just clinical wording.

In cases where assisted reproductive techniques were involved, it said, “gestational circumstances do not alter the children’s genetic status as direct descendants of the royal house.”

To lawyers, it was a clear signal:

Serena’s eggs.

Perhaps another woman’s womb.

But legally, the only part that mattered for succession was genetics.

To the public, it was fuel.

The palace had confirmed what everyone had guessed, without saying the quiet part out loud.

Serena had, at least once, not carried her own child.

Or had she?

The phrasing left room for multiple readings.

Some experts interpreted it as proof of surrogacy for both Leo and Aria.

Others thought it might apply only to one.

Either way, the years of “born by Serena’s body” imagery collapsed into something more complicated.

Serena’s bump.

The dancing video.

The staged hospital room.

Every past attempt to control the narrative was thrown back into the spotlight.

But the files did one other thing—something more important to Westmere than reputational damage.

They locked Leo and Aria into the line.

The same documentation was quietly filed with the Court of Royal Affairs, accompanied by a brief from the palace’s constitutional counsel stating that, under current law, there was no basis to remove the children.

“Any reform to succession criteria,” the brief concluded, “must be prospective, not retrospective.”

In other words:

You don’t get to change the rules after the children are born.

Chapter 9 – Adrian and Serena See the News

In Montara, the morning the files dropped began like any other.

Leo was trying to balance a spoon on his nose.

Aria was arguing with the dog.

Serena was making coffee, scrolling her phone, eyes still half-closed.

Then her screen froze.

Notifications exploded.

A flurry of headlines stacked one after another:

WESTMERE RELEASES DNA PROOF ON LEO & ARIA

KING EDMOND ENDS YEARS OF SPECULATION

‘ASSISTED REPRODUCTIVE TECHNIQUES’ CONFIRMED

Serena’s mug slipped from her fingers.

Ceramic shattered on the tiled floor.

“Mom?” Leo asked, startled.

Adrian walked in, rubbing his eyes.

“What happened?” he asked.

She handed him the phone.

He read in silence.

Serena’s chest heaved.

“They used them,” she said, voice shaking. “They used our kids to protect themselves.”

Adrian’s jaw clenched.

For years, he had accused the palace of sacrificing individuals on the altar of the institution.

To see his children placed on that altar, dressed in footnotes and legal language, ignited a rage he hadn’t felt since the day he walked away.

The kids watched him.

Leo’s eyes darted between his parents.

“Did we do something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” Adrian said instantly.

He knelt, dragging Leo into a hug.

“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “You are perfect. Exactly as you are.”

Aria tugged Serena’s sleeve.

“What’s DNA?” she asked.

Serena swallowed.

“It’s… science,” she said. “Boring grown-up science.”

“Then why is everyone talking about it?” Aria pressed.

Because, Serena thought, this country is obsessed with your blood.

Adrian’s phone rang.

Rowan.

He let it buzz out.

Another call.

Blocked number.

A third.

Westmere switchboard.

He turned it off.

Serena didn’t.

She answered when the American news shows called.

Not with words.

Not yet.

She watched.

Listened.

Every analyst speculated on what this meant for her, dissecting a woman who was very much alive as if she were a historical figure who couldn’t answer back.

They used phrases like “embellished the truth” and “misled the public.”

Very few of them acknowledged she might have had reasons beyond vanity for the choices she’d made.

Later that day, a formal email arrived from Westmere.

Dear Prince Adrian and Lady Serena,

We understand the sensitivity of this development. His Majesty wishes to assure you that the decision to release the document was taken with careful consideration of Leo and Aria’s long-term security within the line of succession…

Serena stopped reading.

“They’ve never cared about their security,” she said bitterly. “Only about their own.”

“You don’t know that,” Adrian replied quietly.

She looked at him sharply.

“Don’t you dare defend them,” she said.

He said nothing.

Because part of him knew something Serena did not.

King Edmond hadn’t only done this to protect the institution.

He had done it to ensure that if Leo and Aria ever wanted Arendale, it would still be there for them.

Even if their father kept them away.

Chapter 10 – The Children’s Future

For Leo and Aria, the immediate impact was simple and cruel.

Their names were everywhere.

School became complicated.

Teachers did their best.

Other parents did not.

Some whispered about “designer heirs” and “test tube royals.”

Others pulled their children closer, as if bad headlines were contagious.

Leo, old enough to understand the concept of “real” and “fake,” began to ask about the word “legitimate.”

“Are we?” he asked Adrian one night, voice small.

“Are you what?” Adrian replied.

“Real royals,” Leo said.

Adrian stared.

Images flickered through his mind—balcony appearances, state banquets, rows of gold chairs.

“Yes,” he said. “You are as real as anyone can be in a family that spends its life pretending.”

“That’s not an answer,” Leo complained, a little of Serena’s sharpness in his tone.

Adrian smiled weakly.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s try again. The line of succession, the titles, the laws—that’s one kind of real. It’s based on papers and stamps and old rules written by people who are long dead. That kind of real says you’re in.”

“And the other kind?” Leo asked.

“The other kind,” Adrian said, “is you falling asleep on my chest when you were a baby. It’s Aria sneaking into our bed at night when she has nightmares. It’s you getting grass stains on every pair of trousers you own, no matter how many times we ask you to be careful.”

He reached over, ruffled Leo’s hair.

“That kind of real doesn’t care about DNA,” he said. “That’s the kind that matters to me.”

Leo considered.

“Do you wish we weren’t… royal?” he asked.

Adrian hesitated.

There it was.

The question he’d asked himself his entire life, now refracted through his son.

“No,” he said, surprising himself with the honesty. “I wish the people in charge of the royal bit had been kinder. But you? You’re not the problem. You’re the best thing that ever came out of that entire mess.”

In Arendale, constitutional scholars poured over the files.

Some argued this would finally force the monarchy to update the rules on succession in the age of IVF and surrogacy.

Others insisted any change should wait for a new generation.

King Edmond resisted immediate reform.

He had done enough.

The children stayed in the line.

Public opinion divided.

Some saw Leo and Aria as victims—children dragged into adult machinations.

Others saw them as the thin end of a wedge that would eventually turn the monarchy into just another celebrity brand.

Somewhere between those extremes was the truth.

They were kids.

Innocent.

Loved.

Instrumentalized, regardless.

Chapter 11 – Serena’s Version

It took Serena three weeks to speak publicly.

In that time, the story moved through its expected cycles.

Shock.

Outrage.

Analysis.

Fatigue.

It was in the fatigue stage, when people were beginning to move on to the next scandal, that she dropped a written piece on a major digital platform.

Not an interview.

Her own words.

“I will not let my children be reduced to evidence,” it began.

She wrote about infertility.

Not in specifics—she did not detail test results, or medical procedures, or the nights she’d cried in bathrooms alone—but in emotion.

“The body you are told can do what women have always done,” she wrote, “suddenly becomes unreliable. Every month it feels like a small funeral. And every public appearance becomes a performance where you wear your failure under your clothes and smile anyway.”

She wrote about the day a doctor had told her that carrying a pregnancy to term would be risky.

Not impossible.

But dangerous.

“Risk can mean many things,” she acknowledged. “To a physician, it means percentages, protocols, carefully worded consent forms. To a woman already drowning in scrutiny, it means this: if something goes wrong, it will be your fault, and it will be public.”

She didn’t say, explicitly, whether Leo or Aria had been born via surrogate.

She didn’t deny it either.

She wrote instead about choice.

“The palace wants you to believe they released these files to protect my children,” she said. “But they are not the ones who protected Leo and Aria when the world first began obsessing over whether my bump was the right shape. They did not stand between my body and millions of strangers who dissected it frame by frame. I did.”

She described filming the hospital video.

Part of her had wanted to believe that if people saw her in that room, saw her moving, laughing, clearly pregnant, they would stop.

“They didn’t,” she wrote simply. “Because this was never really about medicine. It was about control. About who gets to define what motherhood looks like, and who is allowed to wear a crown while they do it.”

She ended with Leo and Aria.

“They are not lab reports,” she wrote. “They are not legal risks. They are not constitutional hypotheticals. They are children who sleep with stuffed animals, who argue about who gets the last pancake, who think ‘Westmere’ is just the place where their cousins live, not the building that decided they needed to be defended with a PDF.”

“If you want to judge anyone,” she concluded, “judge the adults who built a system that cares more about whether a baby was pushed out of the right body than whether that baby is safe, loved, and told the truth.”

The piece went viral.

Support poured in.

So did hate.

It didn’t fix what had been broken.

It did, however, give Leo and Aria a new frame through which to see the mess their lives had become.

Their mother’s voice.

Not just the palace’s.

Not just their father’s.

Hers.

Chapter 12 – King Edmond’s Burden

At Westmere, King Edmond read Serena’s essay alone in his study.

He had always found her persuasive, even when she infuriated him.

He recognized, with bitter clarity, how the system he inherited had failed her.

Failed Adrian.

Failed the children.

And yet, he could not entirely regret the choice he’d made.

If he hadn’t released the files, the question would have festered for decades.

Every photograph of Leo and Aria would have carried the unspoken caption: Are they really?

He thought of his own youth, spending hours being told how to stand, how to wave, how to speak without saying anything.

He had wanted something different for his successors.

Instead, he had passed them a crown that demanded the same old sacrifices, just more publicly.

In his private diary, he wrote:

I have traded one kind of harm for another.

I have protected the line and hurt the branch.

I do not know if there was a third option.

He did something then that he had not done in years.

He picked up the phone and called Adrian.

The call went to voicemail.

He did not leave a message.

Chapter 13 – No Way Back

The question on everyone’s lips shifted.

Not “Are Leo and Aria legitimate?”

Now the kingdom asked:

“Is there any way back for Adrian and Serena?”

Royal commentators were almost unanimous.

No.

They had gone too far.

He had written too much.

She had said too much.

They had, in the eyes of the institution, turned private grievances into public entertainment.

Trust, once broken in that way, rarely returns.

Adrian knew it.

He told a friend, off the record, “There isn’t a version of this where my father and brother look at me again and see just me. They see legal risk. They see betrayal. And now, thanks to their own decision, I see them as the people who put my kids’ genetic business in the news.”

Mediation was floated.

Counselors.

Quiet meetings at neutral estates.

Nothing stuck.

The silence between them hardened into something like policy.

On Serena’s side, things with her own family were no better.

Her father had sold stories to the press.

Her half-sister had built a career criticizing her.

Attempts at reconciliation failed, then stopped entirely.

She was, in a way, cut off from both her origins and the family she’d married into.

All that remained was the family she had built herself.

Three people.

Four, including the dog.

Five, on good days, when Adrian wasn’t touring and Serena wasn’t shooting and Leo and Aria weren’t at school being quietly asked what their grandparents thought of them.

One evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific and turned the sky the color of old gold—the exact shade of the crown Adrian had walked away from—Serena asked him a question.

“If they called tomorrow,” she said, “and said, ‘Come back, all is forgiven,’ would you go?”

He thought of Westmere’s halls.

Of Rowan’s careful smile.

Of his father’s lined face.

Of the balcony, the anthem, the weight of metal on his scalp.

“No,” he said.

“Would you visit?” she asked.

He hesitated.

“I would take the kids,” he said slowly, “if they wanted to go. Not to serve. To see where they came from. To understand. But I wouldn’t wear a uniform. I wouldn’t bow. I would not stand on that balcony as decoration ever again.”

Serena nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Because they will never ask.”

They sat in silence awhile.

“Do you think we did the right thing?” he asked her.

“By leaving?” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked at Leo and Aria chasing each other on the lawn, shrieking with laughter, oblivious to the battles being fought over their names.

“We’re here,” she said. “We’re together. They’re alive. They’re loud. We can tell them the truth when they’re ready. I can live with the cost of that. I couldn’t live with the cost of staying.”

Chapter 14 – A New Story

Years later, when historians wrote about the reign of King Edmond and the scandal of the DNA files, they reduced it to a few lines:

In 2026, Westmere Palace released genetic documentation affirming the paternity of Lord Leo and Lady Aria, children of the estranged Prince Adrian and Lady Serena of Halewood. The unprecedented publication sparked renewed debate about succession law in an age of assisted reproduction, further straining relations between the Crown and the couple.

They rarely mentioned the kids’ first day at a new school, under new names.

They didn’t talk about the way Leo flinched the first time a teacher offered to keep his work “confidential” and he wondered if she meant safe from his classmates—or from newspapers.

They didn’t record the conversation where Aria, at twelve, asked Serena:

“If you hadn’t married Dad, would I still exist?”

Serena had swallowed the lump in her throat and said:

“Maybe not as you. But the world would have had some other clever, infuriating, wonderful girl in it. I’m just glad it’s you.”

They didn’t note the afternoon Adrian received a letter from Westmere—not from his father, but from his nephew, Prince George.

“I don’t know what it’s like to build a life outside this,” the future king wrote. “But I know what it’s like to grow up inside it. If Leo or Aria ever want to visit, as cousins, not as symbols, my door will be open.”

What history did record, in more detail, was the law that came later.

Queen Charlotte II, George’s daughter, would eventually sign a reform clarifying that assisted reproduction, including surrogacy, did not disqualify a child from succession so long as at least one parent held royal blood and all parties gave informed consent.

The footnote in that act read:

“This clarifies, rather than creates, the legitimacy of individuals previously in the line.”

Everyone knew who that was about.

By then, Leo was an adult.

He had no interest in crowns.

He lived quietly, worked in mental health advocacy, occasionally gave interviews where he mentioned “the mess my family made over my DNA” and then steered the conversation away from himself.

Aria, sharper, more political, publicly called the monarchy “a story that became law and now desperately needs editing.”

Neither of them ever took a step onto the balcony of Westmere.

But they traveled to Arendale privately, sometimes.

Stayed in guest houses, visited museums, walked past portraits of ancestors who might or might not have shared their genes.

The monarchy did not collapse.

It bent.

Cracked.

Reforged some of its rules.

Ignored others.

It survived, not because its blood was pure, but because enough people still wanted the idea of it around to keep fixing it.

For Adrian and Serena, survival looked different.

Not redemption.

Not reconciliation.

Just a small house, a stubborn garden, a family that knew too much about how power works and loved each other anyway.

“Do you ever wish none of this had happened?” Serena asked Adrian once, years after the files, after the essays, after the worst of the storm had passed.

He thought of alternative timelines.

Ones where they stayed.

Ones where they left quietly.

Ones where Leo and Aria were never born.

“No,” he said. “I wish we hadn’t had to bleed so publicly to get here. But I don’t wish this away.”

He nodded toward the living room, where Aria and Leo were arguing animatedly about a school play.

“This,” he repeated, “I keep.”

Outside, the sun dropped toward the horizon, turning the sky gold again.

Somewhere far away, over stone and ceremony and centuries of rules, the crown glinted under the same fading light.

It belonged to someone else now.

Prince Adrian did not miss its weight.

He had enough to carry.

A wife.

Two kids.

And a story that, finally, was his to tell.