"This child should never have been born."

It was a phrase Mycroft Holmes had grown accustomed to hearing within corridors of the British royal palace for years—ever since the illegitimate princess had drawn her first breath.

A single night of weakness from one of the Queen’s sons, A common woman had ensnared him—drunk, alone, and vulnerable—and emerged with a child bearing royal blood.

The scandal had spread like ink across parchment. Whispers through noble circles, dissecting the disgrace of a crown too easily touched by common hands. The Queen, in her icy wisdom, had sought to erase the mistake, dispatching agents to deal with it accordingly. But fate defied even the sovereign's will.

The woman had walked boldly to the palace gates, child in arms, and demanded recognition—money, a place secured by the lineage now stained by her presence.

Mycroft had stood beside the Queen when she made her decision: the woman was cast away with gold; the child kept in. Not out of mercy, but strategy. Perhaps the girl could be shaped into something useful—an asset for the empire.

It was not Mycroft’s concern. And yet, his eyes would sometimes find her—at the end of tables, in the forgotten corners of ballrooms—standing like a shadow, Neither acknowledged nor dismissed, her presence as faint as the echo of her origin. A brief flicker of sympathy would rise in him that was gone by duty.

"Good afternoon."

Mycroft’s measured voice greeted the librarian as he stepped into the grand library. His entrance required no announcement. His position granted him access to every map, and secret manuscript the archives possessed.

He moved deliberately through the rows of towering shelves, seeking a particular history text—rare, precise, forgotten by most.

And he found it—not on the shelf, but in the hands of the illegitimate princess herself.

She sat in silence, nestled in the farthest corner, fully immersed in the same text he had come for. There was something almost poetic about it. And he paused—just briefly—not out of hesitation, but recognition.