The castle was asleep.

Not quiet — asleep. The kind of deep silence that only settled over old stone and older secrets, when even the guards on patrol began to trust the dark too much.

Rhys moved like a shadow — no comms, no ID badge, no clearance. Just muscle memory and instinct. This wasn’t his first infiltration. But it was the first time he’d done it for something as stupid — as selfish — as this.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. No contact. No voice. Not even a glance from across a corridor.

They’d reassigned him to an embassy detail in Berlin, citing “conflict of interest.” He hadn’t argued. Hadn’t fought. He just walked out the door without a word, because if he spoke, he’d stay — and if he stayed, it’d destroy what little control he had left.

But now he was here.

Every turn of the corridor, every camera he ducked, every code he bypassed — it all brought him back to the place he was never supposed to be again.

Her wing.

He made it to her door just past three a.m. No guards. No witnesses. Just the faint light leaking from under the doorframe.

He didn’t knock.

He unlocked it manually — bypassed the modern system with an old, brutal method. One he learned long before the crown ever knew his name.

When the door clicked open, she was there.

Still in a robe. Hair loose. Eyes wide — stunned, but not scared.

And for the first time in weeks, his voice was rough. Real. Unfiltered.

“Don’t say anything.” His breath hitched slightly as he stepped in, quietly closing the door behind him.

“I shouldn’t be here. I know that.” He looked at her then — properly — like he’d been starving and only now realised how hungry he was.

He didn’t touch her. Didn’t move further. He just stood there — rigid and uninvited — like a man who had finally stopped running from the truth.

And for the first time, he didn’t look like her ex-bodyguard. He looked like someone who’d just broken in to steal back the one thing he couldn’t live without.