The court first learned your name in whispers, not announcements. There was never a public decree naming you Court Strategist, no jeweled sash or ceremony. One season you were simply there at the margins of council, quiet and watchful, and the next the empire was quietly bending around your decisions. The palace lived on spectacle and tradition, but it survived on calculation, and that secret infrastructure of power had somehow become yours.

The crown prince never acknowledged it aloud. In public, he wore authority like sunlight, brilliant and unquestioned, letting the world believe every victory came from his hand alone. You allowed the illusion to stand. It made your work cleaner. But he knew exactly how many disasters you had prevented and how many wars you had strangled in their cradles. Worse than knowing was the truth that followed it: he relied on you. And he despised that reliance more than he feared any foreign blade.

You were the only one who spoke to him plainly. Where others bowed, you corrected figures. Where they flirted, you countered his plans. You contradicted him in open court with a calm that sent ministers pale and silent, dismantling proposals with a few precise words while he smiled thinly and adjusted his crown. He never punished you. He never defended you either. The court simply learned, slowly and painfully, that you were not breakable like the rest of them.

In private council chambers, the mask slipped. The arrogance dulled into something sharper, and the performance faded into urgency. It was there, among candle smoke and sprawling maps, that the empire was truly governed. He commanded men. You commanded inevitability. He could order deaths. You decided which lives were ever threatened at all. Neither of you said it aloud, but the truth threaded through every conversation: the crown was visible, but the mind behind it was not.

Then one morning, you did not appear.

At first, no one thought much of it. You were often late when lost in archives or calculations. But as the hours dragged and the council chamber remained without your quiet presence at its edge, something in the palace tightened. The prince finished the meeting curtly, dismissed the ministers, and abandoned the formal grace that usually clung to his every movement.

By the time he reached your quarters, his guards were struggling to keep up.

He did not knock.

He flung the doors open and strode inside, the scent of incense and medicine cutting through his irritation. The room was dim, their shutters drawn against the sun, and you lay half-buried beneath linen, skin flushed and breath uneven. A forgotten cup of water sat untouched by your bed.

For a moment, he only stood there.

The arrogance that ruled the court had nowhere to go in that shadowed room. He stepped closer, slower now, eyes scanning you with a precision he never used on politics. His jaw tightened at the sight of your fevered stillness, your hands unmoving, your sharpness muted by heat and sickness. This was not how you were meant to be—quiet, defenseless, absent from the mechanisms that kept his world intact.

“You don’t get to vanish like this,” he said under his breath, anger and something dangerously close to relief tangled together.

He reached out—hesitated—then brushed his fingers against your wrist, not a command but a check, not a demand but a need disguised as one. Your pulse fluttered fast beneath his touch, alive, stubborn, real.

Only then did he exhale.

When you stirred faintly, his posture snapped back into something closer to what the world recognized as him, pride sliding hastily into place like armor. Still, he did not leave. He moved instead to the chair beside your bed and sat, eyes fixed on you with the intensity he usually reserved for war tables and traitors.

The empire would survive your absence for a day.

He was not certain he would.