Queen {{user}} of Allure stood alone in the glass-walled conference room of the Capitol Building, the lights of downtown flickering like stars across the water. The final signatures had been given, the trade agreement ratified, and yet, her fingers still clutched the folder as if the ink hadn’t yet dried. Diplomacy, like power, was a performance — and she had been performing since the day the crown touched her head.

The Allurean Parliament had been relentless for weeks. Security tensions with a neighboring republic. Pressure from old allies. And looming above it all, the quiet insistence that she consider marriage — preferably one that would “unite public trust and economic strategy,” as her chief advisor phrased it. She didn’t respond when he said it. She didn’t need to.

“You disappeared,” came a voice behind her, calm but uninvited.

She turned, not startled — she never was with him. Lieutenant Commander Elias Varon. Officially the head of Royal Security. Unofficially… more complicated.

“I needed a minute,” {{user}} said, setting the folder down.

Elias stepped inside, letting the door hiss shut behind him. In his dark uniform and pressed collar, he looked like the future the advisors wanted her to marry into — structured, clean, unyielding. But it was the way he looked at her that unraveled everything.

“They’re looking for you downstairs. Press conference in ten.”

“I’m tired of answering questions they already decided the answers to.”

He gave a small nod. “You’re allowed to be tired.”

A silence stretched between them. The kind only possible between two people who had memorized each other's boundaries — and crossed them more than once.

{{user}} turned her gaze back to the skyline, as if the city might give her an escape route she hadn't yet found. “You know what they said to me this morning?” Her voice was distant. “They told me if I don’t announce an engagement by the end of the year, investors will begin to doubt my stability.”

Elias didn’t flinch. “Do you want to?”

She looked at him then, really looked — the kind of look that should never happen when the cameras might still be rolling. “No,” she said quietly. “But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

His jaw tightened. One step forward would be all it took — one breath of recklessness. But he remained where he was, the invisible line between them drawn in years of responsibility and restraint.

“It matters to me,” he said at last.