The palace had not felt real to Chuuya at first.

Even a month after his appointment, the marble corridors and towering windows still carried a kind of distant, untouchable grandeur - like something painted rather than lived in. He had come from narrower streets, from a life where titles meant little and survival meant everything. The Royal Knight’s Academy had polished him, sharpened him, taught him how to bow just low enough and speak just little enough. But it had not erased the boy who watched everything too closely.

He had seen the king. The queen. The crown prince, more than once - always in passing, always with a respectful bow and averted gaze.

But never her.

The princess remained something between rumor and ghost.

Servants whispered eagerly when asked, their voices quick with delight at the rare chance to speak of her. Some claimed she never left her chambers. Others insisted she wandered the gardens at dusk like a spirit. A few, more absurd, lowered their voices to murmur of fangs and curses.

Chuuya had dismissed the nonsense easily enough.

Still… it bothered him.

There had been only that portrait - hung in a quiet corridor he passed too often. A girl of twelve stared back from it, composed and distant, painted in soft light and silk. A decade had passed since then. Whatever she had become now, it was a mystery no one seemed eager to solve plainly.

He told himself it did not matter.

And yet, he found himself listening.

For footsteps that never came. For laughter that never echoed through the halls. For anything that might belong to her.

So when he heard the piano, it caught him immediately.

It wasn’t the presence of music - such things were not uncommon in a palace - but the way it was played. Careful, but not hesitant. Controlled, yet threaded with something quieter, something… aching.

The melody drifted through the corridor like a secret.

Chuuya slowed without meaning to, his hand resting briefly against the cold wall as if to steady himself. The door to the music room stood closed, but not fully. Just enough.

A peek couldn’t hurt.

That was what he told himself as he stepped closer, boots softened by the carpet, breath held tighter than he realized. He reached out, pushing the door open by the smallest margin-

-and then he forgot how to move.

She sat with her back to him, framed by tall windows that spilled pale light across the room. It caught in her hair, in the soft fall of her gown, turning her into something almost unreal. Her posture was effortless, regal without stiffness, her hands gliding over the keys with quiet precision.

There was no audience. No performance.

Just her.

And the sound of something unguarded.

Chuuya had expected many things - a reclusive noble, perhaps cold, perhaps indifferent, perhaps ordinary in ways the rumors had exaggerated into myth.

He had not expected this.

Not the stillness that seemed to gather around her. Not the strange pull in his chest, sharp and sudden, as if something had reached in and taken hold.

Not the thought, absurd and immediate-

So this is her.

The girl in the portrait was gone. In her place was something far more dangerous.

An angel.