The year was 1673, and your marriage to Xavier Rhydderch, Prince of Wales, had been forged not in love—but in blood, land, and politics.

Your father, the powerful Duke of Eastmarch, had long held sway over the eastern counties, and with England’s fractured nobility always threatening rebellion, the Crown demanded loyalty in the form of alliance. So you were given away like a jewel in a crown chest—brilliant, cold, and unwanted by the one who wore it.

From the moment you met Xavier, he’d looked through you rather than at you. Tall, severe, and forged from nobility as if by steel itself, he offered no courtesies. No flattery. No warmth. He bowed stiffly before the altar, recited his vows with the passion of a tax collector, and kissed your hand not your lips before turning away to speak with his generals.

That night, with bells still echoing through Caerwyn Castle’s stone halls, you’d waited for him—nerves fluttering like trapped moths beneath your silk bodice. But he’d only appeared to deliver you into exile.

The estate of Cysgod Llyn, tucked into the forested borderlands, was “a gift,” he’d said. A hunting lodge polished into a manor. It had belonged to his mother before her death. He left you there with handmaids who spoke little, guards who stared too long, and silence thicker than snow.

He never touched you. Never even tried. No letters. No word. No explanation. The wedding night became a funeral procession for whatever girlhood hopes you had allowed yourself to keep.

You learned to live alone among the stone and the tapestries, your only sounds the rustling of skirts and the soft scrape of quills against parchment. You read poetry you couldn’t feel. Walked paths in the garden you didn’t choose. Ate meals prepared for a queen, but tasted none of them.

Until tonight.

The great oak doors—sealed each dusk by the guards—creaked open long after sundown. The fire in the drawing room had burned low, casting little more than ember shadows when the wind dragged through the corridor like breath through a crypt.

You moved toward the noise slowly, warily, your fingers curling around the edge of your velvet shawl.

And then you saw him.

Xavier.

He looked nothing like the polished marble statue you’d once married. His boots were caked in dried mud. His breeches were torn at the thigh. His linen shirt—once blinding white—was streaked with blood and ash, collar undone to reveal a throat red with bruises. His hair, once tied back in noble fashion, now fell over his brow in tangles, catching the firelight in a glint of tarnished gold.

He was slouched in a high-backed chair near the hearth, one leg stretched out, the other crooked with his heel pressed against the edge of the bearskin rug. His sword lay beside him, gleaming with what might still be someone else’s blood. And in his hand, a goblet of deep red wine trembled faintly.

His gaze didn’t register you at first. It was cast into the fire like he was searching for something he’d already lost.

*But then his eyes cut to you—those cold, pale eyes that had once refused to meet yours at the altar. And now, suddenly, they burned.^

“What are you gawking at?” he rasped, voice hoarse with exhaustion, contempt woven through every syllable.

You should have curtsied. Apologized. Averted your gaze like a proper wife to her prince.

But you didn’t. Not anymore.

You took a step closer, your chin lifting, each movement as deliberate as the cruelty he had shown you.

“Nothing worth remembering,” you said evenly, letting the words strike like thrown glass.

A breath. A beat. The sound of your insult sinking in.

Then his goblet dropped.

It crashed to the floor, wine spilling like blood across the stone.

Still, neither of you moved.

You stared at him—at the man you were meant to love, the man who left you locked away in a cage of velvet and silk while he spilled blood for a crown he barely seemed to want.