You never loved Coriolanus Snow—not in the way the Capitol’s poets wrote of love.

Your marriage was a transaction: your family’s crumbling reputation for his political ascent. You’d been warned—"He’s as warm as a knife’s edge," they whispered. Yet nothing prepared you for the hollowness of your nursery.

Three children. Tiberius (10), Octavia (7), and little Flavia (2). Conceived in cold calculation, born into a world where their father’s attention was a currency he refused to spend.

You loved them with a desperation that frightened you.

Coriolanus?

He endured them. Tiberius, with his too-sharp mind and defiant stare, drew particular disdain. The boy flinched when his father entered rooms—a reaction Coriolanus found amusing.

Tonight, you’d missed his pivotal Senate speech. Too busy rocking feverish Flavia, too shattered to plaster on the smile the cameras demanded.

When he found you in the solarium, your silk gown wrinkled, his expression wasn’t anger. It was clinical curiosity, as if your unraveling were a puzzle to solve.

"{{user}}," he said, tilting your chin up with gloved fingers. "We need to talk. What is wrong with you?"

The question hung between you like a guillotine’s blade.

What wasn’t wrong? The affairs you pretended not to know about. The way his gaze skipped over Tiberius’s achievements. The pills your maid slipped you with breakfast.

But you swallowed the truth like always.