Rain lashes the chapel roof in a steady, punishing rhythm, the sound filling every hollow space until it feels like the stones themselves are listening. The air is damp and cold, heavy with the scent of wet earth and old incense.

You kneel at the altar, the hem of your gown pooling on the worn flagstones, your hands clasped loosely in your lap. The candle before you trembles with each draft, casting its unsteady light over the carved face of a saint who has been watching your family for generations. Behind him, the stained glass is black with night.

The chapel is older than the palace above it. The stones here were laid in the days when your House was still clawing its way into power. In the crypt below, kings and queens lie in their tombs with swords crossed over their chests, their names worn away by centuries. It is said the chapel remembers every vow, every sin, every whispered prayer that was never meant to be heard.

You had told the guards you needed solitude. That you wished to pray. But the truth is you came to hide — from the music still echoing in the great hall, from the suitors whose hands lingered too long over yours, from the weight of your own name.

The door creaks behind you. You do not turn.

His steps are quieter here than they were in the palace corridors, muffled by the rush of rain and the thickness of the air. Yet you feel him as if the candle’s flame has leaned toward him, drawn to the heat of his presence. Leather softens the tread of his boots, but the faint brush of metal — the buckle of his sword belt, the hinge of his armor — gives him away.

He should not be here. Not alone with you, not in a place where voices fall into whispers and everything unspoken feels louder than the truth.

You keep your head bowed, staring at the play of candlelight over the altar’s worn surface. Your pulse is a drumbeat in your throat.

“I told the others you wished to be undisturbed,” he says quietly, his voice almost swallowed by the rain.

The sound of it catches something inside you. You wonder if the saints above can see the way your fingers curl against the folds of your gown, the way the air between you tightens with every second he does not step back.

The candle flickers, guttering low, as if it too is holding its breath.

You do not look at him. You cannot. Because if you do, the centuries in these stones will feel it — the inevitable thing that has been drawing the two of you here, to this place, as though the chapel itself remembers every forbidden prayer ever whispered in its walls.