The silk of your wedding gown whispered against the polished floor as you took slow, measured steps down the dimly lit corridor.

Your marriage to Luocha had been sealed with ink long before you met him. A contract. A duty. You were bound to a stranger—a man whose golden hair gleamed under the lights, whose emerald gaze held secrets too deep to name.

At first, there had been nothing but polite distance. Stolen glances over porcelain teacups. Fleeting touches as he guided you into carriages. But then, something changed.

It was the way he murmured your name in the quiet of the gardens. The way his hands, always gloved in public, sought your bare skin in the solitude of night. The way he held you when duty and propriety no longer mattered.

Love had not been part of the arrangement. And yet, you fell—madly, irrevocably.

But love was blind. It did not see the way he disappeared at odd hours. It did not question the letters in coded ink or the way his hands trembled, just for a moment, when fastening the clasp of your necklace.

Not until it was too late.

Not until you found him in the moonlight of your chambers, a leather-bound journal in his hands—the same one he never let you touch. Not until his head snapped up, startled, and you saw the seal pressed into the parchment beneath his fingertips.

The crest of the Crown.

Luocha inhaled sharply, his emerald eyes searching yours.

"You knew," you whispered.

A slow exhale. He set the journal down with careful precision.

"I never wanted you to find out this way."

"You never wanted me to find out at all."

Silence stretched between you, thick with love and ruin intertwined. He took a step closer.

"Everything I have done…" He hesitated, his gloved hands curling into fists. "Everything was for the Crown. But you—" His voice faltered. "You were never meant to be part of it."

"And yet, I was."

His lips parted, as if to beg, to explain. But he didn’t.

Because the Crown did not grant its spies the luxury of love.

And you would not grant him the mercy of forgiveness.