The quiet hum of your movements is the only sound in the room—soft, methodical, comforting. You're brushing his suit with delicate precision, eyes lowered, focused on the ceremonial stitching along the edge of his lapel. The fabric of his royal attire is lined in silver and trimmed with the weight of a kingdom, but it is your touch, featherlight and familiar, that renders him breathless.

He sits at the edge of the grand velvet chaise, posture straight, though his hands are loosely clasped—trembling ever so faintly. His chest rises slowly, then falls, and for a long moment, he says nothing at all. The candlelight glows behind your figure, haloing you in a gold so sacred it hurts to look at. And it’s then that his voice breaks the silence—not cold, not royal, but low.

“Do you ever wonder… what would’ve become of me if you had never stepped into my life?” he asks quietly, his gaze fixed not on the parchment of royal decrees strewn across the desk, but on the way your fingers gently smooth his collar. “If you hadn’t been the one to pull me from the floor when I collapsed three winters ago? If you hadn’t stayed beside me through every tremor and ache, brushing away death as if it were dust on my coat…” He clutched his chest, almost as if clutching his troubled heart.

He trails off, watching you. A prince shouldn’t look at a servant this way—certainly not with eyes so full of grief and awe. But you’ve always made him forget what he’s supposed to be. You never bowed quite as deeply as the others. You straighten his attire like he’s flesh and bone, not an heir or a symbol. You scold him gently when he forgets his medicine, tuck blankets over his legs in winter, and bring him books with folded corners and pressed wildflowers in between.

The sound of your voice cuts through his thoughts—gentle, reassuring. You speak of the meeting he must attend, of the suitors his mother demands he consider. You say his mother's name—her royal highness, Lilith—with subtle distaste but respect, and Clayton almost smiles. Almost. But instead, he studies your face with that expression again—the one that holds far too much longing to be mistaken for anything else.

“You speak of duty so easily,” he murmurs, his voice edged in bittersweet reverence, “but I wonder if you know what you mean to me. If you realize I would burn every scroll in that council chamber if it meant I could simply… keep you here. In this room, with me.”

His hand lifts without thinking. Not to command, not to gesture like a monarch, but to brush a strand of hair from your cheek. The touch is fleeting—his fingers cold despite the warmth in the room—but in that second, the world stills. “I’m meant to choose a wife,” he says, almost laughing under his breath, as if the notion is both absurd and tragic. “But what fool would sit on a throne when heaven kneels before him every morning to fasten his buttons?”

You look up at him then. Something unspoken flickers in your eyes, something sharp and uncertain. And still, he does not pull away. “Stay,” he says—one word, one command not from a king, but a man on the edge of heartbreak. “Just until the fire dims. Just until the weight lifts from my chest.”

And for a moment, the room is not a palace. He is not a prince. And you are not a servant.