"If he’d gone back to his kingdom, he would have been married off within months. M⁹aybe to so elderly noble woman looking for a young, attractive husband to show off. Maybe to soone cruel who’d treat him like a pretty object. Maybe to soone kind but boring who he’d have to pretend to love for decades. He would have been used as a political tool—again—except without any choice in the matter, without any say in his own future."
"But that doesn’t an I can afford to fall ’in love’ with him in the romantic, all-consuming way you’re imagining. Because here’s the thing you need to understand: for ’them’—for Larus, for everyone in this world—this is their entire lifeti. Their one and only existence. But for ’’?"
Her voice softened, but beca more firm.
"For , this is just one mission among many. When it’s complete, I move on. I have to. That’s the job. I can’t stop, settle down, and give up my work just because I’ve fallen for soone. There are other worlds. Other people who need help. Other disasters to prevent."
System 427’s ears drooped slightly. "But Host..."
"Let finish," Heena said gently. "I know this sounds harsh. I know it seems like I’m being unfair to Larus. But think about what the alternative was for him."
She stood and moved to the window, gesturing out toward the palace grounds.
"If he’d gone back to his kingdom, he would have been married off within months. Maybe to so elderly noble woman looking for a young, attractive husband to show off. Maybe to soone cruel who’d treat him like a pretty object. Maybe to soone kind but boring who he’d have to pretend to love for decades. He would have been used as a political tool—again—except without any choice in the matter, without any say in his own future."
The system beca silent and did not know what to say; seeing this, Heena just turned around and went to the bathroom.
.
.
Prince Larus POV
On the other side of the palace.
They gave him a room.
Not a guest room. He could tell the difference—he’d slept in enough guest rooms to know them by feel, that careful blankness of spaces ant to be occupied and then vacated, flowers chosen by soone who didn’t know him, pillows arranged just so, everything faintly holding its breath waiting for him to leave.
This wasn’t that.
There was a small brass plate beside the door.
*Prince Consort Larus.*
He stood there staring at it for probably an embarrassingly long ti. Long enough that one of the passing servants gave him a slightly concerned look and then very politely pretended they hadn’t.
He touched the letters with two fingers, just—touched them. The tal was warm from the morning sun.
Soone had put his na on a door.
’Before he’d even said yes.’
He had to breathe through his nose for a mont before he could go inside.
The room hit him imdiately, and not in any way he could have prepared for. It wasn’t grand—it was comfortable, which was sohow so much worse for what it did to his chest. The window faced east. There was a chair sitting directly in the path of the morning light, the kind of thoughtless-seeming placent that was actually anything but thoughtless. A writing desk with good paper on it—real paper, heavy and cream-colored, not the thin ceremonial stuff he’d been given back ho for letters he wasn’t supposed to send to anyone interesting.
And books.
Not decorative books. Not the kind chosen to make a room look scholarly. These were ’his’ books—or books that were so precisely his that the difference barely mattered. Philosophy, history, two volus of political theory he’d ntioned once in passing during a dinner conversation he hadn’t even thought she was paying close attention to, and—
He pulled one slim volu off the stack and then imdiately put it back, a little embarrassed even though he was alone.
An adventure novel. A terrible one, probably. The kind he’d always read with the cover facing down.
She’d noticed.
Or soone had noticed for her and that soone had cared enough to act on it, which amounted to the sa thing.
Larus sat on the edge of the bed—which was soft in that particular way that made you imdiately want to lie down and never move again—and just held the white rose and breathed.
He was going to be happy here.
Not a wish. Not a hope. A fact, the sa flavor of certainty as knowing his own na.
He was going to be so stupidly, embarrassingly, completely happy here.
And sitting underneath all of that happiness, quiet as a stone at the bottom of a river—
Heena didn’t love him.
He knew that too.
He’d known it, he thought, even while he was crying into her shoulder in the garden. Even while she was holding him with that steadiness that felt like being held by soone who had decided to be a wall specifically for your benefit. She was kind to him. She was genuine with him. Every word she’d said she had ant—he was sure of that in the way he was sure of very little else.
But love was a different animal entirely, and he wasn’t twenty-two and foolish enough to mistake one for the other.
He understood the shape of what this was. An empress didn’t build an empire on feelings. She built it on careful choices, on people who were valuable and trustworthy and wouldn’t cause unnecessary problems, and he happened to be all of those things in a configuration she’d found useful. He understood that. He wasn’t insulted by it.
He just—
He turned the rose over slowly in his hands.
He’d expected, when the understanding settled in, to feel so version of grief. The quiet ache of it. The awareness of a door that was open but only partway, and might never open further than this.
Instead what he felt was sothing he didn’t quite have a word for.
She had looked at him. ’Really’ looked at him—not at his title, not at his face, not at whatever his bloodline was worth on the political market. She’d looked at him specifically, Larus, and decided he was worth the trouble of an entire sleepless night and a thousand flowers and a brass naplate on a door.
Not because she loved him.
Just because she thought he deserved it.
He tried to count, carefully, the number of people in his life who had ever chosen ’him’ that way. Deliberately. On purpose. Without needing sothing from him first.
His mother.
A tutor who’d told him once, quietly, that he had a better mind than he was being allowed to use.
A friend from childhood who’d moved away when their families’ political fortunes diverged.
That was the whole list.
And now this.
He thought: love could grow. He’d seen it happen, the slow accumulation of shared years and small monts until two people looked at each other and realized sothing had changed without either of them noticing. Maybe that would happen. Maybe he would do everything right, work hard, be genuinely useful and present and real, and one day she would look at him differently.
Or maybe she wouldn’t.
Maybe this was exactly what it was ever going to be—warmth without romance, respect without passion, a partnership that was good and solid and genuinely, honestly more than he had any right to have expected when he’d arrived here a week ago with nothing but a diplomatic mission and a growing suspicion that his kingdom was planning to marry him off to soone terrible.
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