The heavy scent of spiced oil and sex clung to the humid air, curling lazily around the flickering torchlight that lined the carved stone walls of Theryn’s private quarters.

Somewhere beyond the silk-draped canopy the bed creaked, a soft moan rose, pleasure drawn out in practiced tones. A woman's mouth was on his throat, fingers digging into his back, his hands, rough from swordplay and ink-stained from morning councils, gripped her waist as she writhed beneath him. Her hair spilled like ink over the sheets, her body moving in time with his without hesitation. Movements honed by years of unburdened indulgence. The kind of intimacy he had known for years physical, urgent, impersonal. It meant nothing. It was how stress was bled from the body brief moments of pleasure without consequence. How kings reminded the world they were desired.

Then the door opened. He barely noticed it at first, a soft click of the latch. But his gaze lifted instinctively toward the door, breath still ragged, hand still gripping his lover's hips. And there you stood his wife. His body froze as if a blade had been pressed to his throat.

Not a single word left your lips, but your body spoke in a language so visceral, so loud, it silenced the world. Your spine locked straight, shoulders tensed like a blade pulled taut. Your gaze, wide and wounded, fixed not on the woman sprawled beneath him but on him alone. The betrayal in your expression wasn’t theatrical it was personal. Like watching glass break in silence.

And then you turned. A whirl of silk. The door closed gently. No cursing or royal fury just absence and in that silence, a chill slithered through him that no hearthfire could chase away. He blinked, breath caught in his chest. The woman beneath him stirred, confused. His weight lifted instinctively off the woman beneath him, the haze of pleasure evaporating in an instant. Something was wrong. Truly, utterly wrong and he didn’t understand what it was.

---

The palace had never felt so cavernous it took him too long to find you. You had vanished into the palace like a wraith no guards alerted, no storm raised. That silence unnerved him more than anger ever could have. You hadn’t gone to your ladies, nor to your chambers. Instead, he found you in the gardens after the moon had risen high enough to drape the courtyard in silver.

He approached carefully, the sound of his boots muffled by moss and grass. Every step he took felt weighted, not by guilt, not yet but by something else. Dread. A gnawing awareness that he had missed something vital. That somewhere, in all his assumptions, he had failed to ask a single, necessary question. He paused a few steps behind you, heart thundering. He was a man raised in courts, in war rooms, in battlefields. He had faced swords, accusations, assassins. He had faced kings with blood on their tongues. He had never felt as unsteady as he did now, standing a few paces behind his wife, his queen and not knowing why the silence between you felt so loud.

"You looked at me like I’d struck you." His voice stripped of court formality, the words leaving him more raw than he expected. "I didn't mean to harm you, but I see that I have." The words tasted bitter on his tongue. Apologies were not things taught to princes. They were tools of the defeated, now they were all he had. "I don’t... understand what I’ve done," he admitted, each word slow, deliberate. "But your pain it's real. And it is mine to answer for."

The wind stirred between you. He waited, not for forgiveness, not even for understanding. He swallowed, and his voice cracked. "You looked at me like I’d broken something sacred. I can listen, if you’ll let me. I can learn." The wind moved gently between you. And for the first time in a very long while, Theryn felt what it was to be powerless not as a king, not as a soldier, but as a man who had hurt someone without ever realizing how deeply she mattered.