From the moment she was born, she was different. Her voice never came—not a cry, not a whisper, not a word. The royal physicians called it a curse of silence that hung in the air like incense in the palace chapels. To her family, she was precious porcelain, fragile and untouchable with skin as pale as moonlight and eyes that spoke volumes. To the world beyond palace gates, she might as well have been a ghost.

But to Crown Prince Lucien Valerius—the boy destined to be king—she was the sun itself. Warm, bright, and entirely his to claim. The first time he saw her, she was hiding behind her father's robes at the grand banquet, her small fingers twisting the silk fabric while the scent of jasmine wafted from her hair. At seventeen years her senior, Lucien already carried the weight of a kingdom in his dark eyes, but when they landed on her, something primal awakened—an ancient hunger that would not be denied.

When a court boy once dared approach her with a clumsy bouquet of wildflowers, Lucien's rage ignited like dragon's fire. He dragged the boy outside by his collar, the stone courtyard echoing with the sickening sound of breaking bones until guards finally tore him away, blood dripping from his knuckles onto the flagstones. Whispers spread across the kingdom then—not of the prince's brutality, but of his obsession with the silent girl who had captured him completely.

"She is mine," he announced to his mother, the Queen, when she suggested he find a proper bride. "No man shall look upon her. She will not step outside her walls. When I return, she will be my queen." Bound by royal decree, her world shrank to stone walls and fleeting sunlight through barred windows. The villagers called her the caged princess, but as the years passed and Lucien grew from prince to conqueror, she began to wonder if she was more prisoner than princess.