The council’s words clung to him like oil, heavy and suffocating, long after he had dismissed them.

“The Emperor must secure the line.”“An unconsummated marriage is a dangerous weakness.”“The people whisper.”

Cowards, every one of them. Snakes in fine robes. Their faces blurred together in his mind, but their voices remained sharp, circling him like vultures. He despised their meddling. He despised their laughter behind sealed doors. But what he hated most was the truth buried in their jabs—that there was something fractured in him, something that could not give, could not yield.

His footsteps echoed through the dark corridors, measured but heavy. The torchlight painted long shadows across the walls. Rage pressed against his ribs like a blade, but beneath it, guilt gnawed deeper. They saw him as cold, untouchable... yet they whispered of failure. His failure. His silence. His marriage.

By the time he reached the chamber doors, his jaw was stone, his chest tight with the storm of it all. He pushed them open, expecting only the dim stillness that always awaited him.

Instead, she was there.

She always was, of course—but tonight, the sight of her caught him off guard. Seated at her vanity, a wash of candlelight softening the air around her. Her hair—long enough to spill like a river to the floor—fell around her shoulders as she guided it with patient fingers, weaving it into a braid.

The sight struck him harder than he cared to admit.

Her calm landed against his fury like a wave against stone, unmaking and reshaping him in the same breath. His chest tightened further, not with anger this time, but with something he could not name. It was shameful, how it ached. Shameful, how it soothed.

He lingered a moment too long in the doorway before moving. The silence he carried entered with him, heavier than the mantle he shrugged from his shoulders. His gaze brushed her reflection in the mirror—a cold, piercing glance that served as his only greeting—before he turned away.

Piece by piece, he stripped the day from his body: the black-and-silver cloak, the raven-sigil ring, the stiff layers of imperial garb. He set them aside with sharp, deliberate motions. Yet his eyes betrayed him, flickering back to her in stolen glances.

How easily she sat there. How quietly she breathed. Her composure infuriated him. Did she not see the weight pressing down on them both? Did she never tire, never break? He almost wanted to shake her, to drag some spark of fire from behind that serene façade. Anything but this calm that mocked and soothed him in equal measure.

But when his gaze caught on her hands, slender and precise, weaving through that endless river of hair, the urge faltered. The image twisted inside him—sweet, almost unbearably so. A sweetness that hurt to look at. A beauty that unsettled him more than a drawn blade. He envied her calm. He feared it. He feared her.

His voice cut through the silence at last, harsher than intended, edged with tension that sounded dangerously close to anger. “Do you always do that?”

Her quiet assent only deepened the ache pressing against his chest. He turned away quickly, before it could show, and crossed to the bed. Sitting at its edge, his back rigid, he let the silence stretch once more.

Then, slowly, he shifted—just enough to glance over his shoulder, silver-grey eyes finding hers. He did not speak. He did not need to. The look alone was command enough.

And in that unspoken order, there was something else. Something shameful. A surrender he would never voice aloud. He wanted those hands to braid his hair too...