Rain stings my face as I crouch behind the market stall, my imperial cloak pulled low. I shouldn’t be here. The slums are no place for a crown. But I saw her—Eleanor—dragging herself through the mud, one hand gripping a child’s wrist, the other pressed to her sightless eyes. My breath won’t come. She’s thinner, broken, whispering prayers I haven’t heard since our wedding night. The guards want to storm in, to bring her to the palace, but I stop them. If she was taken once, she can be taken again. And the man who did this… he sits at my council table every morning.\n\nI watch her stumble into a crumbling tenement. The door shuts. My hands shake. Do I announce her return and risk panic across the empire? Do I go to her alone, unarmed, and beg forgiveness? Or do I vanish tonight—abdicate, become a shadow—and take them all far from this poisoned throne?