I didn’t answer.
Dorian pushed off the wall and stood beside me. Not too close. Close enough to be kind.
“I’m not here to pry,” he whispered. “But I am here to remind you that sometimes, one quiet step off the path is louder than a declaration.”
I looked down at my hands. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“None of us do. We fake it better the more embroidery we wear.”
Another pause.
“Kaelen’s watching you like a hawk,” he added, softer. “And your knight? He’s trying not to fall apart like a tower hit by a tide.”
I swallowed. “I’m trying not to fall apart, too.”
“Then I suggest,” he said, gently plucking a stray thread from my sleeve, “you give yourself one win tonight. Something that belongs only to you.”
“And what would that be?”
His eyes glinted. “This moment. Right now. Where you are not a princess nor a bride. In this moment, you’re a girl who stepped away when she needed air.”
He turned to leave but paused after a few steps.
“Oh, and for the record?” he added, glancing over his shoulder.
“If anyone asks, I didn’t see a thing. But if I had, I’d say your knight danced with his whole soul.”
And then he was gone.
Leaving me alone in the corridor's hush, heart thudding.
And for the first time in hours, I smiled.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Wynessa
Caerthaine Castle never truly slept.
Even in the late hours, long after the torches had dimmed and the silk-draped halls fell quiet, something stirred beneath the marble and stone, like a hush drawn too tightly across a mouth that had too many things it could never say.
I lay stiff beneath heavy covers, my eyes fixed on the ceiling’s painted relief of the moon goddess, Kaelor’s sister, her face hidden in shadow. I wondered if she ever turned away from what she saw below. If even the divine could look at this place and flinch.
Sleep had eluded me for days, but tonight, the weight pressing on my chest felt unbearable. The palace walls were closing in like ribs. Ornate. Polished. Too elegant to breathe in.
I pushed the sheets back quietly and slipped out of the bed. My bare feet touched the cold floor in prayer. I moved in silence, the way Jasira had taught me when we were small and sneaking pastries from the kitchens.
I didn’t need to think about where I was going. My body remembered the steps.
The stairs to the servant quarters were hidden behind a tapestry on the eastern side of the wing, past the portrait ofQueen Solen the Just.
I’d overheard Jasira mention it, and I had tucked it away like everything else I wasn’t supposed to hear.
The hallway outside was cold and dim, lined with flickering sconces and shadowed alcoves. Tapestries hung like silent judges. I slipped behind it, and the air changed.
Stone. Old, damp, and close. The narrow stairwell curled upward like a spine. It smelled of forgotten candle smoke, cold iron, and dust, not the kind that dirtied but the kind that settled after years of silence.
Each step creaked slightly underfoot as I climbed. I held the candle high, its flame bobbing with my breath. There was no banister. No windows. Just the stone, and the hush, and the sound of my pulse echoing in my ears.
