Her smirk tugged sharp and knowing. “Perhaps because you insist on improvising.”
He sighed theatrically. “A flaw, I’ll admit. But only because I approached it wrong.”
She raised a brow, a spark of intrigue in her eyes. “Oh?”
“Yes.” He rubbed at his jaw, the habit buying him a heartbeat. “I respected where you came from. I studied your customs before I came. But I made the mistake of looking at them through my own lens. In my homeland, young people meet tradition with a pinch of salt. I assumed—wrongly—it was the same here.”
She studied him without flinching. And it made him restless in a way he couldn’t name. Her eyes lingered. On his face. On his eyes.
She tore her gaze away before it lingered too long. He swallowed against the silence it left.
“I pushed too hard,” he admitted finally. “And I apologize for that.”
The wind picked up, curling grass around their feet.
“I misjudged you, too,” she murmured. “I was too quick to assume the worst. I didn’t make things easy for you. That’s not how I usually am. I apologize for being too harsh.”
Alaric caught the pale shimmer of moonlight in her eyes. “It’s alright,” he said. And he meant it. “I’m the guest here. I came to stand by your side, not impose myself. You deserve the highest respect.”
He felt the words as soon as they left his mouth—too honest, too clumsy, like stepping barefoot onto ice and hoping it would hold.
“If I’m being honest,” he confessed, fingers fidgeting through his hair, “I also acted the way I did because I wanted you to like me.”
Her single, baffled blink was more dangerous than any retort. “What?”
He forced a rueful shrug, the only armor he had left that didn’t look unbearably performative. “I mean it. I know I can be… a lot. Loud. Dramatic.” He laughed, too quick and too thin. “I was trying to make a good impression. Maybe too hard. It’s… a performance, sometimes.”
She studied him, expression narrowing as though weighing the truth of his words. He caught the subtle motion and, absurdly, thought she resembled a magistrate assessing the worth of a coin.
“Then why the performance?”
He shifted his focus, letting it rest on the lake rather than the stars above.
“When I was a boy, I asked too many questions,” he confessed. “Not just treaties and bloodlines. I wanted to know why the stars move, why languages split like rivers, how old a book could be.” He swallowed. “Every time I leaned too far into it, someone would say, ‘You’re going to be emperor. You don’t need that.’”
He let the lesson sit between them, ugly and raw. “Later, when I earned the words, they said it was easy for me. That it was handed to me. Golden Boy. Crown polished beforehand.” He tasted the small, private anger again—ridiculous for a prince, perhaps, but true.
“So I tried,” he admitted. “Hard. Obnoxiously hard. To prove them wrong. To prove I was more than the robe they measured me at birth. Maybe I went too far. I still do.”
When he finally faced her, moonlight gentled the edges of his expression, softening a confession that cost him more than heshowed. “I don’t like being disliked. So I…” He hesitated. “I fill the space. Because simply being Alaric never seemed sufficient.”
He stopped, with nothing clever left to follow it. Maybe it had been too honest. But if there was one thing he had learned, it was this: if you wanted the truth from others, you had to begin with your own.
“And now?” she asked.
He could have said anything in that instant—something clever to fold the moment back into safety—but instead: “You’ll be my wife soon,” he said, his tone small yet steady. “And I want you to know me—not the prince, not the heir.Me.”
He watched her closely, waiting for laughter, disdain, dismissal. What met him instead was what he’d scarcely dared to hope for—something gentler, disarmingly real.
She kept her eyes ahead, her skirts clenched tight in her grasp. Then, drawing a breath sharp enough to ache, she spoke.
“The engagement I had before. With the Dvorenics…”
Alaric nodded once, careful, steady. His stomach pulled taut.
“I was sixteen when they called it off. The letter was polite. Everything is polite when it’s meant to decide I wasn’t worth the gamble.”
Her eyes never turned toward him.
