The guards faltered mid-step.
For a moment, no one did anything. Even Heinrich seemed to hesitate, his anger giving way to something that looked almost like desperation.
“Think, Allegra,” he said tightly. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
She laughed once.
“Maybe not. But I’m tired of everyone else deciding for me.”
She reached for her left hand, wiggled the engagement ring free, and hurled it down the corridor.
It spun end over end and struck a gilt-framed portrait of some powdered ancestor.
Tink.
The ring embedded itself in the painted man’s forehead.
“There,” she said, chest heaving. “Arrest him if you want. But I’m going too.”
Julien stared at the painting. At the ring. At her. His face went ashen.
Mathilde lifted a hand to her mouth, eyes wide.
Clara nearly applauded, checked only by the fact that one hand was occupied with a flute of champagne. She adjusted her grip instead, fingers sliding elegantly along the stem, lips pressed together to conceal the grin threatening to break free.
Heinrich cleared his throat. For a fleeting second, he didn’t look like a patriarch. He looked like a young man who had once wanted something he hadn’t been allowed to have.
“No,” he murmured. “I can’t permit this.”
“Permit?” Allegra said. “I’m not applying for a visa.”
“For fuck’s sake, Allegra—” Julien began.
“Enough!”
Mathilde’s voice rang through the corridor like a bell struck hard. She stepped forward, her dress whooshing against the marble. Then she rounded on her husband.
“I have listened to you talk for years about legacy. About the future.” Mathilde’s voice rose, not shrill, not hysterical, but honed. “You keep saying you want a strong leader to take over when you’re gone. Someone who will modernize the monarchy instead of embalming it.”
Heinrich opened his mouth.
She steamrolled him.
“Well?” She stabbed a finger down the corridor at Allegra. “Isn’t this exactly what that looks like? Someone who holds her ground. Who knows her mind and chooses what she wants, consequences be damned.”
She crossed her arms, daring him to contradict her.
“Maybe it blows up in her face. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s hers to decide. Which, last I checked, was the whole point of not raising a spineless heir.”
Silence fell again. The awkward, echoing kind.
Heinrich’s gaze ricocheted—from Mathilde to Allegra, to the guards, to the painting, the diamond winking obscenely from his ancestor’s forehead. He shut his eyes and jabbed a thumb into his temple, as though wrestling with a headache or a very stubborn principle.
Then he grunted, his shoulders slumping. “When did I stop being able to command my own household?” he muttered. Louder this time: “Fine. It seems I am outnumbered.”
His gaze softened, barely. “I won’t pretend to understand it, Allegra. But I won’t drag you back from it either. If this turns into a catastrophe, it will be yours.” A faint shrug. “If nothing else, it will put us on the map.”
He glanced toward the ceiling as if drafting headlines. “Perhaps the press office can spin it—reinvention, authenticity, a redemption arc.” A beat. “And I have been dying to tell those vultures atBlitzexactly where they can shove it.”
