Her Royal Highness

Run, Eleia

The man beside him is tall and familiar in ways my body recognizes before my mind catches up, his presence still calibrated to the rooms we were raised in, his face older, sharper, but devastatingly the same. Five years haven't erased him from me. They've only taught my heart how to bleed quietly.

James. I don't see a Duke. I don't see a groom. I see the boy who followed me to the Shabby house when the Crown decided grief was inconvenient. The man who cooked disastrously and held me through nights when sleep felt like betrayal. The only person I ever trusted enough to make a promise with that mattered more than love.

No secrets. Not ever. The memory hits so hard my breath stutters. For one fragile year, we lived like people instead of symbols, like the world might allow us to stay human if we didn't ask too much of it. I learned how to sleep again without nightmares. He learned how to laugh without calculation. We bled together in that house, built something honest out of grief and quiet mornings and the reckless certainty that truth would keep us safe.

And then he broke the one promise that mattered.

I didn't see a strategy. I didn't see protection. I saw another woman standing where I had bled, another future chosen without me, another man deciding what was best while calling it love. I saw my parents all over again. I saw the Crown. I saw erasure dressed up as care. When he told me Seraphine was safer for that world than I was, something inside me went cold so completely I didn't even cry.

I left without screaming. Without begging. Without looking back.

I took my heart with me, cracked but intact, and I survived him the way I survived everything else.

Now he's here. Five years later, standing close enough that my body remembers his hands, his voice, the way he used to say my name like it was something worth protecting. The palace calls it destiny. The Crown calls it duty. They think time has sanded the pain down into something manageable.

They're wrong. I look at my grandmother, and her satisfaction steals the air from my lungs. I look at his mother, Kathaina, already composed. I look at James, and the love I never finished grieving twists painfully against the woman I fought to become without him. Julian's hand is steady at my side, grounding, kind, everything James once was when he chose me.

My head shakes before I can stop it. I slip out of Julian's grasp because if I don't move now, I will shatter where I stand.

I run.

Out of the parlour, down the corridor, away from the man I still love and the future they've decided will fix us both. I run from the palace, from the Crown, from the lie that love requires disappearance. My chest burns, my breath fractures, and every step feels like choosing myself over the version of me that would have vanished quietly for him once.

I'm not afraid of loving James again. I'm so scared that loving him means becoming smaller, quieter, easier to replace.

And this time, I refuse to disappear for anyone.