The corridors were too silent.
Arin's footsteps echoed like a funeral march, hollow and uneven as she stumbled through the empty halls. The grand chamber, the one meant to serve as the beginning of her life as Queen of the Realm lay behind her like a broken altar. A shrine desecrated.
It had not held Roan waiting for her.
It had held an ending. One she had refused to entertain the possibility of. One her heart had not been prepared to survive.
She reached up and scrubbed at her cheeks with a trembling hand, wiping away the hot, fast tears that wouldn't stop falling. She wasn't even sure why she was crying. Shame, betrayal, fury, grief, none of them fit quite right. The pain was too shapeless. Too vast.
What had she expected?
He had made his contempt for her clear before hundreds, before the moon, the council, the spirits of their ancestors.
Why would he want her in private?
Nova's moan still rang in her ears, a vicious chime of mockery that sliced through her mind. And Roan… Roan had not looked shocked. Not guilty. He hadn't even blinked.
He had looked at her.
Just looked like she was the one intruding.
As though she were the interruption, the unwanted presence in her own wedding night.
Arin barely made it through the terrace doors before the sob escaped her throat.
The night air struck her like ice. Sharp. Unforgiving. It lashed at her skin through the sheer layers of red and silver that had once felt regal now they felt like shackles. The embroidery itched against her chest like the brand of a criminal. She clawed at it, breath catching, and collapsed to her knees in the middle of the garden, right among the moon-kissed roses.
The petals bent around her like mourners. Their perfume, sweet and fragile, did nothing to soothe her.
She didn't scream.
The tears came silently at first, sliding down her cheeks like betrayal given form. Her body began to tremble, the sob building like a wave she couldn't hold back. And when it finally broke, when her ribs caved around the grief her cry was raw, almost feral.
It was not the sound of a queen.
It was the sound of a girl who had never been wanted. Not by her father, not by the kingdom, and certainly not by the man she had been bound to for life.
And for the first time in years, Arin felt the full weight of her own weakness.
It crushed her. It shamed her.
She had walked into that room hoping, just hoping that maybe he would treat her with the barest shred of decency.
But there had been nothing waiting for her but Nova's body, Roan's hands, and silence that felt like a blade.
Her shoulders heaved. Her fingers dug into the soil beneath her knees as if she could anchor herself there root herself into the earth and vanish. Disappear into something nameless.
A sound reached her ears then. Soft, rhythmic. Footsteps on stone.
She froze.
A lantern's light approached from the winding garden path.
Of course.
Usera.
The woman always came dressed in sympathy, perfumed in pity, her beauty a mask so well-worn it had become indistinguishable from her truth. Arin didn't lift her head. She didn't have the strength.
Usera crouched gracefully beside her, the rustle of expensive silk whispering secrets to the night air.
"Oh, child," she said, voice laced with feigned ache. "What has happened?"
Arin didn't speak. She couldn't. Her throat had closed around the truth. The shame was too raw. Too fresh. She couldn't give it breath.
A hand rested gently on her back, light as a spider's footfall.
"Tell me," Usera urged. "I saw you flee. Did Roan…?"
Arin gave a sharp shake of her head, though her trembling never ceased. The motion alone felt like it drained what little strength she had left.
But there was no need to explain. Usera always knew.
"Nova," the older woman said softly, the name falling like a dagger disguised as a sigh. "Oh, Arin. That foolish girl."
Arin felt herself being gathered into an embrace which was soft, practiced, maternal in its performance. She didn't resist. She didn't cling either. Her body simply gave way to it like water finding a crack in the floor.
"Oh, darling…" Usera whispered, fingers stroking Arin's hair with slow precision. "I had hoped, I prayed he would not be so cruel but i guess Nova was hard to resist."
The touch should have comforted her.
It didn't.
It only reminded her how starved she was for any semblance of affection.
"How could he do that?" Arin's voice cracked like splintered glass. "Why… now?"
Usera continued stroking her hair, voice low and measured. "Because men like Roan see only power. And Nova… well, Nova has always known how to make herself indispensable."
Arin shook her head against the silk-clad shoulder. "He didn't even look sorry. He looked…" she stopped, breath hitching. "Like I wasn't even there."
A handkerchief was pressed into her palm.
"You deserve more," Usera whispered, soft as silk over steel. "And you shall have it."
The cloth smelled of rose oil and crushed herbs. Faintly metallic, odd. When Arin pressed it to her cheeks, the sting only deepened her sense of humiliation.
Usera drew back, rising to her feet like a queen. "Stay here," she said, smoothing her skirts. "Let the night take your grief. I'll handle Nova."
Arin didn't move. Didn't respond.
She was still kneeling among the roses, curled into herself like the child she had once been, waiting at her bedroom door for a mother who never came.
When Usera's lantern light faded into the dark, Arin finally let her face tilt up toward the moonlight.
Her lips were pale. Her eyes were swollen.
And somewhere, deep inside her chest, something had begun to harden. A slow, quiet shifting of weight.
She was weak tonight.
Shattered.
But not forever.
Not again.