"Will you wait for me? I'll come back. I promise I'll come back to you—"
Beatrice woke reaching for nothing.
Her arm was outstretched toward the ceiling, fingers splayed and trembling, grasping at the remnants of a voice already dissolving like smoke. She lay there a moment, breathless, her body still half-convinced it was somewhere else entirely — somewhere cold and dark, where the smell of rust and stone and copper clung to the air like a second skin.
She exhaled slowly. Let her arm fall.
This dream again.
Seven months.
Every night for seven months — since the morning after her eighteenth birthday — it had returned to her with the same cruel fidelity. The same iron cold pressing into her spine. The same bloom of white-hot pain splitting open her abdomen. The same pair of hands, enormous and shaking, cradling her as though she were something irreplaceable. Something already being lost.
She never saw his face. The dream refused her that much.
Only the outline of him — vast, broken, trembling — and the sound of his breathing coming apart at the seams. And her own hand, slick with blood that she somehow knew was hers, lifting toward a face she couldn't reach. Wanting to tell him it doesn't hurt, it's alright, please stop crying, please—
Her body never listened. It never let her move. It only let her feel.
That was the cruelest part.
Not the pain in her stomach. Not the cold. But the helplessness of lying there in his arms, heart absolutely shredding with the need to comfort him, and being utterly, completely unable to.
She pressed her palm flat against her sternum now, feeling her pulse knock unevenly beneath her ribs.
Why does it feel like grief? she thought, for what must have been the hundredth time. Why does losing someone I've never met feel like losing everything?
No answer came. It never did.
Two soft knocks broke the quiet.
"Come in," she said, her voice still rough with sleep.
The door opened with its familiar creak, and Mary slipped inside — sixteen years old, round-cheeked, warm brown curls escaping their pins as always. The black and white of her uniform was pressed immaculately, but there was nothing immaculate about the brightness of her expression. It was simply, genuinely hers.
"Good morning, milady." She crossed to the curtains and drew them back with practiced efficiency, flooding the room with pale gold light. "Did you—" She paused, took one look at Beatrice's face, and the brightness softened into something gentler.
"The dream."
It wasn't a question.
Beatrice confirmed nodding her head once.
Mary made a quiet sound of sympathy as she moved to the bed, beginning to straighten the sheets Beatrice had obviously battled through the night. She didn't ask for details. She already knew them all — had memorized every fragment Beatrice had ever shared, late at night when the loneliness became too loud to bear alone.
That was the thing about Mary. She listened. In a house full of people who spoke at Beatrice, Mary was the only one who ever truly listened.
"Your bath is ready," she said gently. "And I should lay out something appropriate for the palace visit, I suppose."
The words landed like a stone in still water.
Beatrice closed her eyes briefly. "Yes. Please."
The corset was, as always, a small daily act of violence.
Beatrice stood with her hands braced against the bedpost while Mary worked the laces, each measured tug compressing her waist until her ribcage felt like a birdcage being slowly closed around her lungs. She breathed shallowly and stared at the wallpaper and thought about nothing.
She was practiced at thinking about nothing.
The door opened without a knock.
Lady Laporte entered the way she always did — as though the room and everything in it, including her daughter, existed primarily for her purposes. She was a handsome woman, sharply put-together, with the kind of beauty that had long since hardened into armor.
"Beatrice." She didn't look at her directly. She rarely did — her gaze always seemed to land just beside Beatrice's face, as though addressing a concept rather than a person. "Today is not the day for carelessness. You will be pleasant, composed, and agreeable. You will not speak unless spoken to, and you will not, under any circumstances, give the prince reason to find you tiresome. Do I make myself clear?"
Perfectly, Beatrice thought.
"Yes, mother," she said.
Once, those instructions would have stung. She would have wanted to argue, to remind her mother that she was a person with preferences and opinions and an inner life that existed independently of what she could offer to Laporte family name. But that version of herself had learned its lesson slowly, and then all at once.
She was not a daughter here.
She was a function.
A carefully maintained piece to be moved across the board at the appropriate moment.
"The carriage is here, milady," Mary said, with the precise timing of someone who had learned when an exit was mercy.
Beatrice was already moving. "Thank you, mother," she said, and left before another word could find her.
*****
The palace was unreasonable in its beauty.
That was the only word she had ever found for it — unreasonable. The kind of grandeur that didn't feel built so much as declared, all pale marble and gilt and towers that caught the morning light and threw it back doubled. Any girl who had grown up dreaming of fairy tales would have wept at the sight of it.
Beatrice had dreamed of it once, too. A long time ago.
Now she stepped down from the carriage and felt the familiar thing stir in her chest.
It happened every time.
The moment her feet touched the courtyard stones, something deep inside her — beneath logic, beneath language — turned like a compass finding north.
A pull.
A pressure.
A sensation so specific it almost had a direction: inward, forward, deeper.
As though something within these walls knew her name.
As though something was waiting.
She pressed her fingers lightly over her heart, feeling it pound with an urgency that had nothing to do with nerves, and stared at the palace's grand facade. The windows glittered like collected stars. The doors stood open, attendants lining the steps.
And somewhere beyond all of it, that invisible thread pulled taut.
There, some wordless part of her insisted. Right there.
The guards fell into formation around her before she'd taken three steps — armor clinking, faces neutral, eyes professionally blank. They moved when she moved. Stopped when she stopped. A perimeter made of people, ensuring she stayed precisely where she was meant to be.
She looked at them once, said nothing, and fell into the familiar rhythm of endurance.
She was a marquis's daughter within the walls of a palace. She had no privileges here. No freedom of movement. No voice that carried weight.
One wrong step. One poorly chosen word.
She knew the architecture of her own precariousness by heart.
So she walked where they permitted her to walk. Looked where they allowed her to look.
And pressed her palm quietly against her chest, where that impossible pull hummed and ached like something that had been waiting a very long time.
Just a little longer, she thought — though she couldn't have said who she was thinking it to.
I'm here.