LOGINArden’s POVThe moment the door shut, he hit me.Not hard enough to knock me down. Not wild with drunken rage or a loss of control. It was measured. An exact strike from a man who knew his strength and wanted the message to land without making a scene.My head snapped slightly to the side, more from shock than pain. For a second, I just stood there, staring past his shoulder at the wall, trying to place the sound in my mind. The dull thud of knuckles against bone. The quiet that followed. The way my heartbeat stumbled, like it hadn’t expected violence to be part of this conversation.He had never hit me before.Not as a child, when my tutors complained about my mouth. Not as a teenager, when I stopped attending his prayers for obedience. Not even the first time I disobeyed him publicly, when he dragged me into a study and tried to suffocate me with words until I apologised for wanting a life outside his script.That was always his weapon: language. Decrees. Lectures. Public silence th
Arden’s POVNala had regained some colour, but her eyes remained too wide, too alert. Her hand clenched the edge of her robe as if it were the only thing holding her together.“As for the footage, all you would see is her,” I said. “She was the one making all the moves. I didn’t touch a hair on her head.”Silence.The palace held its breath again.I saw the way her uncle’s eyes shifted, calculating. Saw the way my father’s expression tightened as he realised the narrative might not be as clean as he wanted. Saw the way Nala swallowed, her throat moving too hard.“You can ask her,” I added. “Or I will release the footage from the bedroom and the living room.”I looked directly at Nala.“Choose.”Her composure wavered.A beat passed.Two.Her lips parted as if she might argue, might cling to the script.But fear is a stronger force than pride, and for all her ambition, Nala wasn’t brave.She broke.Not in tears.Not in confession that sounded noble.She broke the way people break when th
Arden’s POVNala walked out of the corridor behind me wearing a pale sleeping robe, the fabric soft and flowing, cinched at the waist as though she’d woken and thrown it on in modest haste. Her hair was loose and artfully disordered, as if she’d spent the night in a bed she belonged in. Her face was bare enough to look innocent, but her lips held a tint of colour that hadn’t happened by accident.She moved like someone who belonged there.Like someone who had been invited.Like someone who owned the place.The performance was meticulous. The robe, the hair, the timing, appearing exactly when my father asked for her, as if summoned by the script.The palace liked scripts.Nala loved them.My father… my father depended on them.She walked straight up to us with a soft smile and looped her arm through mine before greeting the King and her uncle.My jaw tightened.I did not pull away immediately.Not because I accepted it, but because I was watching my father’s reaction.His shoulders rel
Arden’s POVI knew my father thought he had won the moment he saw me come down the stairs.It wasn’t subtle.It was written into the way he stood at the base of the marble steps like a man waiting for applause, one hand resting lightly on the carved bannister as though the palace itself belonged to his palm, the other tucked behind his back in that practised posture of regal patience.The morning sun poured through the tall windows behind him, turning the marble floor into a pale mirror and throwing a halo of light around his silhouette. It should have made him look noble.Instead, it made him look theatrical.And my father loved theatre.He loved moments where the court could see him appear calm and in control. He loved the illusion that everything in Eldenwald moved according to his will, the laws, the press, the nobles, his sons.Especially his sons.His posture was relaxed in a way it hadn’t been in days, not since the rumours began to circulate with a hunger that couldn’t be star
Arden’s POVI stared at Nala where she stood in that red lace like she expected the room itself to bow to her.She had positioned herself perfectly, the low light catching the curve of her shoulder, the colour chosen to provoke, the stillness rehearsed. She wasn’t just trying to entice me.She was trying to corner me.And that was the moment I laughed.Not loudly. Not cruelly. Just a low, quiet sound that escaped before I bothered to stop it , the kind of laugh you give when something stops being a threat and starts being a joke.Her eyes widened immediately.Shock flashed across her face before she smoothed it into something cool and amused.“Well,” she said lightly, tilting her head, “if it weren’t for the rumours about what’s going on between you and your brother’s wife, I’d think you didn’t even fancy women.”Her voice was playful.Her intention was not.I didn’t let the words touch me. Didn’t rise to them. Didn’t react.I just kept looking at her.Because that was the thing abou
Richard’s POVMy father depended on me. The country depended on me. And no matter how much I blamed the crown for caging me, I couldn’t walk away from my people, not when the earth was drying beneath their feet, not when famine crept closer each day like a beast stalking its prey.My royal status wasn’t power. It was shackles.Gilded, polished, revered shackles, but shackles all the same.I would never be free. I could never wander the world the way other men could, disappear for months at a time, chase a life untouched by scrutiny or tradition. That kind of freedom belonged to Arden and Sebastien, my brothers who could go anywhere they wanted, reinvent themselves whenever they chose, live without the crushing weight of a kingdom on their shoulders.And I envied them. God, how I envied them.They could move. They could breathe. They could become whoever they wished to be.Meanwhile I, Crowned Prince of Eldenwald, had never truly lived a single day of my life.And in the mid







