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81 The Weight of a Crown I Never Wanted
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2025-12-10 21:13:32
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Tempting the Wrong Prince 90 The Things I Cannot Tolerate 2
Arden’s POVI slipped out the same way I came, silent, shadow-like, keeping close to the stone walls of the quieter corridors, avoiding the guards who patrolled on predictable rotations. The palace’s lesser staircases were narrow and dim, meant for servants and forgotten royals, but I knew every creak in every step, every patch of worn marble, every place where the torchlight didn’t quite reach.By the time the night air hit my face, cool and sharp against my skin, I felt the tight coil inside my chest snap just a little. Not enough to ease anything. But enough to keep me from turning around to do something reckless.It took everything inside me not to march back into that cursed palace and drag Cassandra out with my bare hands.Not walk out, drag her out. Pull her away from the man who ruined her. Rip her from under my father’s control. Tear her out of the hands of a court that fed on her suffering like it was entertainment.But I couldn’t. Not yet.So I walked away.But my rag
Tempting the Wrong Prince 89 The Things I Cannot Tolerate
Arden’s POVThe room still smelled like her.Cassandra’s perfume lingered faintly, soft, floral, familiar, etched into the stale air of that abandoned chamber like a haunting. I stood there long after she slipped out with Diana, long after her footsteps faded into nothingness down the corridor, long after I ran out of excuses to remain in the place that had once tormented her.But I didn’t move.My hands were still shaking.Not from desire. Not from the ghost of her lips on mine. Not from the heat of her body pressed against me.From rage.Pure, undiluted fury.The kind that simmered under the skin, burning slow and vicious. The kind that made breathing feel like swallowing glass. The kind that made my vision blur at the edges and my heartbeat thrum with violence.I was furious at everything.At the king. At Richard. At Ivana. At the palace. At the suffocating politics of this country. At the damned, rotting court that fed on misery and pretended it was tradition.If I was bein
Tempting the Wrong Prince 88 Everything I Never Said 2
Cassandra’s POV“You didn’t hold me. Not once. You didn’t ask how I was doing. How I felt. What I wanted.”The words left me before I realised I’d spoken them. They came out raw, stripped of polish, stripped of diplomacy, stripped of the soft carefulness I had been trained to carry like a second skin in this palace.I shook my head slowly, the memories crashing back with the cold clarity of a blade.“It was always about you,” I continued. “Your title. Your court allies. Your heir. Your mother. Your reputation.”Richard’s lips parted, his breath catching as if some half-formed apology hovered behind his teeth. But before he could speak, I lifted my hand, a quiet command, a line he no longer had the right to cross.“I loved you,” I said quietly.His eyes flickered, wounded by the gentleness in my tone. Because it wasn’t tenderness. It was grief. The soft ache of all the illusions I once carried.“When I married you,” I went on, “I thought you’d love me unconditionally. Protect me. Put m
Tempting the Wrong Prince 87 Everything I Never Said
Cassandra’s POVFor a long moment, there was nothing, no sound, no breath, no movement, only the two of us suspended in a silence so heavy it felt like it could crush bone. The air in the room was thick, humid from the steam that had followed me out of the bathroom, yet cold at the edges in the way only palace walls could be. Richard sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped forward as though the weight of the crown, past, present, future, had finally settled on him all at once. His eyes, usually sharp with princely discipline or clouded with guilt, were now dark, empty, hollow.He was waiting.For an answer.For a truth neither of us had dared speak for six years.And I stood there, wrapped in a towel, my hair still damp and clinging to my shoulders, my skin still flushed from the too-hot water I had used to scrub away the evidence of a man who wasn’t my husband. But even beneath the heat, I felt cold. The kind of cold that came from years of loneliness, years of hoping and break
Tempting the Wrong Prince 86 What Remains of a Heart 2
Cassandra’s POVMy chest twisted. The truth was too big to ignore: he was the king’s eldest son. Duty would always come for him. Family would always chain him. There was no universe in which he could tear down the throne for me. No world where he could abandon the bloodline that shaped him.He couldn’t choose me. Not in the end. Not when everything settled.But I didn’t say any of that.I didn’t want him to think I doubted him. I didn’t want to break him apart with a truth he wasn’t ready to admit.So I held my tongue.“I’ll see you again,” I said softly. “We’ll talk again. I promise.”He looked at me like the promise was a blade pressed to the softest part of him.Then, he kissed me.A desperate, aching, consuming kiss. One that burned. One that pleaded. One that said everything he couldn’t allow himself to utter aloud.It felt like a beginning… And like something ending.When he finally let go, my legs felt weak. My breath trembled. My heart felt bruised.Diana pretended not to n
Tempting the Wrong Prince 85 What Remains of a Heart
Cassandra’s POVTime moved differently when Arden held me. Not slower. Not faster. Just… elsewhere.It was as though the abandoned palace room carved out its own pocket in the universe, a sliver of existence untouched by anything beyond its cracked walls. The world outside didn’t just fade, it ceased to matter. The royal court became a distant, irrelevant machine. Ivana’s venomous tongue and the crown’s iron weight dissolved into nothing. Even Richard, his grief, his desperation, his unraveling, felt like a faraway echo I couldn’t afford to listen to.There was only Arden.His arms around me. His breath warming the side of my neck. The familiar scent of cedarwood and cold night wind clinging to his clothes like a shield.I hadn’t realised how hungry I had been for safety until the moment he pulled me in. It was physical, this starvation I’d developed without knowing. The kind that turned solid the second his body wrapped around mine, the second my cheek found the steady rise and f
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