CHAPTER SIX: THE PRINCE'D QUESTION

~~LUCY'S POV~~

The royal physician arrived before I had finished convincing myself that none of this was real.

He was an elderly man with silver hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and he carried himself like someone who had delivered bad news to kings and lived to tell of it. A leather case hung from one hand. In the other, a small crystal vial caught the firelight and scattered it across the ceiling.

Elara took her place beside the door, eyes fixed on the floor. She had the look of a woman who suspected something I didn't.

"Good morning, Miss Lucy."

"Good morning."

"I've been instructed to examine you after your collapse on the Moon Bridge."

I nodded. Nobody in this palace seemed to need my permission for anything.

He took my wrist first, two cool fingers pressed against my pulse, his gaze drifting somewhere over my shoulder as he counted. Then came the questions. Had I slept? Did my head ache? Had I eaten anything since the trials began?

Ordinary questions. Harmless ones.

Until they weren't.

"When was your last monthly bleeding?"

Heat flooded my face. "I... I'm not sure."

"When did you last experience it?"

I tried to remember. I truly did. But the past few weeks had dissolved into hospital corridors and unpaid bills, into counting coins at midnight and counting Molly's breaths beside her bed. Days had stopped having edges.

"It's been a while."

His fingers went still against my wrist.

"Any nausea recently? Dizziness? Unusual tiredness?"

The room tilted, though I was sitting down. The mornings I had gripped the edge of the sink with my eyes shut. The dizziness I had blamed on hunger. The exhaustion I had blamed on everything else.

"Sometimes," I whispered.

He said nothing. He only nodded, slowly and gravely, and reached into his case for the vial.

"Your hand, please."

I held it out. Why was it shaking?

He pressed the cool crystal into my palm. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a pale glow stirred inside the glass, soft as a candle behind a curtain, and began to change. Silver deepened into gold. Gold bled into something warmer, brighter, something that pulsed against my skin like a second heartbeat.

I looked up. The physician's face had gone completely, terribly serious.

"What is it?"

He didn't answer. He lifted the vial away, turned it to the light, and studied it again, as though the glass might change its mind.

"Miss Lucy," he said at last, "I believe you may be carrying a child."

The words made no sense.

They were just sounds. Gentle ones, spoken in a gentle voice, meant for some other woman in some other life.

"A child?"

"Yes. The signs point to an early pregnancy. I would like to conduct further examinations to be certain, but I believe it is very likely."

My fingers curled into the sheets until my knuckles ached.

Pregnant.

No. I couldn't be. One night. One desperate, terrible night I had survived by promising myself that it would end with the sunrise and leave nothing behind.

Apparently, it had left everything behind.

Without meaning to, my free hand drifted toward my stomach. I stopped it halfway and pulled it back, as though touching myself might make it true.

The physician snapped his case shut. The sound cracked through the room like a whip.

"His Highness must be informed immediately."

My head jerked up. "Why?"

"Because the child may be of royal blood."

I opened my mouth, but before a single word could escape, the door swung open.

The prince strode in.

He didn't pause at the threshold. His golden eyes swept the room, from the physician to Elara to me, and when they landed on me, they stayed.

"What's happening?"

The physician bowed low. "Your Highness, I have examined Miss Lucy. The results suggest that she may be carrying a child."

Silence.

Total, suffocating silence. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.

I stared at the prince, waiting for the crack in him. A flinch. A flicker of shock, or fury, or anything remotely human. News like this had to cost him something.

His expression didn't change.

That was the worst part. Not rage, not disbelief, just that cold, perfect stillness, as though someone had read him the price of grain.

His gaze dipped, briefly, to my stomach. Then it rose again to the physician.

"Are you certain the child is mine?"

The air left my lungs.

For one wild second, I thought I had misheard. Then I saw the physician's shoulders tighten, and Elara's eyes fly up and away, and I understood that I hadn't.

The physician cleared his throat. "Your Highness, considering the circumstances and the timing, it is reasonable to believe so. However, there is no way to establish the child's paternity with absolute certainty at this stage. That can only be confirmed after the child is born."

I looked from one man to the other.

The prince had asked whether the child was his.

Not whether I was well. Not whether I was frightened. Whether the child was *his*.

And the physician had just told him that no one could prove it. Not for months.

Rage climbed my throat, hot and bright. I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to hurl every furious word I had swallowed since the bridge, since the money, since the night I had agreed to it all.

But my mouth wouldn't move.

I hadn't come here for this. I had never imagined that one night could follow me into the daylight and put down roots. I had only wanted to survive the trials, take what I had been promised, and go home to my sister.

Instead, I was sitting in the prince's own bed, in a stranger's nightgown, being told I carried his child.

And he didn't even believe me.

I lowered my gaze to my hands, pale against the white sheets, and for the first time in my life, I wasn't sure they belonged to me anymore.