The blizzard had passed sometime before dawn.
Snow still clung to the arrow-slits, but the sky beyond them had turned the color of pale rose-gold.
Castle Velmont was silent for the first time in weeks—no moans, no chains, no wet slaps echoing through stone corridors.
Only the soft hush of breathing.
Alaric woke alone in the vast bed.
The furs were warm, heavy with the mingled scents of thirteen women and one man.
He lay on his back, staring up at the embroidered canopy, feeling the pleasant ache in every muscle.
For once, his cock was soft, resting against his thigh like a sleeping wolf.
A small sound—bare feet on cold stone.
Queen Lysandra slipped through the door, carrying a silver tray.
She wore nothing but his black cloak, the one he'd discarded in the snow last night.
It hung open, framing the heavy sway of her milk-full breasts, the soft curve of her belly still faintly streaked with dried spend.
Her silver-streaked hair was loose, tousled from sleep and sex.
She looked forty years younger than the proud monarch who had arrived demanding respect.
"I thought you might be hungry," she whispered.
Her voice was hoarse—hours of screaming his name had done that.
On the tray: warm bread, honey, a single pear sliced into pale moons.
Simple things.
Human things.
Alaric sat up slowly.
The sheet fell to his waist.
Lysandra's eyes flicked down, lingered, softened.
Not with hunger this time.
With something gentler.
She knelt on the bed, set the tray between them.
He tore the bread in half, offered her the larger piece.
She took it with both hands, like a child receiving a gift.
They ate in silence, knees touching under the furs.
Honey dripped onto her wrist; he leaned over and licked it away without thinking.
She shivered, but didn't pull back.
When the pear was gone, she wiped her fingers on the cloak and crawled closer.
Not to seduce.
Just to rest her head on his bare chest.
Alaric's arm curled around her automatically, thumb tracing the faint stretch marks along her ribcage.
Marks from carrying kings and princesses who would never know this version of their mother.
"I used to hate these," she murmured against his skin.
"Now I think they're beautiful.
Because they brought me here."
He pressed his lips to her temple.
No words.
None were needed.
Minutes passed—maybe an hour.
The fire crackled low.
Outside, a lone raven called.
Lysandra's hand drifted down, not to stroke him awake, but to simply rest over his heart.
She counted the beats.
"I was queen for thirty-five years," she said softly.
"I gave birth to nations.
I signed death warrants with ink made from crushed rubies.
And none of it ever made me feel as small… as safe… as I do right now."
Alaric's fingers threaded through her hair.
He felt something loosen in his chest, something he hadn't known was knotted.
"I thought I wanted to break you all," he admitted, voice rough.
"But this morning… I just want to hold you."
She smiled against his skin—small, secret, real.
"Then hold me, my king.
The others can wait."
They stayed like that until the sun climbed higher, painting golden bars across the bed.
Somewhere below, thirteen women slept tangled together, dreaming of storms.
Up here, two people breathed in perfect sync, honey still sweet on their tongues.
No crowns.
No collars.
Just skin, and warmth, and the quiet promise that when the storm returned—and it would—they would face it together.
For now, the world could wait outside the door.
She was born in the Year of the Red Comet, the only child of King Aldric IV and his foreign consort, Princess Maerwyn of the Sapphire Isles.
From the cradle, she was told she would be queen one day, and queens did not cry, did not laugh too loudly, did not want.
At seven, she watched her mother die of a wasting fever while courtiers whispered that the foreign woman had "brought the sickness with her southern blood."
Lysandra was not allowed to weep at the funeral.
She bit her lip until it bled, tasting copper instead of salt.
At twelve, she was married to Prince Consort Edric, thirty years her senior, chosen because his lands bordered three enemies and his coffers were bottomless.
Their wedding night was witnessed by six high priests and two midwives.
Edric managed three painful thrusts before spilling on her thigh and falling asleep.
The midwives declared her "opened."
She lay awake until dawn, staring at the canopy, feeling nothing but the sticky cooling on her skin.
At fifteen, she bore her first child—a daughter.
The labor lasted twenty-six hours.
Edric never entered the birthing chamber.
When the babe was placed in her arms, Lysandra felt the first true warmth of her life.
Three days later, the infant caught lung-fever and died.
Edric told her, "We will try again. Daughters are replaceable."
She learned to smile with dead eyes.
Over the next eighteen years she gave him four living sons and two more daughters who survived.
Each pregnancy stretched her body further, left silver rivers across her belly and breasts.
Edric praised her fertility the way one praises a prize mare.
He never touched her again after the last son was born.
His mistresses grew younger every year.
At thirty-five, Edric choked on a fishbone during a banquet and died purple-faced at the table.
Lysandra—now Queen Regent for her twelve-year-old heir—stood over his corpse and felt… nothing.
Not even relief.
Just the hollow echo where feeling should have been.
For fifteen years she ruled with an iron grace that terrified the council.
She crushed rebellions before they began.
She married her children to foreign powers.
She signed treaties in blood-red ink and never flinched.
At night she walked the palace corridors alone, trailing her fingers along cold stone, wondering why her bed always felt too large.
She learned to pleasure herself in secret—quick, guilty rubs under silk sheets, biting her pillow so the guards wouldn't hear.
She came in silence, always, because queens did not make noises of abandon.
Afterward she would lie staring at the ceiling, thighs trembling, and feel more alone than before.
The dreams started six moons ago.
At first she thought them fever visions—Alaric's face between her thighs, his hands gentle where every other man had been rough or indifferent.
In the dreams she screamed, she laughed, she wept, she begged.
She woke soaked—sheets, thighs, pillow—her body aching with a hunger she had never been allowed to name.
She fought it for weeks.
Burned the sheets.
Took ice-cold baths.
Prayed until her knees bled.
Nothing helped.
The dreams grew sweeter, crueler.
She began to look forward to sleep.
When the raven arrived with Alaric's invitation—black wax, no crest, only the words Come willingly or not at all—she stared at it for an entire night.
Then she packed one small bag, left the crown on the council table, and rode north through the blizzard without telling a soul.
She told herself it was political.
A strategic surrender to protect her children's thrones.
But when she stepped from the carriage and saw Alaric waiting, cloaked in crimson, eyes burning like winter stars, she felt the last piece of the ice inside her crack.
That night, when he finally entered her—slow, deliberate, watching her face the entire time—she cried for the first time since she was seven years old.
Not from pain.
From the simple, devastating miracle of being wanted.
Now, in the quiet morning after the storm, Lysandra rests her cheek over Alaric's heartbeat and understands something she never grasped in fifty-two years of life:
She was never a queen.
She was a woman who had been waiting—waiting to be held, waiting to be seen, waiting to be allowed to feel.
And for the first time, the waiting is over.
He came into the world screaming, not from pain, but from rage.
The midwife swore later that the infant's tiny fists were already clenched, that his emerald eyes (far too aware for a newborn) had locked on the wet-nurse's enormous breast and refused to look away until he latched on so hard she yelped.
They named him Alaric because the old duke wanted a war-name.
What he got was something far more dangerous: a child who wanted everything and knew, from the first breath, that the world would try to keep it from him.
His mother died three days after the birth.
Complications, the maesters said.
Alaric learned the truth at seven: she had bled out because the duke refused to send for the southern healer who might have saved her.
The man had been busy bedding a new mistress half his age.
The duke never looked at his son without a flicker of disgust.
"You killed her," he said once, drunk on Dornish red.
Alaric was five.
He didn't cry.
He simply stared until his father looked away first.
Castle Velmont became a museum of cold lessons.
Age six: locked in the crypts for three nights because he refused to call his father's new wife "mother."
He learned to love the dark.
Age nine: forced to watch the stable master geld a stallion.
Lesson: power is taken by cutting away what makes a thing strong.
Age twelve: sent to foster with Lord Blackthorne, who beat him daily for "looking at my wife too long."
Lady Seraphine (twenty-eight then) would sneak into the stables afterward, press warm cloth to his split lip, and let him bury his face between her milk-heavy breasts while she whispered, "One day, little wolf, you'll bite back."
He never forgot the smell of her skin.
It became the first brick in the hunger that would define him.
At fourteen he was already taller than most knights, shoulders broad from secret training in the abandoned north tower.
He discovered sex the way other boys discover knives: suddenly, violently, and with the thrilling knowledge that it could kill.
The cook's daughter, a busty girl of nineteen, cornered him in the pantry and taught him what a woman's mouth could do.
He lasted four heartbeats, came so hard he saw stars, then flipped her over the flour sacks and fucked her until she sobbed his name into the dough.
Afterward she traced the bruises on his back (his father's latest gift) and said, "You fuck like you're trying to punish the world."
He didn't deny it.
By sixteen he had bedded every willing servant over thirty in the castle.
He sought them out deliberately: the lonely, the neglected, the ones whose husbands looked through them.
He learned that a woman starved for touch will give you her soul if you simply look at her like she is the only thing in the room.
His father noticed.
Of course he did.
At seventeen the duke dragged Alaric to a banquet and offered him to Lady Isolde as a "tamed pup."
Isolde laughed, spread her legs under the table, and let the boy finger her to a silent orgasm while the duke toasted his own cleverness.
That night Alaric slipped into his father's bedchamber and held a dagger to the old man's throat until he pissed himself.
He didn't kill him.
He wanted the duke to live long enough to watch everything he owned become Alaric's.
The old man died anyway (heart attack, they said) six months later, right after Alaric turned eighteen and took the ducal signet by force.
Some whispered poison.
Alaric never bothered to deny it.
He buried his father in an unmarked crypt and opened the castle gates to every widowed noblewoman who had ever looked at him with hunger in her eyes.
But the hunger never went away.
Because beneath the conquest, beneath the collars and the milk and the screaming orgasms, there was still the boy locked in the dark, pressing his face into a warm breast and praying someone would hold him long enough for the cold to stop.
He just never expected the first person to do it would be the queen herself, fifty-two years old, trembling in his arms at dawn, honey on her lips and tears on her lashes.
For the first time in twenty-two years, Alaric closed his eyes and let someone else carry the weight.
Just for a morning.
Just until the storm remembered his name.
She was born Seraphine of House Blackthorne in the Year of the Three Moons, daughter of a minor baron whose lands were mostly swamp and sorrow.
Everyone said she was cursed from the cradle: hair too red, breasts too heavy by fourteen, hips that made priests cross themselves in the chapel.
At sixteen they married her to Lord Gervais Blackthorne, forty-seven, twice widowed, and famous for two things:
1. A cock that never rose after his second wife died in childbirth.
2. A fortune built on black pearls harvested by slaves who never saw daylight.
Their wedding night was a farce.
Gervais poked at her thrice with a limp, wine-soaked prick, then rolled over and snored.
Seraphine lay staring at the ceiling, thighs sticky with his failure, and decided two things:
- She would never again wait for a man to give her pleasure.
- One day she would own the man who finally did.
For twenty-six years she played the perfect widow-in-waiting.
Gervais lived to seventy-three, growing fatter and softer while Seraphine grew riper: breasts like war-drums, ass that clapped when she walked the castle battlements, cunt that wept nightly into silk sheets she bought with his gold.
She learned her body the way knights learn steel.
In the stillroom after midnight, fingers slick with almond oil, she discovered every secret fold, every rhythm that made her bite her own wrist to stay quiet.
She came in silence, always, because a lady does not disturb the household.
When Gervais finally choked on a sugared fig and died, the will reading lasted three minutes.
Everything (lands, pearls, slaves, castle) went to a cousin in Dornspire.
Seraphine received a widow's pittance and the crimson mourning gown she still wore the night Alaric dragged her from the feast.
She was forty-two, penniless, and furious.
For three years she drifted from court to court, the "cursed widow" whose husbands died after bedding her.
Men feared her.
Women envied her.
She smiled at both and collected secrets the way other women collected jewels.
Then came the boy.
Alaric de Velmont, seventeen, fostered at Blackthorne Keep after his father beat him bloody for staring too long at a steward's wife.
Seraphine found him in the stables one dawn, shirt torn, lip split, eyes burning with something older than rage.
She was thirty-eight then, milk still leaking from breasts that had never nursed a living child.
She pressed him against the hay bales, let him bury his bruised face between her tits, and whispered, "One day, little wolf, you'll bite back."
She didn't mean to fall in love.
Love was for girls who still believed in songs.
But every night for a year she sneaked into the stables.
She taught him how to touch a woman until she forgot her own name.
She let him drink from her breasts when the pain of his father's belt became too much.
She came on his fingers, his tongue, and once (when Gervais was drunk in the solar) on the thick, veined cock that would one day rule kingdoms.
When the duke dragged Alaric home at eighteen, Seraphine stood on the battlements and watched the carriage disappear.
She touched the faint bruise on her neck where he had marked her the night before and smiled for the first time in years.
She waited four more years.
Waited while rumors drifted north: the young duke who collected widowed nobles like trophies, who made duchesses crawl and queens beg.
When the invitation came (black wax, no words, only a single crimson ribbon tied around a black pearl), she recognized the ribbon instantly.
It was the one she'd worn in her hair the first night she let him taste her.
She arrived at Castle Velmont during the feast, crimson gown cut so low her nipples threatened rebellion with every breath.
She felt his eyes on her the moment she entered the hall (emerald fire, exactly as she remembered).
Later, when he dragged her up the spiral stairs and ripped her gown down the front, she laughed (low, triumphant) because she had waited twenty-six years for a man to want her badly enough to ruin silk worth a village.
When he buried his face between her thighs and drank her like wine, she came so hard she saw stars and whispered the words she had never said to any husband:
"Yours.
Always yours."
Now, in the quiet mornings when the harem sleeps, Seraphine is the one who brings Alaric warm bread and honey.
She is the one who curls against his back when nightmares of crypts and gelding knives wake him sweating.
She is forty-six, milk still sweet, ass still criminal, and for the first time in her life she is not waiting.
Because the boy she taught to bite grew up and bit the entire world.
And he kept her at his side (first conquest, first love, first collar) while the realm fell to its knees.
Some nights she stands on the battlements where she once watched him leave, crimson ribbon still tied in her hair, and smiles at the snow.
The curse was never that her husbands died.
The curse was that none of them ever lived long enough to deserve her.
Alaric
1472 – Year of the Red Comet
Born in the Sapphire Palace of the Summer Isles as Princess Maerwyn's only child.
Her mother named her Lysandra ("she who frees others") in the island tongue.
Her father, King Aldric IV, immediately changed it to the mainland version because "foreign names make allies nervous."
Age 3: Learns that when she cries, the nurses hush her with honeyed dates and the words, "Queens do not cry, little star."
1479 – Age 7
Her mother dies of the Grey Wasting.
Lysandra is forbidden from attending the pyre "lest the smoke ruin your complexion."
She hides in the aviary and sobs into a white peacock's tail until the feathers are soaked.
That night she cuts her own hair with ceremonial scissors (short, jagged, boyish).
The court is scandalised.
Aldric locks her in her rooms for a month.
She learns that feelings are weapons others will use against her.
1484 – Age 12
Betrothed to Prince-Consort Edric of Highreach, thirty years her senior.
The alliance treaty is signed in her blood (one drop pricked from her thumb).
On her wedding night, six priests and two midwives watch Edric fumble for three minutes.
He finishes on her thigh and falls asleep snoring.
The midwives declare her "successfully deflowered."
She stares at the canopy until sunrise, feeling the sticky mess cool, and decides that pleasure is a myth told to foolish girls.
1487–1499 – The Breeding Years
- Age 15: First daughter, stillborn.
- Age 17: Crown Prince Aldric V (lives).
- Age 19: Princess Celestine (lives).
- Age 21: Twins (one lives, Prince Edric II; one dies).
- Age 23: Princess Royal Maelis (lives).
- Age 25: Prince Rhaegar (lives).
Each birth tears her body a little more.
Edric praises her the way one praises a prize cow: "Good hips, strong milk."
He never enters her bed again after Rhaegar's birth.
His mistresses grow younger every season.
1500 – Age 28
Edric dies choking on a fishbone at a banquet.
Lysandra, now Queen Regent for 12-year-old Aldric V, stands over the corpse and feels… nothing.
She rules for fifteen years with a hand so steady it terrifies the council.
They call her "The Ice Queen."
She signs death warrants in crimson ink and never flinches.
1500–1515 – The Silent Nights
Every evening after court, she walks the marble corridors alone.
Her footsteps echo like accusations.
In her locked solar she touches herself quickly, mechanically, biting a silk scarf so the guards won't hear.
She comes in silence, always.
Afterward she washes her fingers in rosewater and stares at her reflection:
beautiful, powerful, untouchable,
and utterly, achingly empty.
1523 – Age 51
The dreams begin.
Alaric's face between her thighs.
His hands gentle where every man has been rough or indifferent.
She wakes soaked (sheets, thighs, pillow) gasping his name.
She burns the linen, takes ice baths, prays until her knees bleed.
Nothing stops the dreams.
They grow sweeter.
She begins to crave sleep.
1524 – Age 52, Winter Solstice
A raven lands on her windowsill at midnight.
Black wax, no crest.
Inside: a single crimson ribbon and a black pearl.
She recognises the ribbon instantly (Seraphine wore one identical at the feast where Alaric first claimed her).
The pearl is warm, as if it has rested against someone's skin.
She stands at the window for hours, snow falling on her bare shoulders.
Then she does something no queen has ever done:
She leaves the crown on the council table,
takes only a small leather satchel,
and rides north through the blizzard alone.
She tells herself it is diplomacy.
A strategic surrender to protect her children.
But when she steps from the carriage and sees Alaric waiting (cloak open, snow melting on his bare chest, eyes burning like winter stars),
she feels the last shard of ice inside her shatter.
That night, when he finally enters her (slow, deliberate, watching her face),
she cries for the first time since she was seven.
Not from pain.
From the devastating miracle of being wanted,
of being allowed to feel,
of being held like something precious instead of a throne with legs.
Now, when the harem sleeps tangled in furs and milk and cum,
Lysandra is the one who wakes first.
She pads barefoot to the kitchens, steals warm bread and honey,
and crawls back into bed beside the man who broke her open and somehow made her whole.
She is fifty-two years old,
silver-haired, stretch-marked, milk-heavy,
and for the first time in her life,
she is not a queen.
She is simply Lysandra,
curled against the heartbeat of the only person who ever looked at her and saw the woman instead of the crown.
And she has never been happier.
The invitation reached the Jade Empire on the first day of spring.
Empress-Regent Xu Mingyue (forty-nine winters, widow of the Dragon Emperor for seven years) opened the black-lacquered scroll with trembling fingers.
No words.
Only a single crimson ribbon and a black pearl still warm from someone's skin.
She knew what it meant.
Every crowned widow on the continent knew.
For seven years she had ruled from the Dragon Throne, her body draped in mourning white, her heart locked behind jade and ritual.
The emperor had died in her arms, poisoned by his own brother, whispering with his last breath:
"Keep our son safe.
Keep yourself pure."
She had kept the first promise.
The second had been easier than anyone guessed; no man had touched her since the funeral pyre.
But every night, for the last three moons, she dreamed of a storm-eyed duke who knelt at her feet, not to worship the throne, but to worship her.
In the dream he never spoke.
He simply unlaced her mourning robes with the patience of a monk, pressed his lips to every scar the emperor's physicians had left, and drank her milk like it was the elixir of immortality.
She woke each time soaked, thighs clenched around silk that cost more than provinces, whispering a name she had never been told.
Now the raven had brought the name.
Alaric de Velmont.
She burned the imperial seal that night.
Left the crown on the altar of her ancestors.
Took only the white mourning gown and the crimson ribbon.
She sailed west on a single ship painted black, no banners, no guards.
Forty-nine days across the Sapphire Sea.
When the ship docked at Velmont's hidden cove, the castle loomed against a sky the color of bruised plums.
She stepped onto the pier alone, barefoot, white silk clinging to curves that had softened with age and grief.
Alaric waited at the end of the dock.
No cloak this time.
Only black breeches, boots, and the platinum collar key glinting against his bare chest.
Behind him, thirteen women stood in absolute silence (six queens, seven princesses), all naked, all collared, all watching with something like awe.
Xu Mingyue walked forward until her toes touched his.
The wind carried salt and snow and the faint scent of milk from the women behind him.
She sank to her knees in the frost, white silk pooling like spilled milk.
Not in submission.
In recognition.
Alaric's hand lifted (slow, reverent) and unwound the crimson ribbon from her hair.
Her black locks fell to her waist, threaded with silver like moonlight on water.
He spoke for the first time, voice rough with something that might have been fear.
"I did not send for you to conquer you."
She looked up.
Her eyes were the color of wet jade.
"I know," she whispered.
"I came to be conquered."
He lifted her to her feet, hands trembling.
The other women parted like a silent tide.
He led her (not carried, not dragged, led) through the castle gates, up the spiral stairs, past the great hall where feasts of flesh had raged for months.
Into the solar that had once belonged to his mother.
The room was warm.
A single fire.
One bed, draped in white furs.
No chains.
No collars.
Only the two of them.
He unlaced her gown with the same reverence he had shown in her dreams.
When the silk fell, she stood naked for the first time in seven years, body soft and heavy and scarred and perfect.
He knelt.
Pressed his forehead to her belly, just above the faint silver lines where she had carried an emperor's children.
And wept.
Not the tears of a conqueror.
The tears of a boy who had finally met someone stronger than his hunger.
Xu Mingyue threaded her fingers through his hair.
"Stand up, my wolf," she said softly.
"Tonight I am not an empress.
Tonight I am only Mingyue.
And you are only Alaric.
Let us be human together."
They made love like people drowning.
Slow.
Aching.
No audience.
No performance.
He kissed every scar.
She traced every bruise his father had left decades ago.
When he entered her, they both cried out (not from pain, but from the shock of finally being home).
Afterward they lay tangled, her head on his chest, listening to the same heartbeat that had soothed Lysandra, Seraphine, thirteen royal women who now slept in the great hall below, dreaming of storms.
Mingyue spoke into the dark.
"I ruled half the world," she whispered.
"And never once ruled my own heart.
You have done both."
Alaric's arms tightened around her.
"Stay," he said.
It was not a command.
It was a prayer.
She smiled against his skin.
"I crossed an ocean for you.
I am not leaving."
Outside, spring snow began to fall (soft, silent, forgiving).
Inside, fourteen collars lay unused on the table.
For the first time in months, the castle slept without a single moan.
Only the quiet sound of two people breathing in perfect sync.
The snow melted in a single week.
By the ides of March, the castle gardens (once frozen graves) exploded into color: snowdrops pushing through black earth, wild crocuses bleeding purple into the grass, and, in the walled rose garden, one impossible white bloom that opened the morning after Mingyue arrived.
The harem woke to birdsong instead of screams.
They found Alaric in the rose garden at dawn, barefoot in the dew, Mingyue's white mourning gown draped over his shoulders like a cloak.
He was on his knees, pressing his face into that single rose, breathing it like it was the first flower the world had ever grown.
Fourteen women stood at the garden gate and did not speak.
They simply watched the man who had broken crowns learn how to hold something without crushing it.
Mingyue stepped forward first.
She wore one of Alaric's linen shirts, sleeves rolled to her elbows, hem brushing mid-thigh.
Her hair was loose, black and silver waves catching the early light.
She knelt beside him in the mud and took the rose from his hands.
"It's called a Ghost Bride," she said softly.
"In my country, it only blooms when someone forgives themselves."
Alaric's throat worked.
He couldn't speak.
Lysandra (fifty-two and barefoot) was next.
She carried a small wooden tray: warm milk, honey bread, three ripe figs.
She set it on the grass and sat cross-legged like a girl, not a queen.
Seraphine followed, crimson ribbon still braided into her hair, eyes soft in a way no one had ever seen.
One by one they came:
Princess Amabel with dew on her golden lashes.
Zoraya carrying a tiny desert violet she had grown in a clay pot on her windowsill.
Viviane, milk beading at her nipples, no longer ashamed of it.
They formed a circle around the rose, fourteen women and one man, all barefoot, all uncollared, all breathing the same spring air.
No one gave orders.
No one knelt.
Alaric looked up at the circle of faces that had once begged him for ruin and saw something new:
peace.
Mingyue broke the silence.
"In the Jade Empire," she said, "when a new season begins, we release paper lanterns into the sky.
We write our old names on them and let the wind take them away."
She tore a strip from the hem of Alaric's shirt (her gown now), wrote something in flowing characters, and tied it around the Ghost Bride's stem.
Lysandra took the next strip, wrote in the old mainland script, tied it beside Mingyue's.
Seraphine.
Zoraya.
Amabel.
Celestine.
One by one, fourteen strips of white linen fluttered in the breeze, each carrying a name that no longer fit.
When only Alaric's strip remained, his hand shook.
Mingyue closed her fingers over his.
"You do not have to let him go all at once," she whispered.
"Just let the boy breathe."
He wrote a single word in charcoal:
Hungry.
Then tied it to the rose.
The wind rose.
Fourteen strips of linen lifted at once, dancing upward like white birds.
They caught the sunrise and vanished over the castle walls.
No one moved until the last scrap disappeared.
Then Seraphine (first conquest, first love) leaned over and kissed Alaric's forehead, exactly where she had kissed the seventeen-year-old boy in the stables years ago.
"Welcome home, little wolf," she said.
He cried then (not the silent tears of the night before, but the messy, human kind that come with sound and snot and shaking shoulders).
Fourteen pairs of arms wrapped around him.
They stayed in the garden until the sun was high, passing the warm milk in a single cup, tearing the honey bread into fourteen pieces, feeding each other figs with sticky fingers.
When they finally stood, the Ghost Bride had closed its petals, spent but whole.
Alaric looked at the circle of women (his women, but no longer his possessions) and spoke the only words that mattered.
"Thank you for teaching me how to be gentle."
Lysandra smiled, eyes bright with tears she no longer had to hide.
"And thank you," she answered for all of them, "for teaching us how to be brave enough to want it."
That night, the great hall stayed dark.
No chains.
No altars.
No storms.
Fourteen women and one man slept tangled in the rose garden under the stars, wrapped in nothing but each other and the soft spring air.
Somewhere beyond the walls, the world still burned with politics and wars and crowns.
Inside the garden, fifteen people breathed in perfect sync, hearts finally quiet.
Spring had come to Castle Velmont.
And this time, it planned to stay.