The dining hall doors stood before her like the entrance to something inescapable — two towering slabs of dark oak, carved from top to bottom with winged lions mid-roar, stretching from the polished marble floor all the way up to the arched ceiling.
The guards pushed them open with both hands, the heavy groan of the hinges rolling through the corridor behind her like a warning.
"Lady Beatrice Laporte has arrived."
Beatrice stepped inside.
The room was enormous — far too large for a family meal. Crystal chandeliers hung in a row overhead, each one blazing with warm golden light that reflected off every polished surface below. The dining table stretched the full length of the hall, set with fine china and gleaming silverware and tall tapered candles burning in perfect stillness.
Servants stood silently along the walls, spaced evenly like portraits that had learned to breathe.
The imperial family was already seated.
It was meant to feel like a warm family gathering.
It felt nothing like that.
At the head of the table sat Emperor Edward von Devereux — broad-shouldered and immovable, draped in robes of deep crimson with a gold lion crest pinned at his chest. His hair was silver, the color of cold moonlight, and his face might as well have been chiseled from stone. Not cruel, exactly. Just utterly, thoroughly unyielding. His eyes moved to Beatrice the moment she entered — dark, sharp, and calculating, the eyes of a man who was always measuring something.
To his right sat Henry, already wearing an expression that hovered somewhere between boredom and mild irritation, as though simply being in the same room as her required a particular kind of patience he hadn't budgeted for today.
To his left sat Crown Prince Arthur — the elder brother, the heir. Beatrice had met him only a handful of times. He had his father's stillness and his mother's unreadable quality, and he watched her approach the way one watches something that has not yet revealed what it is.
Beatrice stopped and bowed deeply.
"Your Majesty. Your Highnesses."
"Rise," the Emperor said.
His voice wasn't harsh. It didn't need to be. It simply carried the kind of weight that made the air in the room feel slightly denser whenever he spoke.
Beatrice straightened. A servant appeared at her elbow and gestured to her seat — two chairs down from Henry. She moved to it quietly and sat.
The moment she was settled, she felt eyes on her.
Not the Emperor's.
Not Henry's or Arthur's.
She knew — before she even turned her head — that Isabella had arrived.
The Empress entered through a side door, her silk gown whispering against the marble as she glided to her seat beside the Emperor. She moved without hurry, without effort, the way water moves when it has all the time in the world to reach where it's going. She gave the Emperor a polite nod, settled into her chair, and then — as naturally as breathing — let her gaze drift across the table to Beatrice.
A slow smile curved her lips. Warm on the surface. Something else entirely underneath.
"Beatrice," she said pleasantly. "We are so pleased you could join us."
"It is an honor, Your Majesty," Beatrice replied, bowing her head.
The Emperor lifted his goblet. "Since we are all present — let us begin."
The servants moved at once, appearing from the walls in silent, practiced synchrony. Dishes arrived in steady procession — fragrant soups sending ribbons of steam into the candlelit air, delicate cuts of meat arranged with careful artistry, shimmering jellies, small towers of bread still warm from the oven. The table, already beautiful, became spectacular.
Beatrice could not taste a single thing.
Her throat was too tight. Her hands too cold. She lifted her cutlery and went through the motions while her mind stayed somewhere else entirely — somewhere behind Isabella's unreadable smile, somewhere in the pages that had been cut from that history book, somewhere in the echo of a voice that had whispered her name from inside empty walls.
Then Isabella reached for the wine.
She poured a glass — and then, without pausing, she poured one for Beatrice too.
Beatrice stilled.
An empress did not pour wine for a marquis's daughter. It simply wasn't done. The gesture should have felt like an honor. It felt instead like a test, or perhaps a trap dressed in the clothing of generosity.
"Drink," Isabella said softly, her eyes steady on Beatrice's face.
Beatrice picked up the glass. She kept her hand from trembling through sheer force of will and brought it to her lips.
"Tell us," the Emperor said, his deep voice filling the hall without effort, "how you find palace life."
Beatrice set the glass down carefully. "It is an honor to be invited here, Your Majesty."
Henry made a quiet sound beside his father that wasn't quite a scoff and wasn't quite a laugh. It was something in between.
Isabella tilted her head, still watching Beatrice with that particular expression — attentive, patient, like someone waiting for a specific flower to bloom.
"You look tired, my dear. Has something troubled you today?"
The question was too precise to be casual.
"The palace is vast, Your Majesty," Beatrice said carefully. "I believe I am simply a little overwhelmed."
Isabella's smile deepened by a fraction. "Overwhelmed by history, perhaps?"
Beatrice felt the words land squarely in the center of her chest.
Henry frowned, glancing between his mother and Beatrice. "Mother, what are you —"
Isabella raised one gloved hand — barely, just enough — and he stopped.
And then —
Beatrice heard it.
Or felt it. She wasn't sure which.
A sound from somewhere impossibly far below — not loud enough to be a sound at all, really. More like the suggestion of one. A deep, low reverberation moving through the stone beneath the marble beneath her feet, as though something enormous had shifted in the dark.
A rumble.
A breath.
A heartbeat that was not hers.
Her spoon froze halfway to her mouth.
Her vision blurred — one sharp, involuntary second — and in that second she saw something that wasn't the dining hall at all. Darkness. Heavy chains. Claws dragging across stone. Two points of molten green light snapping open, wide and desperate and searching.
...Beatrice.
Her hand jerked. The spoon struck the edge of her porcelain bowl with a sharp, ringing clatter that cut through the quiet of the entire table.
Every head turned.
Henry leaned back slightly. "What now? Are you ill?"
"I'm fine," Beatrice said immediately. Her voice came out steady. She was grateful for that, at least.
"I apologize."
But she wasn't fine.
Something below was pulling at her — the same pull she had been feeling since she walked through the palace gates that morning, but stronger now. Sharper. As though whatever had been gently tugging at the edges of her awareness had grown impatient and was now pulling with both hands.
The Emperor's eyes narrowed just slightly. "Is the palace's aura too much for you, Lady Laporte?"
Aura.
The word moved through her strangely. She looked at him, uncertain what he meant, uncertain whether asking would make things better or worse.
Isabella dabbed the corner of her mouth with a silk napkin. "Some individuals are more sensitive to the palace's presence," she said lightly. "Old spirits tend to cling to old walls."
The words settled over the table like a fine layer of frost.
Old spirits.
Beatrice's chest constricted.
Not a ghost. Not some ancient and faded echo of a life long gone. Whatever was beneath this palace was not old in the way forgotten things are old. It was alive. It was aware. And it knew her name.
She stared at her plate and said nothing.
Across the table, she felt Henry's gaze on her — different from before. Less annoyed, more uncertain. He was looking at her the way people look at something they've dismissed for a long time and are only now reconsidering.
"Are you truly fine?" he asked, and the reluctance in his voice suggested the question cost him something to ask.
"I am," Beatrice said. "Thank you, Your Highness."
A lie. Everyone at the table knew it. No one said so.
Isabella's eyes caught the candlelight as she watched Beatrice — that same quality as before, like a predator who has seen exactly what it was looking for and is in no hurry because it already knows how the evening ends.
"Are you?" she asked again. Just two words. Soft as a whisper. Sharp as a needle.
"I believe the heat may be affecting me slightly," Beatrice said.
Henry's brow pulled together. "It's the middle of winter."
She had no answer for that.
The deep pulse moved through the floor again — barely perceptible, just a single, low tremor like the slow exhale of something massive breathing in its sleep far below. Beatrice felt it move up through the soles of her feet and into her spine.
She flinched.
It was small. Barely visible.
But Isabella saw it.
Beatrice watched the Empress's smile shift — not wider, not warmer, just subtly different. The smile of someone who has just had a long-held suspicion confirmed.
"How curious," Isabella murmured, almost to herself. "You are rather sensitive today."
Before Beatrice could find a response, the Emperor set down his utensils with a quiet, decisive clack against the table.
"Lady Laporte appears unwell." He didn't look up from his plate. "Henry — see her to her chamber."
The hall went completely still.
Henry's head turned sharply toward his father. Even Arthur glanced up from his meal. It was not a thing the Emperor did — not this, asking Henry personally to escort her anywhere. Henry didn't do such things. He didn't care about such things. Everyone in this room knew it.
But the Emperor simply picked up his fork and returned to his meal as though nothing unusual had been said at all.
The silence that followed was thick and heavy.
"...Yes, Father," Henry said at last, the words coming out reluctantly but without argument. He pushed back his chair and stood, jaw tight, expression unreadable.
"You should rest, dear." Isabella's voice was gentle, solicitous, everything a concerned hostess should sound like. Her smile had not moved. "You've had quite a full morning."
The words were simple. Ordinary. And yet Beatrice was absolutely certain they meant something else — something layered beneath the surface that she could feel the shape of but couldn't quite see.
"Thank you for your kindness, Your Majesties." Beatrice rose from her chair, bowed — low, proper, composed — and followed Henry toward the doors.
The moment they swung shut behind her, she exhaled.
The breath came out long and shaking and silent, released through her nose so Henry wouldn't hear it. The tension in her shoulders loosened by the smallest degree. The air in the corridor felt thinner, easier, less watched.
She was out.
For now.
Henry walked a half-step ahead of her, his hands clasped behind his back, his silence that particular brand of pointed quiet that meant he had things to say and was deciding whether any of them were worth the effort.
Beatrice kept her gaze forward and her breathing even.
But her mind was still back in that dining hall. Still turning over every word, every glance, every fraction of a smile.
Old spirits cling to old walls.
You seem sensitive today.
How curious.
And beneath it all — beneath the marble and the silk and the candlelight and the careful words — that heartbeat. Still faint. Still present. Still reaching.
Reaching for her.