Henry's POV:
Henry had always believed he knew himself well.He was a prince. A swordsman. Disciplined, focused, and coldly self-possessed in a way that most people in the palace found either admirable or quietly intimidating. He had never struggled to understand his own mind.
Until he met Beatrice Laporte.
She had a particular way of walking into a room — quiet steps, eyes slightly distant, her attention drifting somewhere just beyond the immediate world around her — and every single time she did it, Henry felt something twist painfully beneath his ribs that he would rather have taken a sword wound than admit to out loud.
Jealousy.
Hot, irrational, humiliating jealousy.
His fingers curled tightly inside his gloves.
It happened every time she came to the palace. Every single visit without exception, his chest would tighten the moment she appeared, and the tightening would turn to frustration, and the frustration would turn to something uglier before he could get a handle on it. He despised himself for it. But despising it had never once made it stop.
Because Beatrice never looked at him.
Not truly. Not the way he wanted her to.
She would glance in his direction when required — when protocol demanded it, when someone addressed them both, when politeness made it unavoidable. But her gaze never stayed. It always slipped away again, pulled toward something else, something invisible, something that seemed to exist just beyond the edge of the world Henry occupied.
She would stand right beside him and be somewhere else entirely.
Every time.
He was invisible to her. And the worst part — the part that kept him awake more nights than he would ever admit — was that she didn't even seem to realize it.
So he did what he had always done when his emotions backed him into a corner he didn't know how to escape.
He lashed out.
Cold words. Sharp tone. Distance constructed so deliberately it looked like indifference.
This morning in the garden had been no different.
The moment she appeared through the gate, Henry had felt his heart do that infuriating, traitorous thing — and so he'd done what he always did. He'd pushed her away before she could drift further.
"Now that you've seen me. Leave."
The words were out before he could stop them.
And they landed exactly the way he knew they would — Beatrice's eyes dropped, her expression smoothed over into that practiced calm she wore like armor, and she answered him quietly and without argument. As though she had long since stopped expecting anything different.
As though his cruelty had simply become part of the landscape of her life and she had adjusted accordingly.
Henry stared at the teacup in his hands and hated himself thoroughly.
Why do you never argue back? he thought. Why do you never look at me like I've said something worth reacting to?
He would have preferred anger.
Tears.
Anything that suggested his presence meant something to her — even something unpleasant. But Beatrice simply absorbed his words and carried on, and that quiet resilience of hers was somehow more painful than any sharp response could have been.
He kept watching her from the corner of his eye while she sat across from him in the gazebo — watching the way her gaze kept drifting toward the fountain, toward the palace itself, toward whatever invisible thing called to her from somewhere inside these walls. Her expression was distant. Glazed. Like someone listening to a conversation no one else in the room could hear.
He tried speaking to her.
She didn't respond.
"Did you hear anything I just said?"
"My apologies. I did not."
Honest. Simple. Not even defensive about it.
Something snapped inside him — small and stupid and childish, and he knew it even as it happened.
"Figures. You're always daydreaming."
He watched her lashes drop just slightly at the words.
He regretted it immediately. He always did. That was the pattern he couldn't seem to break — say something cruel, watch her quietly take it, feel the guilt settle over him like a stone, repeat. He was running a cycle he had no idea how to exit.
The truth of it — the real truth, the one he kept buried under layers of cold behavior and sharp remarks — was far simpler and far more humiliating.
Henry had liked Beatrice for years.
Not since the engagement. Not since their families had arranged everything around them and handed them to each other like items on a ledger. Before that. Long before that.
He had first seen her in the city market on a grey autumn morning, doing something he had never seen a noble girl do in his life — crouching down in the street, unconcerned about her dress, feeding scraps to a cluster of stray dogs who had gathered around her feet. She hadn't known he was there. She hadn't been performing kindness for anyone's benefit. She had simply been doing it because the dogs were hungry and she had food in her bag.
He had kept walking. He had told himself it meant nothing.
He had thought about it for weeks afterward.
There was a softness to her that the palace had never offered him — something genuine and unperformed. She didn't flatter him. She didn't angle for his favor the way every noble's daughter he had ever spoken to had done, smile carefully arranged, words chosen for effect. She simply existed around him with a quiet honesty that he found, against his will and better judgment, completely disarming.
He had wanted her to see him the way he saw her.
She never had.
She sat beside him at formal dinners and was somewhere else. She walked with him through corridors and her eyes were on the middle distance. She smiled at him when required and it was always polite and always empty and always felt like something assembled for appearances rather than felt.
She looked through him. She looked past him. She looked everywhere except at him.
And whatever she was looking for — whatever she was being pulled toward inside these palace walls — that invisible, nameless, impossible thing had held more of her attention on any given day than Henry had managed to earn in years of trying.
He was losing a competition he had never even been formally entered into. Fighting an opponent he couldn't see, couldn't challenge, couldn't face directly.
It infuriated him in a way that battle never had. War he understood. Swords he understood. This — this helpless, formless jealousy directed at something he couldn't even identify — was an entirely different kind of torment.
Then dinner had happened.
The chandeliers had barely trembled — a vibration so faint that Henry hadn't been entirely sure he'd felt it at all — and Beatrice had gone completely pale. Her spoon had struck the side of her bowl with a sharp clatter, and her eyes had gone to that faraway place again, but worse this time. Deeper. Like she was being pulled under.
Henry had moved before he made a conscious decision to.
"Beatrice —"
He had been halfway out of his chair before he caught himself, his hand hovering near her arm, not quite touching.
She was trembling. Subtly. Her face had drained of color and her eyes weren't fully present, focused on something far below the floor of the dining hall, something no one else at the table could sense.
Henry's chest locked up.
Not with irritation. Not with the cold frustration he usually reached for.
With fear.
And underneath the fear, twisting around it like ivy around iron — jealousy. Because even now, even in this moment, she wasn't here with him. She was somewhere else, reaching for something else, feeling something for something else that she had never once felt in his direction.
His hands curled into fists under the table.
His father's voice cut through: "Henry — see her to her chamber."
Henry had stiffened. The order had surprised him — it surprised everyone at the table, himself included.
His father did not make that kind of personal request. It wasn't how things were done. Henry didn't escort people. Henry didn't perform acts of care and concern in front of the court.
But he had looked at Beatrice — still pale, still trembling, still trying desperately to pretend she was fine while very obviously being anything but — and he had stood up.
"Yes, Father."
The words had cost him nothing.
That was the part that bothered him.
Now they walked in silence through the corridor, Henry a step ahead, his hands clasped behind his back, his jaw set.
He could hear her footsteps behind him — steadier now, composed, her breathing evening out as the distance from the dining hall grew. She was pulling herself back together. She always did. That quiet resilience again, that careful reconstruction of composure — he had watched her do it so many times that he recognized every stage of it.
He didn't speak.
He didn't know what to say that wouldn't come out wrong. Every time he opened his mouth around her, something sharp came out — not because he wanted it to, but because sharp was the only language he had ever been taught for the emotions he didn't know what to do with. The palace had given him swords and strategy and the ability to withstand pain without expression. It had never given him anything useful for this.
I was frightened for you was not something he knew how to say.
I've been watching you since the moment you arrived this morning was even further out of reach.
I am so tired of being invisible to you — that one he couldn't even fully admit to himself in the privacy of his own thoughts without feeling the ground shift uncomfortably beneath him.
So he said nothing.
He walked ahead of her through the golden corridor and said nothing and felt everything and hated every second of it.
He didn't want to be the cold one. He didn't want to be the prince who snapped and dismissed and kept her at arm's length with cruel words he didn't mean.
He had never wanted to be that.
But he didn't know how to be anything else with her. Every time he tried — every time he let his guard down by even a fraction — she wasn't looking. She was somewhere else. And the gap between them felt so wide and so established and so entirely of his own making that he had no idea how to begin crossing it.
So instead he kept building the walls higher.
And then hating himself for it afterward.
And then doing it again.
He was running in a very small, very painful circle, and the worst part was that he could see it clearly and still couldn't seem to stop.
He stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye — just for a second.
She was looking straight ahead, her expression calm and unreadable, giving nothing away.
Henry faced forward again.
Notice me, he thought, in the silence where words should have been. Just once. Look at me like I'm actually here.
She didn't.