Henry didn't say a single word the entire walk.
Beatrice didn't mind. Silence between them had never been uncomfortable — not because it was warm, but because it was simply the natural state of things. They had never been people who talked easily with each other. They existed in each other's company the way two strangers might share a waiting room — aware of the other, occasionally glancing over, but fundamentally separate.
She followed him through the corridor and focused on breathing evenly.
In. Out. Steady.
Her hands were still cold. Her heart hadn't fully settled. That deep, resonant pull beneath the palace floor had quieted during dinner — faded back to its usual low hum — but the memory of it was still sitting in her chest like a bruise that hadn't quite finished forming. That vision. Those glowing green eyes snapping open in the dark. The sound of chains.
She pressed her fingers lightly against her sternum as she walked, feeling her own pulse beneath them.
What is down there?
The question had been living in the back of her mind for months — since her eighteenth birthday, since the dreams began, since the very first time she had stepped onto palace grounds and felt that inexplicable tug guiding her toward something she couldn't name. But today it had become impossible to dismiss as imagination or nerves or the ordinary strangeness of being engaged to a prince and spending time in a palace that felt like it had secrets built into its foundations.
Something was down there.
Something alive.
Something that knew her name.
She exhaled slowly through her nose and kept her face composed.
Henry stopped ahead of her at a set of doors near the east wing — a guest chamber, quiet and removed from the main household rooms. He pushed the door open without ceremony and stepped aside.
"Rest," he said. The word came out clipped. Flat. His eyes were on the middle distance rather than on her.
"Thank you, Your Highness," Beatrice said.
She stepped inside.
The room was beautiful in the impersonal way of palace guest chambers — richly furnished, perfectly arranged, smelling faintly of cedar and dried flowers. A large bed with embroidered covers. A writing desk by the window. Heavy curtains drawn half-open to let in the grey winter light.
She heard the door close behind her.
And then, finally, she was alone.
She stood in the center of the room for a long moment without moving, without performing anything for anyone, and let herself simply feel the full weight of everything that had happened since she arrived at the palace that morning.
The voice in the Empress's chamber.
My Beatrice...
The ink blot that had appeared from nowhere.
The page that had turned on its own.
The missing sections of the history book — cut out cleanly, deliberately, by someone with the power and the motive to rewrite the past.
The tremor beneath the dining hall floor that no one else had felt.
Those eyes in her vision. Green and burning and desperate and directed entirely at her.
Beatrice walked to the window and stood there, looking out over the palace grounds. From here she could see the edge of the royal garden — the fountain, the wisteria-draped gazebo, the neat rows of winter-bare hedges. Everything orderly and beautiful and meticulously maintained on the surface.
Her gaze dropped slowly downward.
Below the garden.
Below the marble.
Below all of it.
The pull was still there. Quieter now, like a voice that had been speaking at full volume and had dropped to a murmur — but present. Always present, ever since she had first set foot here. She had spent months telling herself it was her imagination. Anxiety. The strangeness of being engaged to someone who didn't want her, entering a household where she didn't belong.
She couldn't tell herself that anymore.
She pressed her palm flat against the cold window glass.
Who are you?
The question left her before she could decide whether asking it aloud was entirely sensible. Her breath fogged the glass faintly. The garden below was still and quiet.
No answer came.
Of course it didn't.
She turned away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed, her skirts settling around her. Her mind went back, as it always did, to the dream. The cold stone. The pain in her abdomen. The massive, trembling silhouette holding her with a desperation that she felt even now, even awake, like an echo that had never fully faded.
....Don't leave me behind.
She pressed both hands against her face and breathed.
The voice in the Empress's chamber had said had called her his. Not who are you or why are you here. Not a stranger's greeting. The words of someone who had been waiting. Someone who recognized her.
And the truth — the one she had been carefully, deliberately not looking at directly — was that she recognized him too.
Not his face. Not his name. Nothing she could point to or explain or offer as evidence of anything.
But somewhere beneath rational thought, beneath language, in the part of her that dreamed the same dream every night for seven months and woke up reaching for a silhouette she couldn't see —
She knew him.
She had always known him.
She just didn't know how.
A soft knock at the door broke through her thoughts.
She straightened immediately, composing herself with the practiced ease of someone who had long since learned to tuck everything uncomfortable out of sight in the space of a breath.
"Come in."
The door opened.
It was not Mary — Mary was back at the Laporte estate, and the absence of her familiar face made the room feel a little lonelier than it had a moment ago. Instead, a young palace maid stepped inside, carrying a tray with a small pot of tea and a plate of delicate pastries.
"His Highness Prince Henry requested refreshments be sent up for you, Lady Laporte," she said, bowing her head.
Beatrice blinked.
She kept her expression neutral, but something shifted in her chest — small and quiet and uncertain.
Henry had done that?
"Thank you," she said. "Please set it on the desk."
The maid obeyed and slipped back out without another word, the door clicking softly shut behind her.
Beatrice looked at the tray.
The tea was still steaming. Beside the pot sat a small arrangement of pastries — the kind filled with winter spices, the kind that were served warm.
Someone had thought to send them up quickly enough that they hadn't gone cold.
She sat with that for a moment.
Henry, who had told her to leave the garden this morning. Henry, who had barely acknowledged her through the entire meal. Henry, who walked her here in complete silence and handed her a single word — rest — before closing the door.
Henry had still sent up warm tea.
She didn't know what to do with that.
She didn't know what to do with a lot of things today.
She rose, moved to the desk, and poured herself a cup. The warmth of it traveled through the porcelain into her cold fingers, and she held it there a moment before drinking, letting her eyes drift back toward the window.
Toward the grounds.
Toward whatever lay below them.
The pull was still there.
Softer now. Patient. Like something that had already waited a very long time and had learned, through sheer necessity, how to keep waiting.
I know, she thought, without knowing who she was thinking it to. I can feel you.
And then, quieter:
I don't understand any of this. But I can feel you.
Outside, the winter sky had shifted — clouds moving in slowly from the west, pale and heavy with the promise of snow. The garden below was perfectly still. The fountain caught what remained of the grey morning light and threw it back in ripples.
Beatrice drank her tea and watched the sky darken.
And tried very hard not to think about the fact that somewhere beneath all of it — beneath the marble and the stone and three hundred years of carefully maintained silence — something was awake.
Something was waiting.
A quiet knock came again — different this time, more tentative than the maid's brisk efficiency.
Beatrice set down her cup. "Come in."
The door opened slowly.
Henry stood in the doorway.
He wasn't looking at her directly — his gaze was somewhere around the middle of the room, his posture carrying that familiar stiffness he always wore like a second layer of clothing. He had clearly not planned whatever he was about to say, because for a full three seconds he simply stood there and said nothing at all.
"The tea," he said finally. "It arrived."
It was not a question.
"It did," Beatrice said. "Thank you."
A pause.
"I didn't do it for you," he said, which was such an obvious lie that Beatrice almost — almost — smiled.
"Of course," she said.
He looked at her then. Briefly. His jade eyes moved to her face and stayed there for just a moment longer than usual before shifting away again.
"You looked unwell at dinner," he said, his voice coming out gruffer than was probably necessary. "It was a practical consideration. A sick fiancée reflects poorly."
"Naturally," Beatrice agreed, keeping her voice entirely even.
Another silence.
Henry's jaw worked slightly. He looked like a person standing at the edge of something and debating whether to step forward or retreat to safer ground.
He retreated.
"Rest properly," he said. "The carriage will be arranged for you in two hours."
He pulled the door shut.
Beatrice looked at the closed door for a moment.
Then she looked back at the tea.
Then, slowly, she set the cup down on the desk and turned toward the window again — toward the grey winter sky, toward the frozen garden, toward the deep and patient pull moving through the palace floor beneath her feet.
She pressed her hand to her chest.
Her heart was doing something complicated.
Too many things at once.
She closed her eyes.
And in the quiet of the guest chamber, in the stillness between one breath and the next, she heard it again — the faintest whisper, barely a sound at all, rising from somewhere impossibly far below:
…Beatrice.
Her breath caught.
Warm. Broken. Relieved. As though simply knowing she was still in the building was enough to exhale three centuries of held breath.
Her eyes opened slowly.
Her fingers curled against her chest.
"I hear you," she whispered.
To the room. To the walls. To whatever lay sleeping and chained and desperately waiting beneath the cold palace floor.
"I don't know who you are yet."
She paused.
"But I hear you."