The days after the wedding settled into a strange, quiet rhythm.
Rex was gone most mornings, tied up with matters of state Rachel wasn’t yet allowed near, and she spent her time wandering the castle instead, slowly learning its cold stone halls the way she had once known the warm gardens back home.
She found a small courtyard on the east side of the castle where sunlight actually managed to reach the ground, and she took to sitting there in the mornings, humming quietly to herself, letting her voice fill the empty space the way it used to fill her father’s halls.
It was the closest thing to comfort she had found since arriving.
A few of the younger servants had started to linger near the courtyard doors when she sang, pretending to sweep or carry linens, though Rachel noticed they never came too close.
She wondered if they were curious about her, or simply looking for an excuse to hear something soft in a castle that seemed to run on silence and careful footsteps.
It was on one of these mornings that she met Lady Nerissa.
Rachel found her in the small sitting room off the east hall, a slim woman with sharp eyes and a sharper smile, dressed in deep green rather than the greys and blacks most of the household wore.
She rose the moment Rachel entered, dipping into a bow just a little too slow to be fully respectful.
“So you’re the new princess,” the woman said.
“I’m Nerissa. Married to Rex’s younger brother, Alden. I suppose that makes us family now.”
“I suppose it does,” Rachel said carefully, taking the seat across from her.
Nerissa studied her for a long moment, the way everyone in this castle seemed to study her, like she was a puzzle no one had quite solved yet.
“You look nervous,” she said.
“That’s smart, actually. Most girls who come here aren’t nervous enough.”
“Should I be more nervous?” Rachel asked, trying to keep her voice light.
“That depends on how much you already know about my brother-in-law,” Nerissa said, pouring them both tea with unhurried hands.
“Has anyone told you about his temper? Really told you, not just the polite version the servants give?”
Rachel’s stomach tightened.
“I’ve heard he’s strict. That people are careful around him.”
“Careful.” Nerissa laughed softly, without much humor in it.
“That’s one word for it. I’ve seen him break a man’s arm for speaking out of turn at council. I’ve seen grown soldiers refuse to meet his eyes. He isn’t cruel for no reason, I’ll give him that much. But when his temper turns, it turns all the way, and I don’t think there’s a single soul in this castle who could stop it once it starts.”
Rachel wrapped her hands around her teacup, more to steady them than for warmth.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because no one else will,” Nerissa said simply.
“Everyone here is too afraid of him to be honest with his new wife. I’d rather you walk in with your eyes open than get hurt because no one warned you.”
It was, Rachel supposed, meant kindly, though it didn’t feel kind.
It felt instead like a cold hand closing slowly around her chest, tightening with every word.
“Has he ever hurt you?” Rachel asked quietly.
“Me? No.” Nerissa’s eyes flicked toward the window.
“Alden makes sure of that. He’s the gentler brother, thankfully, though even he walks carefully around Rex when his moods turn. We all do.”
“What set him off?” Rachel asked.
“The man whose arm he broke, I mean.”
“Something small,” Nerissa said, waving a hand as if it barely mattered.
“A joke about their mother, I think. That’s the thing about Rex. You never quite know what will light the fuse, only that once it catches, there’s no putting it out until it burns through on its own.”
Rachel thought of the wedding feast, of the lord who had joked about wolves and lambs, of the sharp flash in Rex’s eyes before he’d spoken so quietly and so coldly in her defense.
She hadn’t thought of it as frightening at the time.
Now, sitting across from Nerissa, she wasn’t sure what to think of it at all.
“But I’ve seen what happens to the women who get close to him,” Nerissa went on.
“There was one before you, you know. Lady Sable. Beautiful thing, sharp-tongued, thought she understood him better than anyone.”
“What happened to her?”
“She’s still around, actually,” Nerissa said, almost lightly.
“You’ll meet her eventually. I’d just be careful how much of yourself you hand over to a man like that, is all I’m saying. Some men take, and take, and never think to give anything back.”
Rachel left the sitting room not long after, her tea barely touched, Nerissa’s words following her down the hall like a cold draft she couldn’t quite shake.
She met Lady Sable herself only two days later, in the castle library, of all places.
The woman was exactly as Nerissa had described — beautiful, poised, dark-haired, with a knowing look in her eyes that made Rachel feel, instantly, painfully young.
“So you’re her,” Sable said, setting down the book she’d been reading.
“The songbird bride.”
“And you’re—” Rachel hesitated.
“His,” Sable said simply, without embarrassment.
“Or I was. We’re still… familiar, let’s say. Rex doesn’t believe in pretending things away just because a treaty was signed.”
Rachel didn’t know what to say to that.
Sable studied her the way a cat studies something small and unsure of itself, not unkindly, but not gently either.
“Don’t look so wounded,” Sable said.
“It isn’t personal. It’s just how things are done here. Marriages are for kingdoms. Everything else is for the heart, and the heart doesn’t sign treaties.”
“That’s a very convenient way to think about it,” Rachel said, surprising herself with the edge in her own voice.
Sable’s mouth curved into something almost like approval.
“There’s more spirit in you than I expected. Good. You’ll need it here.” She picked her book back up, as if the conversation had already run its course.
“Ask him yourself, if you don’t believe me. He won’t lie to you. Say what you like about Rex, but he’s never been a liar.”
Rachel’s face went hot, then cold.
She thought of Rex the night before, standing so close by the fire, saying her name for the first time like it meant something.
She had let herself believe, foolishly, that it had.
She found Rex later that evening in his study, going over papers by candlelight.
She stood in the doorway a moment, gathering her courage, before finally speaking.
“I met Lady Sable today,” she said.
Rex didn’t look up right away.
“Did you.”
“She said you’re still… familiar.” Rachel’s voice wavered despite her best efforts.
“Is that true?”
He set down his quill slowly and finally met her eyes, and Rachel realized, with a small sinking feeling, that he wasn’t going to deny it.
“Yes,” he said.
“It’s true.”
The bluntness of it hit harder than any lie could have.
Rachel had braced herself for excuses, for softening, for something.
Instead he simply looked at her, waiting, as if the truth alone should be enough and nothing more needed to be said about it.
“That’s all you have to say?” Rachel asked, her voice climbing despite herself.
“Yes, it’s true, and nothing more?”
“What would you have me say instead?” Rex asked, setting his quill down fully now, his pale eyes steady on hers.
“That I’ll send her away to spare your feelings? I told you from the start what kind of man I am. I never pretended otherwise.”
“You held my hand at the fire,” Rachel said.
“You said my name like it mattered.”
“It did matter,” Rex said, and for a moment something flickered behind his flat tone, gone before she could hold onto it.
“That doesn’t erase everything that came before you.”
“We are married,” Rachel said, her voice shaking now.
“Bound by blood, the priest said. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“It means the war is over,” Rex said, his tone flat, careful, closed off in the way it had been the very first day she met him.
“That was the purpose of it. I never claimed it would mean anything more.”
Rachel felt something inside her crack, quiet and sharp, like thin ice giving way underfoot.
She had spent days telling herself the softness she’d seen in him on their wedding night meant something, that the man behind the cold prince was worth waiting for.
Standing here now, she wasn’t sure of anything at all.
She didn’t wait for him to say more.
She turned and left the study, walking fast through the halls until she reached her room, where she finally let herself cry, quietly at first, then not quietly at all, the sound muffled into her pillow so the whole watchful castle wouldn’t hear.
She didn’t sleep well that night, or the next.
By the third day, a heaviness had settled into her chest and a fever crept in behind it, aching in her bones the way homesickness and heartbreak sometimes do when a body has nowhere left to put them.
Ida found her curled beneath the blankets, pale and shivering, and rushed to fetch the castle healer.
The healer, an older man with gentle hands and a quiet manner, pressed cool cloths to Rachel’s forehead and murmured something about rest and broth and time.
But Rachel knew, somewhere beneath the ache and the fog of fever, that no herb or cloth was going to fix what was actually wrong with her.
She had come to this cold castle hoping for even a small piece of kindness to hold onto, and the one small piece she’d found had turned out to be built on the same shifting ground as everything else here.
Beth came to sit with her when she could, humming softly the way Rachel’s own mother used to, though it wasn’t quite the same and both of them knew it.
“You’ll feel better soon,” Beth said, smoothing Rachel’s damp hair back from her face.
“You’re stronger than this place wants you to think you are.”
“I don’t feel very strong right now,” Rachel murmured.
“Strong doesn’t mean never feeling this,” Beth said gently.
“It just means you get up again after.”
Word must have reached Rex quickly, because he appeared in her doorway before the healer had even finished examining her, his face unusually pale, his usual careful blankness cracked clean through.
“How long has she been like this?” he asked Ida, his voice sharp with something Rachel hadn’t heard from him before.
Worry, maybe, though she was too tired to trust her own judgment of it.
“Since last night, my lord,” Ida said.
“She’s barely eaten.”
Rex came to sit at the edge of the bed once the healer had gone, closer than he’d come since their wedding night.
Rachel kept her eyes closed, too exhausted and too raw to look at him.
“Rachel.” His voice was quieter now, stripped of its usual flatness.
“Look at me.”
She opened her eyes slowly.
His pale gold gaze was fixed on her, and for once there was nothing careful or closed about it at all.
“I was cruel to you,” he said.
“In the study. I told myself honesty was kinder than pretending, but I said it without care for how it would land, and I let you walk away thinking I didn’t feel the weight of what happened between us on our wedding night. I did feel it. I have thought of little else since.”
Rachel stared at him, too tired to trust her own hearing.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I should have told you before you were lying here like this,” he said, and for the first time since she’d met him, his voice caught, just slightly, on something that sounded almost like guilt.
“I am sorry, Rachel. Truly.”
It wasn’t everything.
It didn’t undo Sable, or Nerissa’s warnings, or the cold flatness in his voice back in the study.
But it was something, a crack of real feeling in a man who had spent his whole life learning not to show any, and Rachel found she was too tired, and too strangely relieved, to turn it away.
“Nerissa told me things,” Rachel admitted quietly, her eyes still half closed.
“About your temper. About a man whose arm you broke.”
Rex went very still.
“That’s true too,” he said, after a long moment.
“I won’t pretend it isn’t. But I have never once raised a hand against someone who couldn’t defend themselves, Rachel, and I never will. Whatever else you hear about me in this castle, I need you to believe that much.”
“Why does everyone want me to be afraid of you?” Rachel whispered.
“Because fear is easier to manage than the alternative,” Rex said quietly.
“A pack that fears its leader stays in line. A pack that loves him can be hurt through him just as easily. I was raised to believe fear was the safer choice. I am only now starting to wonder if my father was wrong about that.”
Rachel turned that over slowly in her tired mind, too worn out to argue, but not so worn out that the words didn’t settle somewhere important inside her.
“Stay,” she whispered, before she could think better of it.
“Just until I fall asleep.”
Rex hesitated only a moment before nodding, settling into the chair beside her bed, and Rachel closed her eyes again, letting the quiet, careful sound of his breathing pull her finally into sleep.
Pls guys comment on my novel if you like it.