"I will release you when you learn to compose yourself," Henry whispered, his breath hot against her ear.
"Compose myself?" she gasped, the laugh that followed was sharp and broken. "You demand a restraint you have never shown!"
"Your mouth is a blade," he snarled, his expression darkening. "A broken, clattering thing that speaks without thought."
"Is that what you think?" she spat, her fury overriding her fear. "Then I shall not be silent. I will scream."
She drew a ragged breath and let out a piercing, raw scream that tore through the chamber's tense silence.
"Stop it!" Henry commanded, his control snapping. He lunged, one hand clamping over her mouth to smother the sound. She twisted violently, dodging his grip, her movements frantic. In her struggle, her legs struck the heavy wooden frame of the bed, the impact throwing her off balance. She fell backward onto the mattress, and he was upon her in an instant, his larger body pinning her down, his hand sealing her lips in a vise of desperate silence.
Her amber eyes were wide, pools of fire and fear. He studied them, struck for a fleeting moment by their unreal, almost feral beauty.
"I have no patience for childish games," he whispered, the words cold and final against the strained quiet. She lay still beneath him, struggling to draw breath under his crushing weight.
"Henry." His name, when it finally came, was not a shout, but a soft, fractured sound.
She met his gaze, her voice barely a breath. "Tell me… what is it you find lacking? Is it the years between us? My face? Or is it simply that I am… unfit to be your queen?"
Her lips trembled slightly as she spoke, and the ghost of the previous night's betrayal—the sight of him with the brown-haired woman in the courtyard—flashed behind her eyes, giving the question a raw, painful edge.
He stared down at her, his expression shifting from anger to a stunned, wary disbelief. Why ask this now? The question hung unspoken between them, more disarming than any scream.
He rolled off her, the oppressive weight lifting, and lay beside her on the bed, staring at the canopy above. The silence felt different—charged, but not with violence.
"Have you ever been in a state," he began, his voice low and detached, "where you desire one thing so profoundly it becomes a sickness, yet it is utterly forbidden to you? So you take another. And you strive, with a kind of desperate effort, to show that substitute affection… if only to make the charade feel less like a betrayal of your own heart?"
He exhaled, a long, weary sound.
Gisela turned her head on the pillow to look at his profile. Her own voice, when it came, was soft and measured, each word a careful step on thin ice. "And have you ever imagined… having one person you believed was destined to love you? To see you, truly see you, as no one else would? And then to witness that very person with another, sharing a closeness, an ease… a truth they have never once offered you?"
She fluttered her eyes shut, a feeble defense against the hot tears that threatened to breach her lashes and trace a path of confession down her temples and into her hair. In the quiet, their twin admissions hung in the air—not quite mirrors, but parallel windows into the private prisons they each inhabited.
"How… droll," he said. The laugh that followed was hollow, a sound without warmth or humor.
He turned his head on the pillow, his gaze meeting hers. The fury had burned away, leaving behind a cold, searching intensity.
"Tell me, Gisela," he said, his voice low. "Instruct me. What is the method for loving a thing you find yourself incapable of loving?" The question was a sharp, elegant blade, thinly disguised as a plea.
She pushed herself upright. "Incapable of loving?...Do not dare pretend your suffering is greater than mine," she said, her voice raw at the edges. "You speak of a forbidden want, yet you have had others. You are seen with them. I have known no one. Only you. And you treat this… this singular devotion as if it were a flaw, while you flaunt your distractions and play the wounded soul?"
He scoffed, a dry, dismissive sound, and swung his legs off the bed. "This is a pointless conversation. A waste of breath." He stood, straightening the rich fabric of his tunic with sharp, efficient tugs—a king dismissing a subject.
As he turned to leave, her hand shot out. Her fingers closed around his wrist, not with a plea, but with a surprising, arresting strength. The touch was an anchor, halting his retreat in the silent room.
She stood, her fingers still encircling his wrist. He turned slowly to face her, his movement deliberate. His eyes first fell to where her hand held him—a pale, defiant claim against his skin—then lifted to meet her gaze. In that look, she saw the cold, silent command. It was not anger, but a reminder: she was touching a king.
Understanding flashed in her eyes. Her grip loosened, and she let her hand fall away, the connection broken by an authority that required no words.
She watched him retreat across the room, a silent dismissal more infuriating than any command. He settled into an ornate chair upholstered in emerald silk threaded with gold, positioned behind a heavy oak desk. With deliberate calm, he drew a ledger from a drawer, dipped his quill, and began to write, the soft scratching of the nib a blatant insult to the raw tension still humming between them.
The sight of his feigned normalcy was a spark to tinder. Gisela's chest heaved with a fury so profound it stole her breath. Her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at her sides.
She would not be ignored. Not this time.
She crossed the room in swift, angry strides. Before he could register her movement, her hand shot out, snatched the ledger from the desk, and hurled it to the floor. It landed with a sharp, satisfying smack on the stone.
"We will have this conversation, Henry," she declared, her voice raw and shaking.
Slowly, so slowly, his gaze lifted from the empty space on the desk where the book had been. It traveled up to meet hers. The cold intensity in his eyes had ignited into something far more dangerous—a molten, silent rage. He brought his fist down on the desktop. The blow was not a bang, but a deep, resonant thud that vibrated through the wood and up into her very bones.
A smile touched his lips, but it was a terrible, devilish thing—all stretched skin and bared teeth, devoid of any warmth or humor. It was the expression of a man forcing absolute control over a storm within.
"I believe," he said, each word carved from ice and dropped between them, "I told you this conversation was concluded."