"You will not be seeing Hilda."
The voice cut through the air, sharp and absolute—a familiar blade of control. She turned to find him standing in the doorway, watching her with detached interest.
"So this is the surprise, Henry? Depriving me of the one person who shows me kindness?" A disbelieving laugh, brittle and hollow, escaped her. "How inventive."
"Leave us," Henry commanded the maids, his gaze never leaving Gisela. They vanished as silently as they had come, sealing her into the room with him. "This is only the beginning. What comes next… you will carry with you forever."
She found her voice had deserted her. The sheer scope of what he might do unfolded in her mind—a dark, terrifying blank.
"Why?" The word was a frayed whisper. "What have I done to deserve such punishment?"
"All will be revealed in time," he said, his tone chillingly casual. "My advice? Follow every instruction without complaint. Unless, of course, you wish to deepen the consequences."
He left her standing there, the threat lingering like a change in pressure before a storm.
---
The maids returned, a silent, efficient swarm. They bathed her, dressed her, and tended her wounds with impersonal hands. Gisela moved through it like a doll, her thoughts a numb, circling dread.
Minutes later, she stood before a gilded mirror. A maid pinned up her vibrant orange hair with gold clips, each tug a small, sharp punctuation. In the reflection, another face appeared—Aurora, bowing low, her eyes carefully averted.
"My Queen."
"Speak."
"The King requests your presence in the dining hall."
"Tell him I will attend shortly."
Her voice was flat, lifeless—the voice of someone already elsewhere.
---
Gisela paused at the towering doors of the dining hall. Inside, the scene was a portrait of calculated power. Henry sat at the far end of the impossibly long table, his mother, Queen Caroline, positioned at his left. Their conversation was a low, intimate murmur. Guards stood like statues along the paneled walls.
Her plan was simple: slip in, take the seat farthest from them, and become a ghost at the feast.
She had nearly reached the distant chair when a voice sliced through the quiet, clean and cold as a scalpel.
"Wait."
Gisela froze. Slowly, she lifted her gaze. Queen Caroline was looking directly at her, a faint, unreadable smile on her lips. Henry, beside her, slowly turned his head. His expression was not one of surprise, but of mild expectation, as if a rehearsed scene was now beginning. In his eyes, she saw the next move in his game, and the terrifying truth that his mother was not merely a spectator, but a willing player.
"Are you planning to sit there?" Queen Caroline's voice was a polished bell of disdain. "Come. Sit beside the King. Your husband."
Every step toward the head of the table felt like a walk to the gallows. Gisela lowered herself into the ornate chair beside Henry, the wood cold and unyielding through the thin silk of her gown.
"A queen's place is at her king's side," Caroline continued, her tone slicing through the clink of cutlery. "How else is she to secure her position… or provide an heir?" The final word was tinged with a disgust so profound it seemed to chill the air between them.
Gisela's gaze fixed on the intricate pattern of the tablecloth, her cheeks burning.
Caroline leaned forward slightly, her eyes like chips of flint. "Tell me, child. How often does your husband share your bed?"
The question hung in the silence, brutal and invasive. The guards might as well have vanished; in that moment, there were only the three of them, and the humiliating intimacy of the demand.
"I… I…" Gisela's voice died in her throat. She couldn't form the lie, and the truth was unspeakable. Her head bowed further, a fragile vase under the weight of their combined scrutiny, her silence a louder confession than any answer could have been.
"Speak clearly and stop your sniveling," Queen Caroline commanded, her voice a whip of pure contempt. "I am beginning to profoundly regret this union. You comport yourself like a scullery maid, not a queen."
Gisela's fingers twisted in the fabric of her dress, her knuckles white. "We… we share a bed twice a week," she whispered, the admission tearing from her.
"Twice a week?" Caroline's voice rose, sharp with theatrical shock. "Now I see the root of the failure. You. When I was your age, I ensured my husband's attentions were claimed daily. Not until his health finally broke did I relent." She leaned forward, her gaze pitiless. "Your foolishness is not just a disappointment. It is a dereliction of duty."
Tears, hot and shaming, began a silent descent down Gisela's motionless face. She did not wipe them away. Henry, beside her, offered no support, no intervention. He merely observed, his silence a colder betrayal than any word. He had not brought her here to defend her, but to witness her breaking.
"Henry, control your weeping consort," Caroline commanded, her voice a blade of pure irritation. "This sniveling is unbecoming of the very air she breathes."
The only sound was the fragile, hiccuping rhythm of Gisela's sobs, a stark counterpoint to the stifling silence.
Henry let the moment hang, a final test of endurance. When he finally spoke, his voice was not raised, but it carried the quiet, absolute authority of a seal being pressed into wax.
"Mother." The word was a verdict. "You will never again speak to the Queen in such a tone." He paused, letting the permanence of the edict settle. "The prohibition is eternal."
He rose, his movement smooth and inevitable. He did not stride; he processed, each step a measured reclamation of territory. He had presided over the entire spectacle, a sovereign allowing a subordinate to overreach, precisely so he could demonstrate where the ultimate power resided.
He stopped before Gisela's shuddering form. Without a word, he bent and lifted her. It was not an embrace, but an acquisition—the retrieval of a contested asset. He cradled her limp body against the cold embroidery of his chest, where her tears marked the fabric not as a token of grief, but as proof of his claim. Turning, he carried her from the hall, leaving behind a silence thick with the aftershock of a throne's cold, decisive wrath.
Gisela's tears did not fall—they were confiscated. They seeped into the crisp linen of Henry's shirt like a paid toll, each hot, silent droplet a stain of despair pressed against the prison of his ribs. She hid her face, not from shame, but as if she could dissolve into the very fabric of his being and vanish from the humiliation of being witnessed in her ruin. He carried her up the staircase, each step a deliberate, jarring proclamation of his dominion, and set her down upon the cold stone of her chamber floor like a relic returned to its niche.
She stood before him, a masterpiece of devastation. Her skin was a canvas of anguish—flushed, tear-channeled, shining under the grim light. A silver thread of abjection trailed from her nose; she drew it back with a wet, guttural gasp that sounded less like breath and more like a spirit being gutted.
"Henry, please," she wept, the words disintegrating as she stumbled backward and collapsed onto the bed. She coiled inward, a brittle effigy of grief, her entire form quaking with the violence of her disintegration. "Just… leave me."
"Gisela, you will—" he began, but the command died on his tongue. It faltered.
"Please," she begged, the sound so raw it seemed to flay the air between them.
Something black and ravenous coiled in his chest—not compassion, but a furious, consuming resentment that this exquisite unraveling was not his to choreograph. Her agony was too potent, too pure, and it whispered to a primal hunger in him. Irritated by his own response, he closed the distance and sat beside her. His hand rose. It did not strike; it possessed. His fingers speared into the riotous silk of her orange hair, gripping not to cause pain, but to imprint ownership. He guided her head down, pressing her forehead against the unyielding muscle of his thigh—a surrender he dictated, an intimacy he imposed.
Her hair spilled like a cascade of molten copper across his leg, a subdued banner of his conquest. He began to stroke it, his touch slow, deliberate, almost ritualistic. His palm moved from the crown of her skull to the nape of her neck, over and over, a hypnotic cadence meant to pacify not just her sobs, but the strange, unwelcome tremor in his own blood. Her cries vibrated through his bones, a desperate, private symphony. He sat in the silence he had engineered, a sovereign in the cathedral of her desolation, calmed not by her peace, but by the profound, dark sacrament of her total collapse against him. In this moment, she was not merely broken. She was his—utterly, exquisitely, and irrevocably his. And in the depths of her despair, he found a perverse, sacred stillness.
---
"You will remain here until the bell tolls twelve," he declared, his voice permitting no argument as he lifted her for the final ascent.
He placed her inside the chamber's consuming silence. "I will send maids with a meal," he added, already turning away. The door sealed shut, entombing her with nothing but the echo of his words and the weight of her own shallow breath.
Alone, the ghost of Queen Caroline lingered—not as a woman, but as an incarnation of the same calculating cruelty that had animated her father. Was that a queen's sole purpose? A vessel, an heir-incubator, an ornamental captive in a gilded vault? Since her wedding, these walls had been not a home, but a sophisticated tomb.
She ached for freedom—not just from the palace, but from the very concept of royalty, from the blood in her veins, from the history that clung to her like a burial shroud. She imagined herself a white dove severed from the earth, soaring into an empty sky, weightless, untethered, forgotten. Could anyone ever be free from pain? Or was existence merely a procession into deeper, more ingenious cages?
Then she felt it—not a thought, but a cellular certainty. A hardening. A crystallization. The next tide of suffering was not approaching; it was already within her, coiled like a serpent in her marrow, waiting for the clock's hands to marry and unleash it.
---
Dong… Dong… Dong…
The bell did not chime; it knelled, each strike a physical blow that shuddered through the palace's foundations and into the very marrow of those who heard it. It was not a call to prayer, but a command to witness.
A wave of grim anticipation surged through the courtyards. The crowd swelled, their murmurs a low, hungry drone. "It's time," they breathed to one another. "The traitor maid. The disobedient one. An example will be made."
Gisela stood paralyzed on the balcony, the cold stone balustrade biting into her palms. Henry was a fixed shadow beside her, an obelisk of absolute authority. Queen Caroline stood just behind his shoulder, a faint, glacial smile gracing her lips, her eyes alight with cold interest. Guards and blank-faced maids flanked them—a curated audience for a meticulously planned spectacle.
"Your surprise is here, little one," Henry murmured. His fingers traced the arc of her cheekbone, a sinister parody of tenderness, before dropping away.
Below, a sea of upturned faces waited, hushed.
"Silence!" the Royal Crier's voice erupted, carving through the murmur. The crowd solidified into a breathless, watching mass.
Henry stepped forward, his voice flowing over the square, measured and pitiless, each word a stone laid in a foundation of dread.
"People of the realm. Today, you will witness a fundamental lesson. Loyalty is the bedrock of the crown. Disloyalty…" he paused, allowing the word to fester in the frigid air, "…is a contagion. And a contagion demands a public purge."
He turned his head slightly, his profile a cutout against the leaden sky.
"Bring forth the infection."
From a darkened archway below, a figure was dragged into the stark, pitiless light of the courtyard. Two guards held her, their grips brutal on her arms. Her simple dress was rent, her face a map of bruises and grime, yet she held herself with a shattered, trembling defiance.
It was Hilda.
Gisela's breath was ripped from her lungs. The world upended, the murmuring crowd dissolving into a silent, roaring void. The surprise was not a gift. It was an extermination. And she had been given the premier viewing platform.