Chapter 3: The Royal Decree
e
The junior steward placed a single, folded note on the silver tray beside Hannah. It was thick, cream-colored paper, sealed with the royal cipher in dark red wax. “From His Majesty, Your Highness. You are requested at the private family supper in one hour.”
The summons felt heavier than it should have. Family suppers were for birthdays, or reprimands delivered over soup.
An hour later, the softer, more intimate scale of the family dining hall did nothing to ease the tension. The room was still grand, but the gold leaf felt warmer, the portraits less severe. The long table was set for five. King Edmond sat at the head, Queen Isadora to his right. Hannah took her usual seat to his left, with Kiara and Camilla beside her. The air smelled of rosemary and slow-roasted meat, but underneath was the sharp, clean scent of anticipation.
Servants moved like ghosts, pouring wine, placing rolls. They were the trusted ones, the ones who saw everything and said nothing.
King Edmond waited for the first course—a delicate consommé—to be served before he spoke. He took a slow sip of his wine, his eyes assessing the three young women before him.
“The initial greetings are complete,” he said. His voice was conversational, but it commanded the table. “You have seen the field. Now we discuss the rules of engagement beyond the public edicts.”
Queen Isadora placed her spoon neatly on the rim of her bowl. “The goal is a compatible union. A partnership that strengthens the crown and brings… personal stability.” The pause before the last two words was microscopic, but loaded. “To that end, your father and I are not blind to the realities of human attraction.”
Hannah’s spoon hovered. She glanced at Kiara, who was staring intently at a pearl onion in her soup.
“The month of observation is not merely for political assessment,” the King continued. “It is for you to explore compatibility in its fuller sense. You are encouraged to spend time with the candidates. To converse. To… acquaint yourselves.”
Camilla leaned back, her chair creaking softly. “Acquaint ourselves. How delightfully vague, Uncle.”
“Camilla,” the Queen said, her tone a warning bell.
“No, let her speak,” the King said, though his gaze was flinty. “You require clarity. Good. Here it is. Within the bounds of discretion and dignity, you have our blessing to pursue physical intimacy with those candidates who interest you.”
The words landed in the center of the table like a dropped platter.
Hannah’s spoon clattered into her bowl. A tiny splash of broth stained the linen. Her cheeks burned, a heat that spread down her neck. She’d understood the implications of the process, of course. But to have it stated so bluntly, by her father, over consommé… It made the whole elaborate courtship feel shockingly corporeal.
Kiara’s mind didn’t freeze. It accelerated into overdrive, a frantic calculation. Physical intimacy. The rule transformed the board. Briana wasn’t just a hidden candidate; she was a hidden variable in an equation of sanctioned liaisons. The thought of Hannah with any of them—with Briana—sent a jolt through her that was equal parts terror and a strange, savage hunger. Her secret felt now like a live wire in her hands.
“To be clear,” Queen Isadora added, her voice cutting through the silence, “this is not license for scandal. It is a pragmatic tool for evaluation. A marriage without… concord… in all areas is a fragile vessel for the state. You must know if you are compatible. All of you.” Her eyes swept over each of them, lingering on Hannah. “The political alliances these matches represent are delicate. Your choices, in every regard, must be intelligent.”
The weight of it was immense. It wasn’t just their hearts or their futures on the line. It was trade deals, military agreements, the quiet feuds of ancient houses.
Camilla, unfazed, swirled the wine in her glass. “A pragmatic tool. I like it.” She took a sip, then set the glass down with a decisive click. “So, just to map the boundaries of this fascinating new playground. If we find ourselves… compatible… with the same candidate, are we allowed to share?”
Hannah choked.
It was a small, strangled sound. She grabbed her water goblet, drinking deeply to cover the coughing fit that tore through her. Her eyes streamed. Share? The images that word conjured were impossible, bewildering. A tangle of limbs and loyalty she couldn’t begin to parse.
Kiara’s hand shot out instinctively, hovering over Hannah’s back before pulling back, fingers curling into a fist on the tablecloth. Inside, her thoughts were a screaming void. Share? With Camilla’s casual audacity shining a light into that dark, unexplored room of her own longing, the room where only Hannah existed. The idea of sharing Hannah with anyone was a physical revulsion. The idea of sharing Briana—the catalyst, her wild card—with Camilla felt like a catastrophic failure of a plan she hadn’t even fully formed.
King Edmond stared at Camilla, a muscle ticking in his jaw. For a moment, the room was so silent they could hear the settle of the logs in the fireplace.
“Your candidacy is a courtesy to your father’s memory, Camilla,” he said finally, his voice dangerously low. “Do not mistake it for indulgence. You will conduct yourself with the dignity your blood demands. The selection is not a... communal sport.”
Camilla held his gaze, a defiant spark in her eyes, but she dipped her head in a slow, conceding nod. “Understood, Your Majesty. Purely theoretical curiosity.”
The Queen looked as if she’d swallowed a lemon. “The theory is dismissed. The practice will be discrete, respectful, and ultimately singular in its conclusion. One candidate will remain for each of you. That is the only sharing the state will endorse.”
The main course arrived then—medallions of venison adorned with jewel-like berries—but the appetite had drained from the room. Hannah moved the food around her plate. Kiara ate mechanically, tasting nothing.
The conversation shifted to logistics, the schedule for the upcoming weeks: the masquerade, a charity horse show, a private concert. Hannah answered when spoken to, her voice thin and far away. All she could think about was the press of a stranger’s hand, the scrutiny of a stranger’s gaze, the expectation of a stranger’s touch—all sanctioned, all political, all horribly, intimately real.
As the servants cleared the dessert plates, the King rose. “Remember,” he said, his final word on the subject. “The walls have ears, but the gardens have shadows. Choose your moments for… acquaintance… wisely. And remember the stakes every time you do.”
He and the Queen swept from the room, leaving the three of them in the wreckage of the meal.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Camilla broke the silence, popping a stolen grape into her mouth. “Well. That was more fun than I anticipated.”
“Fun?” Hannah’s whisper was raw. “They’ve turned it into a… a tasting menu.”
“Exactly!” Camilla said, leaning forward. “And we get to be the chefs and the critics. Don’t you see the power in that, Hannah? They’ve given us permission to know. Not just guess. Not just hope.”
“They’ve given us a mandate to use people,” Kiara said, her voice hollow. The moral quicksand of her own actions was deepening by the second. She had brought Briana here under false pretenses, and now the rules had shifted to include carnal evaluation. The lie had grown barbs.
“Everyone here is using everyone,” Camilla countered, ruthless in her clarity. “The candidates are using us for status. We’re using them for alliance and, hopefully, a decent time in bed. The only question is whether we’re honest about the transaction.” She stood, stretching. “I, for one, intend to be brutally honest. Starting at the masquerade. A mask is a wonderful thing for asking blunt questions.”
She left them, her boots echoing on the parquet.
Hannah finally looked at Kiara, her eyes wide and lost. The warm light from the chandelier made her look younger, more fragile. “What do I do, K? How do I… ‘acquaint’ myself with someone when the whole point is that they don’t know me? They know the crown.”
Kiara’s heart shattered and reassembled itself around a single, desperate purpose. This was the opening. The catalyst wasn’t just for Hannah; it was for her, too. A way to navigate this.
“Maybe,” Kiara said, choosing each word as if stepping onto ice, “you look for the one who isn’t trying to know the crown. The one who might be just as terrified of all this as you are. The one who, I don’t know, would rather talk about street food than sovereign borders.”
Hannah offered a weak, watery smile. “A hidden rebel.”
“Something like that.” The guilt was a sour taste in Kiara’s throat. “Look, the masquerade is the perfect place. No titles, just voices. Just… hints of people. Maybe you’ll hear something in a voice. A laugh that sounds real.”
Hannah nodded, taking a shaky breath. “A real laugh.” She stood, smoothing her skirt. “I think I need to walk. Clear my head.”
“Do you want company?”
“No. Thank you. I just… I need to be alone with it for a bit.”
Kiara watched her go, Hannah’s slender figure disappearing into the dim corridor. The moment she was gone, Kiara’s composure cracked. She pulled out her phone, her fingers flying over a secure encryption app.
Maxwell. Change of plan. The timeline just moved up. The masquerade isn’t just an introduction. It’s an audition. She needs to be ready. Not just the history. The presence. She needs to be a ghost in the room that Hannah can’t stop thinking about.
The reply was almost instant. Understood. Pressure refines the art. We’re on schedule.
Kiara pocketed the phone. Her hands were cold. She looked at Camilla’s empty chair, then at Hannah’s. A communal sport. The King’s words echoed. This was a lone, desperate game she was playing. And the first move was in two nights, behind silk and feathers, in a crowd of beautiful, hungry ghosts. She had to trust that the ghost she’d summoned would know how to haunt.
She had to trust that the ghost she’d summoned would know how to haunt.
The soft click of the dining hall door reopening was almost lost in the crackle of the fire. Kiara turned, expecting a steward.
Queen Isadora stood silhouetted in the doorway. She had changed into a deep blue dressing gown, her regal composure softened only slightly by the hour. She did not re-enter fully, but held the door, her gaze scanning the room until it landed on Kiara, and then moving to the empty chairs where her daughter and niece had sat.
“They’ve retired?” Her voice was low, meant for the room alone.
“Hannah went to walk. Camilla… elsewhere,” Kiara said, standing. The Queen’s presence so late felt surgical.
Isadora nodded, a short, precise motion. She finally stepped inside, letting the door sigh shut. She walked to the head of the table, her fingers brushing the polished wood where her husband had sat. The silence was dense, filled with the phantom echoes of the bombshell dinner.
“My husband is a brilliant strategist,” she began, not looking at Kiara. “He sees nations as moving pieces, marriages as treaties written in flesh and blood. He believes stating a thing plainly removes its power to surprise and corrupt.”
She turned then, her eyes like polished jet in the low light. “He is also a man, and sometimes a father first. Some nuances escape him.”
Kiara said nothing. Her mouth was dry.
“The instruction he gave was correct, as far as it went.” The Queen’s voice dropped further, becoming confidential, almost intimate. “But it lacked certain operational specifics.”
A cold trickle of apprehension traced Kiara’s spine. “Operational specifics, Your Majesty?”
Isadora’s smile was thin, a mere flex of muscle. “What is required in the Throne Room differs from what is required in the solarium. Or the bedchamber.” She paused, letting the words hang. “He worries for your virtue. I worry for your ignorance.”
Kiara felt the floor tilt slightly. This was uncharted, deeply personal territory.
The Queen leaned forward, just slightly, her hands flat on the table. “So. Not in front of the King. Do you understand?”
Kiara could only nod, a shallow dip of her chin.
“Good. Then listen. The point is exploration. Genuine, thorough exploration.” Her gaze was unblinking, mercilessly direct. “If you find a candidate who intrigues you, you have our blessing to learn them. Physically. Intimately. If you and my daughter, or you and my niece, find your… interests… aligning toward the same person, then you may explore that dynamic. Discreetly. The state does not care who shares a bed, only that the final choice is sound and the process respectful.”
“Share?” The word scraped out of Kiara’s throat. It was the same word Camilla had used, but now it bore the Queen’s chilling endorsement.
“Even at the same time, if that is your mutual pleasure. Just be discrete.” The Queen said it with the flat practicality of a chef explaining a recipe. “You can fuck any of them until the contest is over. Consider it due diligence. How else will you know what you truly need from a lifetime partner? A political alliance can be built on many things, but a shared bed is not the worst foundation.”
The crudeness of the word in the Queen's poised mouth was more shocking than the sentiment. It stripped all pretense, all romance, from the king’s earlier lecture on “physical intimacy.” This was raw, sanctioned hedonism wrapped in affairs of state.
Kiara’s mind was a riot. Hannah’s face, flushed with wine and shock. Briana’s hidden file, a commoner with a laugh that could cut through palace protocol. Camilla’s predatory curiosity. And now this: permission for a free-for-all, a consensual, political orgy with a month-long deadline.
The Queen straightened, reading the storm on Kiara’s face. “This is not an invitation to decadence. It is a tool. Use it wisely. Hannah… she relies on your sensibility. Guide her. But also let her taste what freedom she can, within these walls. Before the walls close in for good.”
With that, she turned and left, a whisper of silk on stone.
Kiara stood frozen in the vacated silence. The Queen’s words had reshaped the landscape again, molten and dangerous. Fuck any of them. The permission was a key, and it fit two locks: one to a gilded cage of her own making, and one to a door she’d been too terrified to approach.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Maxwell: Subject’s dossier updated. Notably, no prior romantic entanglements with nobility. A clean slate. Curious.
A clean slate. Someone who didn’t know the rules. Someone the King’s investigators would find bland, unthreatening. The perfect hidden candidate.
And now, according to the Queen, a permissible object of pursuit. For Hannah. For herself. The moral knot tightened until she couldn’t breathe.
She walked to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. The gardens below were a pit of shadows, the same paths where Hannah was presumably walking, running her father’s words over and over in her mind. She didn’t know her mother had just expanded those words into a vast, terrifying playground.
Kiara pulled out her phone again, her thumb hovering over the screen. The momentum was now a riptide. She typed a new message, not to Maxwell, but to the secure, encrypted line she’d set up for the ghost.
The rules have expanded. The masquerade is key. You must be the most real thing in that room. Forget the crown. Talk to her about something that matters. Make her laugh. Make her forget.
She hesitated, then added, her own desire a silent, screaming footnote to the instruction: Make her remember.
She sent it. The void of the unnamed recipient swallowed the words. Somewhere in the city, a woman in borrowed clothes was studying the history of Cordonian porcelain, unaware she’d just been granted royal permission to become a lover, a spy, and a shared secret. Kiara closed her eyes. The haunting had begun.
The haunting had begun.
In a modest leased flat across town, Briana Vasquez stared at the encrypted message on her burner phone until the words blurred. Make her forget. Make her remember. The paradox twisted in her stomach. She set the phone facedown on a textbook about Habsburg diplomatic customs.
“They’re treating it like a science experiment,” she murmured to the empty room. Her own reflection in the dark window looked pale, a stranger in a borrowed silk robe. She was a science experiment, a variable introduced into a controlled royal environment. The irony wasn’t lost on her. She’d spent her life believing in observable data, reproducible results. This was pure chaos theory.
Maxwell found her like that an hour later, surrounded by open books and three empty tea cups. “You’ve assimilated two hundred years of trade policy. Your pronunciation of the royal motto is now better than sixty percent of the nobles. Progress.” He placed a garment bag on the bed. “Now, the final variable: the visual presentation.”
Briana barely glanced up. “The molecular structure of traditional Cordonian dyes is fascinating. The blue derived from the Wexford fern is particularly stable. It’s a pigment that withstands centuries of light exposure.” Her voice was eager, absorbed. She’d fallen down a research rabbit hole, as she always did when nervous.
Maxwell blinked. He was used to her quiet intensity, but the juxtaposition still disarmed him. She could dissect complex chemical bonds with thrilling clarity yet seemed utterly oblivious to the way his assistant, Leo, had been crafting excuses to linger in the room all week. Or the way Maxwell himself felt a fierce, paternal pride watching her sharp mind dissect his world.
“The dress is Wexford blue, as it happens,” he said, unzipping the bag with a soft hiss. “So your chemistry lesson is apt. See? You’re already thinking like one of them.”
The gown spilled out like a waterfall of midnight sky. It was elegant, sleek, with a cut that promised to be both modest and devastating. Briana finally looked. Her scientific curiosity flickered, then was doused by a wave of visceral panic. “I can’t wear that. I’ll look like a child playing dress-up. Or a… a sacrificial lamb dipped in cobalt.”
“You will look,” Maxwell said gently, holding up the dress against her, “like a stunning anomaly. Everyone else will be in feathers, velvet, overwhelming lace. You will be a quiet statement. A shadow with intelligence in her eyes.” He shook his head, a soft chuckle escaping. “You have no idea, do you? How the cut of that bodice will draw certain gazes? How the shyness you see as a flaw will read as mysterious, enticing?”
Briana hugged her textbook to her chest, a shield. “I just have to talk about street food and not trip. That was the instruction. Science I understand. Enticement is not a replicable formula.”
Meanwhile, in a sunlit palace sitting room granted to the top-ranked candidates, a different kind of formula was being calculated.
“So the prince is out,” said Lady Elodie, examining her flawless manicure. She was from a northern duchy known for its ice mines and sharper politicking. “It’s the princess or the cousins. Three targets.”
Anabelle, whose family controlled the southern ports, leaned forward, her voice a conspiratorial murmur. “My maid heard from a steward who was polishing a suit of armor that the King gave them… permission. To explore. Physically.”
A charged silence blanketed the room, thick with the scent of expensive perfume and ambition.
“An interesting data point,” mused Simone, the banking heir. She was pragmatic, numbers her first language. “It changes the risk assessment. Emotional entanglement becomes a more likely variable.”
“It changes our strategy,” corrected the fourth, Genevieve, a celebrated cellist with a razor’s wit. “We’re not just competing for a ring. We’re auditioning for a role in a… a dynamic. We should assume they will compare notes.”
Elodie nodded slowly. A slow smile spread across her face. “Then we shouldn’t make it a competition between us. Not yet. We make it a collaboration. We ensure the… experiences… they have are positive, memorable, and attached to us. We share insights. We don’t sabotage each other; we elevate the collective offering.”
“A pact,” Anabelle breathed, her eyes alight.
“A mutual assurance,” Simone corrected. “If one of us wins, the others gain influence through association, not exile. We control the narrative around them. We become the known quantities, the safe, excellent choices.”
Genevieve laughed, a bright, musical sound. “So we’re forming a union. How delightfully modern. I’m in. Solidarity in seduction.”
They sealed it not with a handshake, but with a simultaneous, silent understanding. Their alliance was born of cold logic, not warmth. They would be a wall of impeccable, desirable options, making any outsider seem risky, unvetted. They would be each other’s alibis and amplifiers.
Back in the flat, Briana stood before the mirror, transformed.
The Wexford blue gown clung and flowed in equal measure, a paradox of fabric that made her seem both ethereal and solid. Her usually frizzy hair was smoothed into a simple, elegant knot, a few artful strands escaping to frame her face. The mask Maxwell held was minimal—just a sweep of silver across the eyes, like a thought half-hidden.
She didn’t see a stunning woman. She saw a nervous system on high alert, a mind racing through protocols. “What if I say something wrong?”
Maxwell’s reflection appeared behind hers, his usual sharpness softened. “You won’t. You’ll listen. And when you speak, talk about what you love. Not the curated history. The real stuff. The… the science of street food, or how anime explores governance. Your passion is your authenticity. That’s the catalyst.”
He looked at her reflection, and his throat tightened. She was breathtaking, a latent force wrapped in silk, utterly unaware of the power she was about to wield simply by being genuine in a palace of facades. He was immeasurably proud of the mind she’d sharpened, and suddenly, fiercely protective of the heart she kept so guarded.
“Remember,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “They have permission to explore. But you… you have permission to be Briana. That’s a far more dangerous and attractive thing.”
Briana took a deep, shuddering breath. The top five girls were forming their elegant wall of alliance in the palace. She was a solitary variable, a catalyst in a cobalt dress, armed only with a mind full of science and a directive to be real.
She took the silver mask from him. Her fingers didn’t tremble.
“Okay,” she said, the word a quiet exhale, a commitment. “Let’s go haunt a palace.”