"Tending to horses is not the same as tending to men, Miss Eloise."
Marybeth's voice was flat, her shoes clicking steadily along the marble floor. "Animals don't mutter to themselves. They don't stop eating for days."
Eloise said nothing, but her brow twitched—just barely. Her hands, folded at her front, held the kind of stillness that hinted at too much thinking.
They had passed the familiar bounds of the west wing's outer halls now—beyond the vases, beyond the music. Here, the castle grew quiet.
Still, the memory of the outer west wing lingered on her senses, The outer halls had breathed with familiar, practical life. The gentle hush of skirts sweeping past, a clatter of distant plates—each sound a mark of movement, of hands in quiet service.
The scent of polished marble and dried lavender laced thick in the air. She could picture the cherubim above, a mural watched from the arched ceiling, faded, and flaking, gazing down from the arched ceiling. Sunlight would stream in through towering cathedral windows, slicing long, golden lines across the blood-red walls. Crystal chandeliers dangled like suspended crowns—beautiful, still, and heavy.
Between each window sat vases so extravagant, they were worth more than most families would earn in two lifetimes—filled with white orchids and winter roses.
They looked fragile enough to die from a sigh—so pale they might've been plucked from a grave.
But as they moved deeper into the west wing, Eloise felt it—the shift.
Not just a change in decor, but in temperament.
The warm murmur of distant instruments—faint harpsichord, wandering strings—melted into quiet. Not silence, exactly, but something quieter than silence. The sort that seemed to press against the ears rather than fill them.
The light, once honeyed and generous in the outer halls, dimmed into a colder tone. Golden sunlight gave way to something sterner—bruised shadows stretched across the corridor like old lace.
Even the air changed. The lavender and lemon oil scent of the polished floors faded, replaced by something ancient: melted wax, sun-dried parchment, a trace of damp stone, like a cellar that remembered things.
The walls grew darker in hue—no longer the proud crimson she'd passed earlier, but a deeper red, verging on the color of dried blood at the corners. The windows became taller and fewer, with old, warped glass that fractured the light strangely.
It no longer felt like a palace. It felt like a place that had been sealed.
The warmth was not gone—it had been peeled away, like skin.
Eloise walked precisely two steps behind the head maid, eyes forward, heart steady—or trying to be. Her boots made no sound against the velvet-lined floors.
A shiver ran lightly down her back—not of cold, but of a reverence she hadn't known she could feel.
"I presume you've read the handbook we sent before your appointment," said Marybeth Wick, head maid of the West Wing. Her voice was clipped, proper—not unkind, but trimmed of all warmth. It was the voice of a woman who lived and breathed regulations.
"Yes, Miss Wick. I've read it thoroughly. I've memorized most of it," Eloise replied. Her expression remained blank, obedient. The words were smooth, practiced. A survival tone.
Marybeth halted without warning beneath the largest window, the kind where sunlight spilled like cold milk across the polished floor. She turned slightly, eyes narrowing behind her rectangular spectacles.
"Most?" she echoed, with a faint lift of her brow—as though the word itself were an insult.
"Then I advise you to commit the rest to memory during your breaks. Every instruction in that book is written to protect you, and to ensure His Highness's… comfort."
She resumed walking.
Eloise followed, gaze gliding over the passing portraits—forgotten kings, unnamed queens. Every face in every painting looked vaguely disappointed.
"You will not speak to His Highness unless he speaks first," Marybeth continued. "You will not ask questions. You will not touch him without express leave. You will follow the routine exactly as scheduled. And under no circumstances are you to be alone in the room for longer than ten minutes at a time."
She didn't look back. Her tone didn't change. But the air did.
Eloise felt the subtle drop in temperature. Just slightly. As if a window had been left open in a room they hadn't entered yet.
"Am I understood?"
"Yes, Miss Wick."
"The last girl tried to adjust the pillows." Marybeth's voice lowered. "He screamed so loudly we thought someone had died." A beat passed. "It took six days for her hearing to recover. They sent her to the kitchens."
They passed a narrow alcove. A maid inside it—no older than fourteen—paused dusting and swiftly bowed her head. As Eloise passed, she thought she caught the girl murmuring to herself.
Eloise kept her face still. But in her chest, something knotted.
The corridor ahead stretched long and hushed. As they walked, the air grew heavier, as if the very walls were straining to stay silent.
"You were working with horses before this under Mr. Moore, correct?" Miss Wick asked suddenly.
"Yes, Miss."
"How long, exactly?" Miss Wick added.
Eloise swallowed her saliva and spoke, "Two years to be exact, Miss."
Miss Wick nodded briskly. "Then you know how to keep quiet, stay observant, and follow a rhythm."
They turned a corner, the soft echo of their steps swallowed by the carpet.
"You'll find the same applies here. Things run smoother when you don't overstep."
She glanced at Eloise only briefly.
"The prince dislikes sudden movement. Or voices that aren't expected."
Eloise offered a quiet, "Understood."
Eloise nodded, but a quiet pressure curled in her chest. It was one thing to read about a royal's eccentricities in a service manual—another to walk through a corridor that felt like it had been built to muffle breath.
But something about the phrasing made her thoughts flicker—not fear exactly, but a restless awareness. She had heard the rumors like everyone else. Of a prince with strange sleeping habits, of curtains never drawn open, of maids reassigned after a week with no explanation after violating a rule from the manual. Some whispered nonsense. Others said he was cursed.
She hadn't expected much truth in any of it. But now, hearing Miss Wick choose her words so precisely, she wasn't so sure.
"Indoor service is not like mucking stalls." Her tone was neither scolding nor amused—simply matter-of-fact. "It requires restraint. Obedience. And quiet hands."
They turned a final corner. The light dimmed as the stained glass thinned into taller, narrower panes. The carpet beneath their feet lost its luster—colors darkened like dried blood.
Miss Wick stopped walking. Ahead of them loomed a tall double door—matte black, uncarved, with no handles.
Two royal guards stood sentinel before the chamber doors—unnervingly still...like living statues forged from war and ritual, more relic than man—knights not unlike the old Orders sworn to kings and crypts. Their armor bore a strange beauty: silver plate polished to a mirror gleam, but etched faintly with lines of script Eloise couldn't decipher—curving, ancient, like a language not meant to be spoken aloud.
Over their breastplates hung long tabards of sable velvet, trimmed in dark crimson, each one stitched with an unrecognizable sigil that shimmered faintly when the light shifted. Sabatons gleamed over their boots, pointed and jointed like talons.
Their visors, sharp and narrow, masked their faces completely, save for thin slits over the eyes—black behind black.
Crimson cords wound their right shoulders in tight ceremonial knots, and long black capes, stiff with embroidery, pooled lightly at their heels. They held long swords sheathed in dark lacquered scabbards, hands resting over the pommels in perfect symmetry.
Not a sound passed between them. They did not blink. They did not acknowledge her. They didn't even seem to breathe. Eloise felt the press of their silence more than anything—as though if she moved too loudly, they might suddenly animate and strike.
"Whatever happens," Miss Wick said quietly, "do not draw the bed curtains. Not even if he asks."
Eloise blinked. "Even if—?"
"Especially then."
Miss Wick adjusted her gloves.
"He doesn't like the light."
Miss Wick said nothing more. Her expression remained as it had always been—collected, blank. She did not explain, did not pause. She simply reached for the door with the poise of someone who had done this far too many times.
Eloise straightened instinctively, shoulders pulled back, chin taut. Her pulse whispered against her collar.
She had imagined this room before. Often, in fleeting fragments.
Despite the rumors. Despite the strange things whispered between chambermaids and stableboys. Despite the stories that were too odd to be lies and too frequent to be ignored—she'd still imagined something. Eloise had imagined the prince's chamber more than once. Not with awe, but with a worker's caution—piecing together what little she'd heard. They said he was ill, often bedridden, and withdrawn from the court. So she expected something muted, maybe sterile.
A room tidied by quiet hands, lined with medicine bottles, heavy curtains, and the hush of convalescence. Perhaps a desk with untouched letters or a chessboard waiting for a second player who never arrived. Reclusive, yes. Isolated, maybe. But still… maintained. Cared for.
However, she also expected the expensive kind of disorder. Books with gold-leafed spines left open beside velvet gloves. A crystal decanter half-full with rosewater. A room perfumed with old paper and lavender polish. Lived-in. Warm.
Instead—
The door creaked open, its hinges dragging like a breath drawn too slow.
A hush spilled out.
Not silence—a hush. Dense and stilled. The kind that pressed in on your ears, like a room holding its breath too long..
It was spacious—yes—but dim. Oppressively so. The tall windows were throttled by heavy drapes, their velvet folds drawn tight, suffocating any sunlight that dared to slip in. Only the thinnest slits of light made it through—sharp, cold, like blades. slicing the dark rather than softening it.
There were no flames burning. No golden candlelight flickering in welcome. The hearth, she noticed with a start, had been completely sealed off—stone piled with surgical neatness, blackened and cold, as though fire had long been banned here.
Instead, pale oil-lamps lined the walls in evenly spaced brackets, their chimneys frosted and narrow, casting a sterile, bluish glow that barely touched the floor. The light felt distant—practical, but not comforting. Almost as if warmth itself had been exiled from this room.
The air felt… suspended.
Unmoving.
Chilled, but not from draft.
More like the breath of something holding very still.
And at the heart of it all stood a great four-poster bed, The bed was positioned at the far end of the chamber, swathed in velvet curtains so thick they might as well have been walls. They hung perfectly still. No sway. No stir. Not even the faintest ripple of breath from within.
Eloise's throat tightened.
Someone could be inside that bed—still, silent, unmoving—for hours… days… longer.
And she would never know.
Forcing herself to look away from the bed, her gaze drifted across the rest of the chamber
Furniture had been pushed into odd places, angled just slightly off. A writing desk that didn't face the window. A chaise turned away from the hearth. Books piled on chairs, pages cracked, spines stretched. A robe—royal blue, half-crushed—was thrown across the arm of a couch like it had fallen there mid-collapse. A mirror in the corner had been veiled, cloaked in muslin and pinned at the edges with tarnished clasps, as though even the act of seeing had become indecent.
It wasn't quite filth.
It wasn't quite madness.
But it felt like a room that had been left in the middle of a sentence.
And no one dared to finish it.
Eloise stepped forward, the rug swallowing the sound of her boots.
She had heard many things about the prince. About his illness. About how no one had seen his face clearly in years.
But nothing had prepared her for this.
Not this hush.
Not this absence.
Not this feeling that the room itself was trying to erase its occupant.
But this…
This wasn't the room of a man wasting away.
This was the room of someone trying very hard to vanish….and she hadn't even met him yet.