"He made me laugh," Ava said quietly. "That's all it was."Edward didn't look up. "How lovely for you.""You're being unfair—""I am being nothing." His voice was flat, final, the kind of quiet that was worse than shouting. "You are a debt I collected, not a person whose social calendar concerns me."She flinched. Just slightly. He saw it."Then why does it bother you?" she whispered. "Who I laugh with. Who speaks to me. Why does any of it matter if I'm just a debt?"He stood slowly, and the room got smaller. "Because everything in this palace is mine." His eyes met hers — cold, direct, unbothered. "Including you.""That's not—" her voice cracked. "You can't own a person."He picked up his documents and walked to the door. "Get out of my study, girl. And don't let me see you near Dorian again or you will not be able to walk for days..."🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸She didn't come to the palace by choice.She came as a debt.Her father owed the crown. She was the payment. No explanation, no goodbye — just men in black carriages and a palace so beautiful it made her feel like a sparrow standing inside a cathedral.She expected to be ignored.She was not ignored.---**Edward Quest** is the Crown Prince of the Questian Empire — brilliant, cold, and entirely closed. He has built walls where other men have hearts, and he has very good reasons for every single one of them. He does not do warmth. He does not do softness. He does not notice frightened girls who apologize to statues and feed street children through palace windows.Except that he does.He notices everything.---She is eighteen. Timid, gentle, carrying wounds she has never shown anyone. She does not rage against her situation — she endures it, quietly and stubbornly, the way only someone who has survived worse things can.He is twenty-eight. Possessive, ruthless, incapable of saying what he means — but warm food appears at her door with no note, and his hand finds her back in crowded rooms before his mind catches up to what he is doing.---The court is watching.The villains are moving.The past — hers and his — is walking back through the door.---*This is not a fairytale.**It is something harder, more real, and far more theirs.*🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸