Emma
By the time the lessons reached their final days, the information was pouring out of my head.
What had started as maps and names—regions, borders, old alliances that sounded more like folklore than reality—had turned into weeks of structure and pressure: council hierarchies, bloodline protocols, the quiet rules that decided who got listened to and who got swallowed whole.
Lucian never softened it. He just… paced it. Letting me breathe between blows.
Still, every day I left the study with a new weight in my ribs, like my body was learning how to carry a crown by learning how heavy it was.
By then, winter was starting to lose its grip.
The view outside the tall windows had changed—less white, more mud and dark earth bleeding through, the last patches of snow shrinking into stubbor
