HIS RELUCTANT MATE

Chapter Two:The Housekeeper's Warning

Madam Edra appeared at the end of the corridor like a woman summoned by my own anxiety tall, sharp-faced, silver-streaked hair pulled into a knot severe enough to qualify as a weapon, moving with the brisk certainty of someone who had never once in her life wondered if she was in the right place.

"Seraphina Oris," she said. Not a greeting. A confirmation, the same way the guard had said it, the same way everyone in this palace seemed to say my name like they were checking it against a list rather than addressing a person.

"Yes."

"You're late."

I opened my mouth to explain about the guard, the wrong path, the prince at the top of the steps who had apparently decided I was an east-entrance problem rather than a front-door one and then closed it again. Some battles weren't worth the breath.

"I apologize," I said instead. "I'll know the correct route tomorrow."

Something flickered across Madam Edna's face not quite approval, but something adjacent to it, the recognition of a person who didn't waste words arguing about things that didn't matter. "Good," she said. "Follow me."

She turned and walked, and I followed, my bare feet silent on the cold marble while her sensible shoes clicked out a brisk, even rhythm that I suspected hadn't changed pace in decades.

"I am Madam Edra," she said, without looking back. "Head housekeeper. You will answer to me directly for all matters relating to your work, your conduct, and your presence in this palace. Is that understood?"

"Yes, Madam Edra."

"You will be assigned to the east wing. Your hours begin at five-thirty each morning and your duties will be explained in full tomorrow. Tonight you will be shown your room, given a uniform, and told the rules of this household, which you will follow without exception." She turned a corner sharply enough that I had to lengthen my stride to keep up. "Do you have any questions?"

I had several hundred questions. I selected the one that felt safest.

"How many people work in the palace?"

"Forty-three on staff. Four princes. One king." A pause, brief and deliberate. "You will likely interact with very few of either category, and that is by design. The princes are not to be engaged in personal conversation. You will not initiate contact. You will not linger in rooms they occupy. You exist, within these walls, to perform your function efficiently and invisibly. Do you understand?"

I thought about the boy at the top of the steps winter eyes, crossed arms, the way the air around him had felt charged enough to spark.

"I understand the rule," I said carefully. "I make no promises about every prince understanding it as well."

Madam Edra stopped walking.

She turned to look at me fully for the first time since we'd met a long, assessing look that traveled from my bare feet to the rose petal still stubbornly clinging to my ankle to my face, which I kept as neutral as twenty years of practice allowed.

"Which one did you meet," she said. It wasn't quite a question. More like she already suspected the answer and wanted confirmation.

"I don't know his name," I said. "Dark hair. Cold eyes. Standing at the top of the front steps like he owned the staircase."

Something passed behind Madam Edra's expression swift, complicated, and gone before I could properly read it. "That would be Prince Caden," she said. "The eldest. He does not typically greet new staff."

"He didn't greet me," I said. "He redirected me. Incorrectly, as it turns out the guard sent me the wrong way, not him."

"Prince Caden does not make errors about who belongs where in this palace," Madam Edra said, and there was something underneath the words that I filed away immediately, the way I filed away everything that sounded like more than it said. "If he engaged with you at all, that is unusual."

"Is that a warning?"

"It's an observation." She resumed walking, faster now, like the conversation had used up more of her patience than she intended to admit. "Prince Caden does not engage with staff. He does not engage with much of anyone, beyond what duty requires. If he spoke to you directly on your first night, I would suggest you take care to remain unremarkable. Some attention in this palace is not a kindness."

We reached a narrow staircase leading up into the east wing, and she began to climb without waiting to see if I understood.

I understood enough.

I understood that whatever had happened between me and the prince at the top of the steps that pull, that charge, that compass-needle tug in my chest that I was determined to ignore into nonexistence had apparently been visible enough, or unusual enough, to register on the radar of a woman who had clearly spent years learning to read this palace's currents.

I understood that I needed to be more careful than I had been in the first ten minutes of my arrival.

I understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had survived on instinct her whole life, that being careful and being capable of it were two very different things.

The room they gave me was small narrow bed, narrow wardrobe, one window looking out over a dark courtyard I couldn't yet identify. Madam Edra deposited a folded uniform on the bed with brisk efficiency and recited the household rules in a tone that suggested she had given this exact speech dozens of times before: meal times, work hours, the locations I was and wasn't permitted to access, the strict and apparently inviolable rule about the princes that she had already half-explained in the corridor.

"Any questions," she said again, at the end, in a tone that suggested she hoped the answer was no.

"Just one," I said. "Why does a prince stand at the top of the front steps at night, alone, when he could be doing literally anything else in an entire palace?"

Madam Edra looked at me for a long moment.

"That," she said finally, "is not staff's concern."

She left.

I sat down on the edge of the narrow bed, in the small room that was about to become my entire world, and unpacked my single canvas bag with hands that were steadier than they had any right to be. I set my mother's photograph on the shelf above the bed her squinting against sunlight, laughing at some joke I'd never know, her face open and unguarded in a way I rarely saw it anymore.

This is why you're here,I told myself, the same thing I'd told myself a hundred times on the journey from Lowerfield. Not for princes at the top of staircases. Not for whatever that pull in your chest was supposed to mean. For her. For the loans. For the roof that needs finishing. For surviving.

I believed it completely.

I was asleep within minutes, exhausted in the particular way that came from holding yourself together all day and only realizing the cost of it once you finally let go.

I did not dream about winter eyes.

I told myself that was true the next morning, too, and I almost believed that as well.

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