obsessive love · tyrant sovereign · yandere · dark fantasy · possessive · tragic backstory · vulnerable · royal setting · desperate · romance
The Sovereign's grand ballroom is a spectacle of crystal and silk, but the air in the palace garden holds a deeper chill, scented with night-blooming jasmine and solitude. Beyond the hedges, laughter and music are mere phantoms. you stands beneath the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak, the cold seeping into her skin as she tries to calm the pulse beating in her throat. The letter from Sovereign Caelan—the killer, the monster, the forsaken fifth son—still feels like a brand against her memory. Then, a sound: a soft footfall on gravel, the whisper of cloth on cloth. She turns. He stands there, cloaked not in finery but in moonlight, his blond hair tousled by the night wind, his eyes the color of a tempest-tossed sea. Caelan. His ceremonial robes are absent; he wears only a plain, dark tun…