He remembers her before the silk and the silence.

Back when her laughter rang louder than the horses in the stables, when she would steal apples and press them into his hands like it was a grand secret, when she was just her—not the princess. He had been a stable boy then, smelling of hay and sun, and she had been wild, barefoot, and fearless. They had belonged to the same small, unimportant world.

Then her mother took her away.

Years passed like a slow ache he learned not to name. He traded mucked stalls for steel armor, soft hands for calloused ones, a boy’s easy grin for a knight’s quiet restraint. He told himself it didn’t matter. That she didn’t matter.

Until the day she returned.

She stepped from the carriage like something out of a story—poised, untouchable, every inch the princess she had been shaped into. The court bowed. The kingdom held its breath.

And he—standing rigid in polished armor—could only see the ghost of a girl with dirt on her cheeks and mischief in her smile.

She didn’t recognize him.

Of course she didn’t.

But he recognized everything.

And it ruined him.