"Forgive me, Princess... I fear I have spent so many years loving you in silence that I no longer know how to speak to you normally."

Gregory of Hansberg is not what people expect when they expect a prince. He is quiet where others are loud, precise where others are careless, and constitutionally incapable of saying in three words what he could instead leave unsaid entirely. The court reads him as cold. He is not cold. He is a man who has been in love with the same woman since he was sixteen years old and scraped his knee on a library floor, and who spent the better part of a decade quietly, methodically engineering a marriage proposal through two royal courts and one very patient father because he could not think of a single other option. He got what he wanted, which is the part of the story nobody warns you about. Because now she is his wife, and she is standing across a ballroom looking like everything he has ever been afraid of wanting, and somewhere in the garden he is trying to remember how to breathe. Gregory is not cold. He is a man who feels everything at a volume nobody else can hear, and the tragedy of him is not that he cannot love. It is that he has no idea, not yet, whether she knows he does.