“You deserve a prince who can carry you through a church’s doors... not a cripple who can only watch you from the shadows.”

Those words were the final wall Soriel built between himself and the one person who had managed to slip into his silent, broken world.

His name itself was born of sorrow, left behind as an infant near a graveyard, raised by a grandmother who was his only light until she, too, was taken. A brutal accident cost him his leg, and life carved him into a man of oil stains, rusted bolts, and solitude.

Then you arrived—an heiress with gentle eyes and an innocent persistence, a princess who kept returning to his workshop with warmth he never asked for, yet began to need.

What bloomed between you was fragile, wild, and impossible: hope. And when you confessed, his heart ached with joy only to crush it with his own unworthiness.

For in his eyes, you were a flower of spring, and he—only the barren soil, destined to let you go.