Prologue — "Once, Before the Crown"

The fire had been going for a while now.

Not the grand kind — no roaring flames, no dramatic crackling. Just the quiet, steady kind that keeps a room warm without asking for attention. The kind that makes everything it touches look a little softer than it actually is.

The children had been supposed to be asleep an hour ago. Everyone knew this. Nobody was enforcing it.

They were piled on the rug in the way children pile — arms and legs everywhere, oversized robes swallowing them whole, eyes wide open and refusing to cooperate with the concept of bedtime. Two of them were leaning against Isebella. One had claimed Estella's lap entirely and showed no signs of negotiating.

"Mama," said the one closest to the fire, in the particular tone children use when they already know the answer will be interesting. "What was your life like before all this?"

Isebella looked at the fire for a moment.

Estella looked at Isebella.

Then Estella grinned — the particular grin that had not changed at all in however many years it had been — and said, "Do you want the royal version or the real one?"

"The real one," the children said, immediately, all at once, as they had rehearsed it.

Isebella's mouth curved. Just slightly. "The real one involves your father looking completely lost in an airport for forty minutes."

"We were not lost," said a voice from the doorway. "We were strategically recalibrating."

The children turned.

King Aaron leaned against the doorframe with the ease of someone who had absolutely nowhere more important to be. Silver at his temples now. The kind of calm in his eyes that had always been there, just — settled, somehow. More sure of itself. He was holding a sketchbook the way he always held a sketchbook — as it had just ended up in his hand and he hadn't noticed.

Beside him, King Ishaan was already halfway into the room, because Ishaan had never once waited in a doorway when he could be in the middle of things instead.

"You're telling them that version again," Aaron said.

"Is there another?" Isebella replied.

"There's the one where I come off better."

"That one's fiction."

Ishaan had already dropped onto the rug beside the children, who immediately reorganised themselves around him with the ease of long habit. He looked up at Aaron. Aaron looked at the ceiling briefly, then came and sat down too — because there had never really been an option where he didn't.

The fire shifted. Settled.

Estella looked at the children, who were now watching with the focused intensity of people who understand that something good is about to start.

"Okay," she said. "Real version. From the beginning." She glanced at Isebella. "You start."

Isebella was quiet for a moment. Not the composed kind of quiet she used in council chambers. The other kind. The kind that means something is being turned over carefully before it's handed to someone else.

"There was a time," she said finally, "when we weren't any of this. Not queens. Not even close." A pause. "We were just two girls in a city we loved, trying to have seven days that belonged only to us. And then two boys crashed into those seven days and never quite left."

"They didn't crash," Aaron said mildly. "You screamed."

"There were six men."

"You still screamed."

"Aaron."

"I'm just saying. For the record."

Ishaan was grinning at the ceiling. Estella was pressing her lips together in the way she did when something was funny, and she didn't want to give him the satisfaction.

One of the children looked between all four of them with the expression of someone trying to read a room they don't have the context for yet.

"What happened?" they asked.

The fire crackled. Outside, somewhere in the garden, the wind moved through the cherry blossom trees, and the night smelled like petals and cool air and the particular quiet that only comes very late when everything that needed to happen has already happened.

Isabella looked at her children. At her husband, who was watching her with that same expression he'd had since the day she met him — like she was something worth paying attention to.

She took a breath.

"It started," she said, "with a festival. And a very loud thirteen-year-old. And an alley we never should have been in."

Ishaan pointed at Aaron. "He was very calm about the whole thing, by the way. Unreasonably calm. He and six men looked like they were thinking about lunch."

"I was focused."

"You were showing off."

"I was seventeen."

"Same thing."

The children were delighted. The fire was warm. The night was quiet and long and entirely theirs.

And so it began — not with a herald's announcement or a royal decree, but with four people sitting on a rug, in a palace that had slowly become a home, telling their children the truth about how they got here.

The real version.

Which was, as it turned out, so much better than the royal one.