Her body healed, but her heart grew heavier with each passing day.
The prince's attentiveness had become a gilded cage—every tender gesture a chain, every whispered endearment a lock. She neither resisted nor embraced it, her silence a wall between them.
Then, one afternoon in the palace gardens, she heard it—a voice soft as silk from behind a flowering quince:
"Will His Highness visit today?"
She turned.
And saw herself.
A woman in pale blue robes, her movements delicate, her smile gentle—a near-perfect reflection. Even the slope of her brows, the way she tucked a stray hair behind her ear—
It was like watching a ghost wear her skin.
A footstep crunched on gravel behind her.
"Why are you here?"
The prince's voice had gone cold.
She whirled, her own voice sharp with frost: "Who is she?"
A pause. "A maid. One who... resembles you."
"Resembles me?" A brittle laugh escaped her. "Since when did you take up collecting replicas?"
His jaw tightened. When he spoke, the words were slow, deliberate: "I thought you were dead. That time... it unmade me. I couldn't—
"So you commissioned a living portrait?" Her hands trembled now. "To stand where I once stood, to smile when you needed comfort?"
"I never touched her." His whisper was raw. "Not once."
She inhaled sharply, but her gaze only hardened. "You claim to love me, yet kept a shadow to warm your bed of regrets. Tell me—am I so easily replaced?"
For a heartbeat, he looked as if she'd struck him. Then his fingers closed around her wrist, urgent, almost desperate: "Not a replacement! A... a reminder. That you existed."
The grip hurt. "Let go."
He recoiled as if burned.
"Leave, if you wish. I won't stop you." His voice cracked. "But don't mistake this for anything less than madness."
She walked away without looking back, leaving only these words hanging between them:
"Love that needs a ghost to breathe is no love at all."
———
That night, the prince himself escorted the look-alike from the palace.
But as the gates closed, the woman turned, her parting words slipping like a needle through silk:
"I never wanted to be her. But you should know—I saw how he shattered when you were gone." A pause. "If I were you... I might have stayed."
And just like that—
The thorn took root.
ns216.73.216.20da2
and then Add to home screen.