The fire had dwindled to a sullen glow, painting the chamber in shifting shades of blood and bruise.
"You will remain here until you have recovered your strength. A week, perhaps more." His voice was detached, clinical, as he rose from the chair.
"But—"
"No." The single word was a door slamming shut. "This is not a negotiation. It is for your own good." He stood, turning his back to her, a silhouette against the dying fire.
"Am I so useless," she whispered, the words sharpening as they left her throat, "that my illness is merely a convenient excuse to lock me away again? Is that all I am—a thing to be isolated when I become inconvenient?"
"Isolate you?" A low, mirthless laugh escaped him, a dry sound that held no warmth. He did not turn. "You have a talent for drama, little one. This is convalescence, not imprisonment."
Tears of pure frustration tracked hot lines down her cheeks, but her gaze burned into his back. "I hate you," she breathed, the emotion gathering into a storm. "I hate you, Henry. You cold bastard. You could have refused me from the start. You could have spat in the face of the treaty. But instead... you took me. You brought me here only to carve holes in my spirit and leave me to bleed. You are not a king. You are a monster."
The silence that followed was absolute, a vacuum that pulled the air from her lungs.
Then, he turned.
Slowly. Deliberately.
His eyes found hers in the gloom. Without a word, he began to walk toward the bed, each step measured, firm, and echoing with a sudden, terrifying intent. The distance between them closed not with anger, but with a quiet, predatory certainty that silenced her raging breath mid-sob.
" So send me away," she pleaded, her voice fraying at the edges. A fresh tear escaped, tracing the contour of her cheek before falling onto the linen. She pressed a trembling hand to her throbbing temple. "Use my illness. Claim I am too frail, too unstable for court. Petition the Pope for an annulment. It would be... easier for you. For us both."
He did not stop. He moved with the inevitability of a shadow lengthening across the floor. One hand came to rest on the carved headboard, the other planted firmly on the mattress beside her hip, caging her in as he leaned down. The space between them vanished, filled only with the heat of her fever and the cold intensity of his presence.
"No one," he whispered, the words a soft, final chill against her skin, "is getting a divorce."
Her breath caught. All protest, all rage, withered under the sheer, immovable weight of his gaze. Her amber eyes, wide and shimmering with tears, were trapped in the burning certainty of his. There was no cruelty in his look, no anger—only a fact as unchangeable as stone. She was his. The cage was permanent.
"And when the time I have allotted comes," he continued, his voice a cold, deliberate whisper in the intimate space between them, "I will claim you. I will plant my seed in you and secure the line."
A violent flinch rocked her, and she scrambled backward against the headboard, seeking an inch of escape that did not exist.
His hand rose, not to restrain, but to trace. His fingers moved slowly, brushing a damp strand of copper hair from her pale, fevered cheek. He tucked it behind her ear with an unsettling tenderness. His touch did not stop there. His thumb swept downward, grazing the line of her jaw before coming to rest against her lower lip. It brushed the chapped surface once, slowly, a mockery of a caress—a preview of a possession that was both political and profoundly personal.
She froze, every breath trapped in her chest, her eyes wide with a storm of defiance and dawning, helpless understanding.
"I cannot fathom why," he murmured, his lips grazing the shell of her ear, his breath a warm, unwelcome intrusion. "But something in me… wants you. Every stubborn, furious, trembling bit of you."
His voice was a low, confiding whisper that seeped into her very bones.
"I want to hear my name in your mouth," he continued, the words deliberate and dark. "Not as a title. Not as a curse. But mourning. Crying out. Begging for me to stop."
A violent tremor shook her. Her hands fisted in the bedsheets beneath her, the fabric twisting tightly in her grasp as if it were the only anchor left in a rising, treacherous sea.
Then, as suddenly as he had descended upon her, he straightened. He stepped back, the intense proximity broken. With detached, deliberate motions, he adjusted the rumpled linen of his shirt, smoothing it over his chest as if brushing away the very tension that had just crackled between them.
"Rest now," he said, his voice once more flat and composed, the intimate whisper gone as if it had never been. "I will see you when the sun rises."
He turned and walked to the door without a backward glance. The latch clicked shut with a sound of terrible finality.
Gisela remained utterly still, the echo of his words and the ghost of his touch humming against her skin. Slowly, a shuddering breath escaped her. She clutched the blanket to her chest, pulling it tight as if its feeble weight could replace the warmth his closeness had stolen, or defend against the promise his cold voice had just sealed. The room, vast and silent, seemed to hold its breath with her. The only certainty was the coming dawn, and the man who would return with it.
The profound silence he left behind seemed to hum in the air. Gisela waited, motionless, until the last faint echo of his tread had been absorbed by the sleeping stones of the corridor. Then, with a slowness that spoke of both profound weariness and newfound resolve, she pushed back the coverlets and rose.
The polished marble was a glacial shock beneath her feet, a brutal anchor to reality. She moved, a pale wraith in her linen shift, drawn not by design but by a desolate compulsion to the open French window. The night air rushed in to meet her—not gentle, but a sweeping, sovereign cold that claimed the chamber. It carried the scent of frost and distant earth, the clean, indifferent breath of the world beyond her walls.
She stepped onto the balcony, the stone balustrade like ice under her palms. The wind, a restless sovereign in its own right, immediately lifted the heavy cascade of her unbound hair, twisting it into living strands of fire against the darkness. Below, the inner courtyard lay in a geometry of moonlight and torch-glow, a still life of sleeping power.
Her gaze, drawn by a fate she felt in her bones, found him.
There, in the vaulted shadow of the opposite colonnade, stood Henry. It had been little more than a quarter-hour since he had loomed over her bed, yet he was transformed. The tension that had gripped him in her chamber was gone, replaced by an ease that struck her heart like a mallet. A woman was with him, her form slight against the ancient stone. His body, broad and familiar, curved protectively—possessively—around hers. His head was bent, his face buried in the curve of her neck, or perhaps seeking her lips; the angle and shadow conspired to keep the woman's face a mystery, but not the plain, brown hair that spilled over his supporting arm.
A single, searing tear breached Gisela's lashes. It did not fall in a frantic rush, but descended with a slow, regal gravity, tracing a path down her cheek as if etching a decree. She made no sound. She did not tremble. She stood, her grip on the rail steady, a queen surveying a treachery that unfolded in her own domain. The wind dried the tear's path almost instantly, leaving only a faint, cold track as a testament.
She watched as they parted. She saw Henry's glance sweep the empty courtyard—a habitual, cautious gesture that never once lifted toward her darkened balcony. She watched the woman, that anonymous silhouette with the common brown hair, slip from his grasp and melt into the deeper gloom of an archway, gone as if she were a figment of the night itself.
Only then did Gisela release the balustrade. She turned, the wind curling around her one last time as if in cold farewell, and re-entered the silence of her chamber. The cold was no longer in the stone or the air; it was a settled, crystalline fact within her, more absolute and enduring than any fever or fleeting rage. The promise of the dawn now held a different kind of light—one that would illuminate not a path to love, but to a reckoning.