Lone Prince by Lilian Monroe
Prologue
A queen doesn’t mournthe same way a woman does.
Wife.
Widow.
She doesn’t curl up and soak her pillowcase in tears. She doesn’t stare at the wall and lose long stretches of time, even when her grief is so heavy it becomes hard to think or breathe or move.
No, a queen must be a queen before anything else. She wears black and looks mournful—but not so much that the kingdom worries for her mental state. She dabs her eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief, but she doesn’t wail. Her tears are restrained. Her voice doesn’t tremble when she gives a speech to the kingdom, telling its citizens that the man she meant to grow old with is dead.
A queen’s back remains straight, her shoulders always thrown back. Her hair is perfectly styled. She knows her clothing will be the subject of scrutiny, so it must remain flawless. She accepts condolences with grace, but doesn’t share her own suffering. There’s no one to share it with.
She takes her own broken, malfunctioning body—one that refused to give her an heir—and she accepts that pain with the rest of the agony in her spirit. Gulps it down like a bitter potion, wondering if her failures somehow caused this tragedy to happen. If in some twisted version of reality, she might deserve to walk through life alone.
A queen doesn’t buckle or bend or break.
She takes her suffering and buries it under a thousand miles of ice. As she stares out at the cold, snowy kingdom over which she rules, she sees the next decades of her life laid out at her feet.
She’ll walk through the snow and embrace the numb coldness in her heart. She’ll leave behind the wife she used to be. The mother she never was. The girl who smiled and laughed.
She’ll give her kingdom what it needs.
A monarch.
A leader.
A queen.
