Everything happened too fast. Not in a chaotic, explosive way - more like water spilling from a broken vase, flooding the floor in slow motion while no one moved to stop it. In reality, it was only a few hours. But to Gabin, it felt like years. It pressed on his chest, heavy and aching, like his bones were turning to glass and his brain to static.

The headlines, the whispers in the halls, the way his mother didn’t meet his eyes - it all blurred together into a surreal fog. But none of it - the crown, the scandal, not even the Queen herself – mattered. Not like Padma did.

It was her. It was always her.

His Padma.

The girl he had loved with a quiet, aching reverence. The girl he had known longer than he knew the shape of his own reflection.

She just had her birthday. A soft celebration in the servant’s quarters, a cake he sneaked in, and laughter he hadn’t heard from her in weeks. Meanwhile, Gabin remained seventeen for a few more months, still trapped in that strange, gilded purgatory between boy and man. He could still feel the way her fingers brushed his wrist when she took the first slice. Still hear her teasing voice whispering, “Don’t pout, mon prince, I saved you the corner with extra frosting.”

But everything beautiful was always short-lived in the palace.

Because love - real, tangled, flawed love - had no place behind those iron gates.

Their story was never meant to happen. Not on paper. Not in history. Not in the blue-blooded narrative of the French monarchy.

But Gabin never had much say in stories.

He was born into a world of silks and spotlights, of endless etiquette and forced smiles. A world where his name was written in gold before he could spell it. Where the weight of an entire country settled on his shoulders before he could stand up straight. He was France’s golden boy. The one who wasn’t supposed to stumble, much less fall in love with the nanny’s daughter.

But Padma was different.

She had always been there. He never had to find her - she was simply part of his world, as natural as breathing.

Her mother, Ms. Arin, had worked in the royal household years before Gabin was born. Loyal, sharp, unshakably kind, she earned the Queen’s trust like few ever had. When Gabin entered the world, red-faced and crying, it was Ms. Arin who cradled him in her arms, who sang lullabies no one remembered teaching her, who stayed up through teething and tantrums and thunderstorms. She became his nanny, yes - but more than that. A second mother. A compass.

And with her came Padma.

Padma, with her wild hair and louder laugh. She moved into the servants’ quarters with her mother, claimed her own little room in the shadows of the palace, and filled it with sunlight. She was already walking and talking and tumbling through life when Gabin was still learning to crawl. And somehow, despite everything - the bloodlines, the protocols, the invisible walls - she was his.

His first memory of real joy was her hand in his. His first secret, told only to her. His first fight, his first apology, his first forbidden longing.

They weren’t just close. They were written into each other’s stories.

In a world where no one touched the prince unless absolutely necessary - where even hugs had to be approved by protocol - Padma was the exception. She never treated him like porcelain. Never bowed, never whispered behind his back. She laughed at him when he was being dramatic, wiped his tears when he wasn’t, and saw him - really saw him - not as a symbol, but as a boy.

He didn’t know how rare that was until much later.

Other kids his age were like strangers in tailored suits. His cousins - distant in every way but blood - treated him like a statue in a museum: interesting, maybe, but off-limits. Polished but cold. He hated them even as a child.

But Padma was different. Bold and bright, sharp-witted and soft-spoken when it mattered. She filled the silence of his life before he ever knew it was silent.

She was special. She always had been. Always would be.

There was no question about that in Gabin’s mind - not even now, not even with the bitter taste of disaster already creeping in beneath his tongue.

That’s how the idea came to him in the first place.

She had turned twenty the day before. Twenty - such a beautiful, glowing, unfairly perfect age. The kind of age where the world still stretched out like a promise. He had wanted to give her something to remember. Something royal, but quiet. Intimate. The kind of memory you could hold onto even after the whole world forgot your name.

So he asked his personal chef to make a small cake - vanilla sponge with strawberry cream, her favorite. He wrapped it in a towel and sneaked through the servant’s hallway like a child escaping bedtime. He brought it to her room, tapping twice the way they always did. She opened the door already smiling.

They ate it on the floor, barefoot and cross-legged, champagne sneaked from the back of the royal cellar bubbling in their glasses. They kissed between bites - soft and sugar-sticky - and laughed too loudly, whispering only when the wind outside reminded them where they were. It was perfect. It was dangerous.

It was the kind of night that never stayed quiet for long.

Padma had leaned her head against his shoulder then, curling a finger around his wrist the way she always did when she wanted to be heard. “Gabin,” she murmured, her voice warm with wine and years of unsaid dreams. “We’ve been together almost three years, and we’ve never even had a proper date. Not outside these damn palace walls.”

He blinked at her, dazed and dizzy with champagne and cherry chapstick and all the stupid ways his heart was hers. “Let’s do something,” she said. “Let’s just… live for one night.”

He didn’t even think.

He didn’t ask what the consequences would be or where they’d go. He didn’t stop to wonder if someone might see them or if someone might care. He just grabbed her hand, lacing their fingers together the way they always had when they were kids hiding from lessons in the garden hedges. She laughed, startled but breathless, as he pulled her through the quiet corridors, out a side gate, past the fences no one ever watched this late.

The night welcomed them like an accomplice.

They ended up at an underground rave in a forgotten basement of Paris - loud music shaking the cracked stone walls, bodies moving like liquid under flickering red lights. He kissed her in the middle of the crowd and again on the street outside, beneath a broken lamppost where the moonlight touched her cheek like it wanted to remember her too.

By the time they crept back through the gates of Versailles, the sun was still hiding, and the world still hadn’t caught up to their joy. They parted ways in the hallway just like always - no sleepovers, no late-night cuddling. That would’ve been too dangerous. If anyone - a guard, a housemaid, her mother - had found them in the same room, the entire country would hear about it before morning.

So Gabin went to sleep still smiling, the sweetness of strawberry cake lingering on his tongue, the sparkle of champagne fizzing in his blood, and Padma’s lips still pressed behind his eyes like a dream he wasn’t ready to wake up from.

But the dream didn’t last.

It couldn’t have been more than two hours later when the double doors to his bedroom exploded open with a bang loud enough to rattle the chandelier. The beautiful white doors with their gold-trimmed edges slammed into the wall so hard, it felt like the palace itself was angry.

He groaned like a wounded animal, barely registering the sound.

His hand came up to rub his face, eyes still sealed shut by sleep and residual alcohol, and he turned over with a pained sigh.

“What?” he muttered hoarsely, voice thick, lips dry. “What the hell?”

He didn’t care who it was. Not at first. Not while his skull felt like it was stuffed with wool and fire. He could still feel her laughter ringing in his head. He wanted to go back to sleep, back to her.

Then he heard her voice.

“Prince Gabin,” came the shrill, pinched tone of a woman who sounded like a dying violin string wrapped in taffeta. “Your mother is on her way back from England. Immediately. She’s furious.“

That voice. That damn voice.

Gabin’s eyes snapped open.

And there she was. Camille.

Blonde balayage frizzing at the roots, red lipstick smudged and clashing with her yellowing teeth, and a cream silk pantsuit that hung off her brittle frame like a poorly tailored flag. His mother’s favorite publicist. The Queen’s personal PR weapon. Forty-something, high-heeled at all hours, and smug enough to curdle milk just by walking into a room.

He hated her.

She was standing near the threshold like she owned the place, squinting as though she, too, had been dragged out of bed before sunrise. A red stiletto clicked impatiently against the marble floor as she crossed her arms, and Gabin couldn’t help but glare at the fact that she was the one to wake him. Not a royal guard. Not even the Queen’s secretary.

Just Camille, the woman who had been itching to call him a failure since he turned thirteen.

Behind her stood three other staff members - his mother’s inner circle. Advisors, maybe. PR aides. He didn’t recognize them all. Two palace guards hovered like statues in the background, giving the whole thing a militarized edge.

It wasn’t just a wake-up call. It was a full-blown containment mission.

“What?” Gabin repeated, this time more sharply, forcing himself upright with shaking arms. The room spun as the alcohol still swirled in his system. He blinked, fighting to see straight.

“What does my mother coming back have to do with me?” he asked, squinting. “Wasn’t she supposed to come back in two days?”

Gabin blinked into the light, his eyelids heavy with sleep and the dull hangover fogging up the edges of his mind. Nothing made sense yet. The world still felt half-dreamed.

He looked around the room, disoriented - at the crowd gathered just past the threshold of his bedroom, their faces a gallery of quiet panic. Everyone looked… disturbed. Pale. Tight-jawed. The kind of expressions people wore after a car crash or a funeral, not after waking a seventeen-year-old boy in the middle of the night.

The bodyguards by the door stood like statues, but there was something dark in their eyes. A simmering, silent accusation. Like they were waiting for him to realize something. Like he’d done something unforgivable and hadn’t even figured it out yet.

A wave of nausea climbed up his throat - part nerves, part champagne, part cheap vodka he should’ve said no to. His stomach twisted. He could still feel the sticky heat of frosting smeared on his sweater, the buzz of sugar and alcohol fizzing behind his eyes. He was still in last night’s clothes - black jeans and his favorite blue Ralph Lauren jumper, now marked with the remnants of Padma’s birthday cake. His lips tingled, still faintly bruised from kissing. His blond curls stuck damply to his forehead, slept-on and unruly.

Everything about him felt wrong in this room. Too soft, too messy, too human.

And then there was Camille.

She stood at the foot of his bed like a vulture dressed in Chanel. Even in the dim morning light, her presence grated. Her mouth twitched, almost into a smirk, and Gabin hated how she looked like she was enjoying herself. Like she’d been waiting for something like this.

She didn’t answer him when he asked what was happening. Not right away.

Instead, she lifted her hand behind her without looking. One of the aides slipped a white tablet into her open palm like they’d rehearsed it a thousand times. She swiped it on in a practiced motion, the screen casting a cold glow across her sharp features.

Then she stepped forward, her red heels tapping against the marble with surgical precision.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound rang through the stillness like a countdown.

When she stopped beside his bed, she looked down at him with narrowed eyes - somewhere between disgust and something colder. Professional pity. Royal disappointment.

“What does it have to do with His Royal Highness?” she echoed, her voice smooth, affected, rehearsed. Then, her mouth curved - not quite a smile, but something close enough to make him uneasy.

“Everything.”

Without another word, she tossed the tablet onto his lap.

It landed with a soft thud against the silk sheets, but the weight of it felt heavy - like a gavel, or a guillotine.

Camille crossed her arms and raised a perfectly plucked brow, watching the boy’s face with something between satisfaction and pity. Gabin squinted, momentarily blinded by the sudden brightness of the screen. He lifted the tablet with trembling fingers, his breath catching in his throat as the image came into focus.

It took a moment for his sleep-hazed eyes to adjust.

But then it opened - slowly, painfully, fully.

And his entire world… cracked open.