Noah Bellamy stared at the email like it might vanish if he blinked. The official crest of the Kingdom of Virellia glinted at the top of the screen, gold against white, regal and surreal. He reread the first line for the fifth time, heart hammering like a faulty metronome. Congratulations. You have been selected as one of twelve international fellows for the Virellia Crown Internship Program.

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. For a long second, the world blurred around the edges, like the universe had paused to make sure he understood. He'd actually gotten in. Him.

A chair scraped in the other room, followed by his mother’s voice. “Noah? Everything okay?”

He tried to answer, but his mouth had gone dry. Eventually, he found his feet, stumbled into the kitchen, and held out the screen like it was a miracle.

His mother looked once. Then again. Then she started crying, the way she always did when something enormous and impossible happened—like when he got his scholarship, when they fixed the heater after three months without one, when they finally paid off the overdue bills on her second job’s paycheck. She pulled him into a hug that hurt in the best way, squeezing the breath out of him like pride could be transferred physically from one body to another.

"I'm proud of you," she whispered into his shoulder. "I always knew you were meant for something big."

Noah smiled, but it felt like borrowed confidence. He didn’t say what he was thinking—that maybe they’d made a mistake. That maybe his file had been switched with someone else’s. That eventually, someone from Virellia would send a second email titled CORRECTION: We Meant Someone Richer.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. He lay awake in his narrow twin bed beneath the cracked ceiling and the peeling corner of his astronomy poster. Outside, traffic hummed and blinked like the distant pulse of another world. He stared at the screen again, reading every word of the acceptance letter, memorizing it like scripture.

Twelve interns. All expenses paid. Summer residency at Valmont Palace. Exposure to foreign policy, royal media, and historical archiving. Noah Bellamy—kid from a tiny apartment with a leaky kitchen sink and a mother who skipped dinner when rent was due—was going to live in a palace.

He wanted to feel triumphant. He really did.

But behind the thrill fluttered something smaller and meaner: the bone-deep fear that he didn’t belong. That once he stepped off the plane, they’d take one look at his secondhand blazer, his duct-taped suitcase, his accent that wasn’t quite posh enough—and realize the truth.

He wasn’t one of them.

Still, when he clicked open a new browser tab and typed Kingdom of Virellia, something like wonder stirred inside him. Gold-lined palaces. Gardens in symmetrical spirals. News headlines filled with royal names and international deals. And right at the center of it all, a face he recognized from a dozen headlines and just as many scandals—Crown Prince Leander August Valmont.

Noah stared at the photo, at the prince’s smirk, his champagne glass, his jawline made for gossip. He rolled his eyes and muttered, “Probably never even met a spreadsheet.”

He didn’t know it yet, but in sixty-eight days, he’d be standing next to that prince in a corridor lined with portraits and secrets—and the world he thought he understood would unravel, piece by piece, in the space between their hands.