The morning air in the Sunstone Courtyard was crisp, carrying the faint scent of lemon trees and damp marble. Levi stood at the top of the shallow dais, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, a statue of royal indifference. He had chosen this location with care: semi-public, with a handful of key courtiers—Jean Kirstein looking dutifully uncomfortable, Erwin Smith observing with that unnerving, placid intelligence from the colonnade—and a few strategically placed secretaries. The scene was set for a clean, surgical strike.

His gaze swept over the small assembly, landing on the figure approaching from the southern archway. A young woman, the correct height, the correct shade of chestnut hair arranged in a style he vaguely recognized as fashionable. She wore a dress of deep emerald silk, finer than what he usually saw Isabel in, but he attributed it to a rare moment of vanity for the occasion. Good. Let her have made an effort. Let the contrast between her effort and his rejection be all the more stark, all the more sympathetic for her.

He did not look at her face. He had seen it a hundred times in portraits and across banquet halls—soft, gentle, perpetually touched with a quiet sadness. To look now would be to invite doubt, to see the ghost of his brother’s heartbreak in her eyes. This was not about seeing her; it was about executing a plan.

She stopped before the dais, a respectful distance away. He noted the set of her shoulders—unusually straight for Isabel, who had a habit of curling in on herself. Nerves, he assumed.

“Isabel Magnolia,” he began, his voice cutting through the quiet murmur of the courtyard, flat and devoid of any inflection that could be misconstrued as feeling. It was the tone he used for reviewing troop deployments or sentencing traitors. “You have been summoned here so that there may be no misunderstanding, and so that the court may bear witness to a decision made for the stability of the kingdom.”

He paused, allowing the formality to sink in. Jean shifted his weight. From the corner of his eye, Levi saw Erwin’s head tilt a fraction, a falcon noticing a shift in the wind.

“The engagement between the Crown and your house,” he continued, each word a chisel strike, “was conceived as a union of mutual benefit. It has become clear that the requisite compatibility does not, and will not, exist. To prolong this arrangement would be an act of poor governance and personal disservice.”

He finally allowed his eyes to focus on her, ready to meet the welling tears, the trembling lip, the quiet acceptance he had predicted. He saw none of it.

The woman before him was not crying. She was not trembling. Her eyes, which he now registered were a sharper, fiercer green than Isabel’s soft hazel, were not downcast. They were locked on his, wide with an emotion that was not grief, but incredulous, boiling outrage. Her posture was not one of submission, but of coiled readiness, her fists clenched at her sides in the fine silk.

A cold, sharp fissure opened in Levi’s gut. Error.

His mind, a machine built for precision, scrambled to reconcile the data. The hair color was close, but the cut was sharper. The dress was Isabel’s style, but the way she wore it was all wrong—it looked like a uniform on a soldier, not a gown on a lady. The face… the face was similar in structure, but the expression was a foreign language. Where Isabel’s gaze was a quiet pond, this one was a lit forge.

His eyes flickered, against his will, over her shoulder. There, just inside the archway, half-hidden in shadow, stood another figure. Smaller, paler, one hand pressed to her mouth. Chestnut hair in a simpler style. A dress of muted lavender. Wide, horrified hazel eyes filled with the exact devastation he had intended to see.

Isabel.

The world did not slow down. It crystallized. Every detail became hyper-clear: the faint scratch of a secretary’s quill ceasing abruptly, the way Jean’s jaw had gone slack, the profound, utter stillness from Erwin’s direction. The lemon-scented air turned to ice in his lungs.

He had not just annulled his engagement. He had annulled it before the wrong woman. He had publicly humiliated and insulted a foreign noble, the cousin, the guest, in a stunning display of royal negligence. He had turned a calculated, sympathetic sacrifice into a chaotic, humiliating scandal. The clean surgical strike had just severed his own political artery.

All of this flashed through his mind in a nanosecond. Externally, nothing changed. His face remained a mask of carved marble, his posture rigid. But inside, the foundations of his perfectly logical plan shattered and collapsed into a silent, screaming ruin. The woman in green—{user}, her name surfaced from some diplomatic briefing—continued to stare at him, her silence now more explosive than any outburst.

He had prepared for tears. He had prepared for quiet acceptance. He was utterly unprepared for the volcanic fury staring back at him from the eyes of a stranger he had just, with all the authority of the crown, profoundly and irrevocably wronged.