He continued, “I’ve been told what to do my whole life.”

Oh, how Elisabeth knew that feeling. Being pinched into a smaller shape, stuffed into a smaller box. Do this, don’t do that. It was impossible to bear. And here was the emperor telling her that he, too, felt the weight of it, the way it made a person smaller.

His next words were another echo of her own heart. “I can’t take it anymore.”

And that was it. Neither could she. They were the same, a perfect match.

“I’ve felt dead inside for months. But with you, I suddenly want to celebrate my birthday.”

“But you don’t know me.” In one way, it was true. But in another, it wasn’t. They’d had so little time and yet he did know her. Knew her in a way that didn’t seem possible.

He rose to the challenge. “You tell the truth when no one else will. And you see things differently than other people.”

Her heart warmed and softened. It was what she’d been longing for someone to say. That her honesty, her truths, were something to be loved, not something to be banished. That her poet’s sensibility was charm, not oddity.

“I need someone like you.”

Elisabeth drank the words in. Someone like her. No keep your womanish opinions to yourself, Sisi. No don’t go barefoot, Sisi. No do what I want not what you want, Sisi. She wanted to cry, and she wanted to laugh. She’d found her great love—she knew it then. She was falling, flying, over the edge of some invisible line, knowing someone would be hurt at the end, but unable to help herself all the same.

“You aren’t what I expected,” she whispered. “On the outside, you stand there like a soldier, but you’re completely different inside.”

“Weaker, you mean?” His smile faltered.

“Stronger, I mean.”

He searched her eyes. Her heart paused, waiting, as he lifted a hand to run it—soft, so perfectly, achingly, soft—down her cheek. Her eyes closed without her permission as she melted into the touch. It was everything poetry promised it would be—fire and ice, tears and songs. Wild joy and tender heartache.

And then he was kissing her, his hands on her face, fingers tracing the edges of her jawline. His lips were soft, warm. She pressed in hard, opening her mouth to his, and his hands moved up, tangling in the ringlets of her hair.

Her heart sang and flew, itself a bird. She was falling; she was soaring. She was a windstorm, a wave, swept up, fallen, lost.

But no.

No.

Helene. She was betraying Helene.

Elisabeth stopped, pulled backward, tried to keep from crying. One more look at his face—surprise and desire and confusion—and she couldn’t do this.

“Happy birthday … Franz,” she whispered.

Then she turned and left, her face crumpling into despair.

TWENTY-EIGHT