He was awake and not awake, knowing it wasn’t real, that he wasn’t there anymore, yet unable to shake the feeling that his body still was. He opened his eyes, saw silver curtains along the edge of a canopy bed frame, ceiling painted in navy night and silver stars. But he could still feel the cold, sharp, breath-stealing knife in his neck, the way his lips went numb, his throat went small.

You aren’t there, Franz. You are here. You are safe.

The weight on his chest was unbearable—the invisible weight of a life nearly lost. So physical, so painful in the moment. He clenched and unclenched his fists, relieved that he could move again, digging fingernails into palms just to feel alive. Real. Here—still here.

His cheeks were a wreckage. He must have bit them in his sleep again. While screaming or trying to run away. His jaw ached. He rolled from back to stomach and pressed his face into the pillow, muffling a frustrated, terrified shout. He’d been so happy last night and now—

Franz was forced straight back into hell again.

He punched a fist into the mattress. It had been months. Months and months. When would it stop?

He’d felt so seen when he’d told Elisabeth about the nightmares, but now doubt poured down in drenching, drowning waves. Nightmares didn’t sound so bad until you were in them. Until you woke up screaming in a cold sweat, the inside of your cheeks torn raw. Or until you woke up next to the person having them. What had he been thinking? He couldn’t ask Elisabeth to live like this.

Franz breathed deep into the pillow, pressing his sweatsoaked forehead into the soft cotton, breathing in the lavender oil the servants scented the sheets with, waiting for his heart to stop punching wildly at his chest from the inside.

It was his birthday, he realized, and made an ironic noise—part laugh, part sob—into the pillow. The day he was supposed to announce his engagement to Helene. Last night he’d been so sure that those plans—that duty—didn’t matter.

But this …

This was a reminder that it did. That there were things happening in Habsburg that were bigger—more important—than this strange, magical thing between Elisabeth and him. There was a reason his heart wasn’t his to give; empires rose and fell on the choice of an empress, the raising of an heir. The darkness at his door wasn’t a thing to be fought with poetry and lingering gazes. The empire was danger and violence and unrest that ended with a knife in your neck. A war bearing down like a nightmare, ready to snatch you up without your consent.