They Forced The Princess To Marry A Beggar… Then He Walked Back Into The Palace As Britain’s……

Chapter 10

Our wedding was unlike any the kingdom had witnessed in generations.

It was not a political alliance dressed in ceremony, not a transaction between families, not a negotiation conducted through intermediaries. It was a union built on months of quiet observation and genuine respect, and the entire kingdom seemed to feel the difference.

The palace was decorated with white roses — the same flowers that had been woven into the garland that had brought us together. The hall was filled with noblemen and women who had once laughed at the beggar, now standing in respectful silence as the Duke of Ashbourne took his bride.

I walked down the aisle in a gown of pale blue silk, the same color I had worn on the day of the ceremony. It was a deliberate choice, a reclaiming of a memory that had been stolen from me. I was no longer the princess who had been humiliated. I was the woman who had survived.

Sebastian waited for me at the altar, and the look in his eyes when he saw me was worth every moment of suffering I had endured.

When the ceremony was complete, and the kingdom celebrated, I did not retreat to the safety of the palace walls. I founded charities across Ashbourne’s lands — schools where children could learn regardless of their parents’ station, hospitals where the sick could be treated without payment, kitchens where the hungry could find warmth and food. I hired the kitchen girls who had once whispered about me, because I remembered what it felt like to be afraid of losing your place.

And I visited Vivienne.

She was living in a small manor in the countryside, a quiet place with a garden and a library and very few visitors. She was thinner than she had been, and the sharpness had gone out of her eyes, replaced by something softer. Something that might have been peace.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me,” she said when I sat down across from her in the parlor.

“I already have,” I said. “Forgiveness is not something you earn. It is something I give, because holding onto anger would only make me smaller.”

She looked at me for a long time. Then she looked away.

“I have spent my entire life wanting what you had,” she said. “I never stopped to consider that I might have been better off wanting something of my own.”

I reached across the table and took her hand. “It’s not too late.”

She did not pull away.