Kingdom of broken crowns

Astra woke up hours later, alone in the cold sheets. Damian was gone, as he always was — a ghost slipping through the cracks of her heart.

She sat up slowly, hand instinctively moving to the delicate gold chain she never took off.

A tiny locket dangled from it, hidden beneath her silken nightgown.

Inside the locket: a picture so small, so precious, it barely weighed anything — yet it crushed her every day.

Her son.

Their son.

Dante.

Three years old. Born in the shadows of a war they had started but never finished.

A boy with Damian’s steel-gray eyes and Astra’s black hair. A boy who laughed like the sun — and belonged to a world of darkness.

Damian didn't know.

He couldn’t know.

Not when enemies lined up like vultures at her door, waiting for one crack in her armor.

Not when love was the deadliest weakness a Queen could have.

She had almost told him once — a year ago, in Rome, when he held her against a bullet-scarred wall and kissed her like he was dying.

She had whispered, "I have to tell you something—"

But then a shot rang out, and blood bloomed across the marble, and he disappeared into the night, thinking she had betrayed him.

Maybe she had.

She had betrayed them both by keeping Dante a secret.

But it was the only way to keep her son alive.

A knock echoed at the door, sharp and impatient.

Astra slipped the locket back beneath her skin and steeled herself.

When she opened the door, her second-in-command, Luca, stood there — pale, furious.

"They know," he said.

Her blood froze.

"Who?" she demanded.

"Everyone." His voice cracked. "Damian. The Moretti family. The Sicilian council. Someone leaked... about Dante."

The hallway spun. Her lungs squeezed so tight she couldn’t breathe.

Luca grabbed her shoulders. "You need to move him. Now. Damian will come for you — for him."

A thousand images crashed through her mind — Damian’s rage, his betrayal, his madness.

Because Damian Moretti didn’t lose.

Damian Moretti didn’t forgive.

And once he found out she had hidden his blood from him...

Astra knew.

He would burn the world to the ground.

---

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

Poem

Whispers of the Hollow

The stars forgot to shine tonight,

the sky wore mourning's bitter shade;

the winds no longer sang to me,

just silent echoes, sharp and frayed.

The garden where your laughter bloomed

now wilts beneath an unseen frost;

each petal bows, each branch we weeps,

a monument to what I've lost.

The clock ticks on in shattered beats,

its hands too heavy to rewind;

the walls still breathe your phantom touch,

the floorboards groan for what’s behind.

I trace your name upon the dust,

a trembling ghost inside my hand;

the letters break, the silence grows,

like grief too vast to understand.

No sun can reach these hollow halls,

no dawn can stitch a broken seam;

I walk through ruins of our days,

a prisoner of a vanished dream.

Your voice, a whisper through the dark,

a memory stitched into my skin;

I wear your absence like a cloak,

a mourning stitched from deep within.

Yet still, I search the endless night,

for pieces of the love we knew—

a life where you might turn again,

and I could find my way to you.

---

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