Chapter 3 Four Years of Silence

The light in his foreign dormitory was a cold, sterile thing, a world away from the golden sun of Klbas. At eighteen, Tarkan hunched over a desk strewn with diplomatic treatises, the text blurring into meaningless symbols. The weight of his kingdom was a familiar phantom, but it was the hollow ache in his chest that truly defined his solitude. He was the embodiment of his sun-drenched home-bronze skin burnished like desert stone, dark hair falling in soft waves, and deep brown eyes that held a storm of longing.

His features, sharpened by the cusp of manhood, marked him as a prince, yet his heart remained a hostage, tethered to a girl a continent away.

Mia Ritchard, with her spun-gold hair and sapphire eyes, haunted the sterile corners of his room. He saw her not just in his dreams, but in the margins of his textbooks. Her beauty wasn't merely the porcelain perfection of her English complexion or the delicate curve of her lips; it was the fire of her mind, the way her laughter could make the ancient library feel alive, the way she'd breathed life into Shakespeare's sonnets until they became the language of his own soul.

He spilled that soul onto a cold, impersonal screen, his fingers trembling as he composed his first email. He wrote of the austere lecture halls that were prisons of gray stone, the tasteless foreign meals that turned to ash in his mouth, the profound loneliness that clung to him like a damp fog. He wrote of everything and nothing, just to reach the only words that mattered: Thinking of you. Did you get my note? He bared his heart across the miles, hit send, and began to wait. Each refresh of his inbox was a small, desperate prayer. A day passed. Then a week. The silence from her was a digital void.

He sent another email, then a third. He dispatched a formal letter through a royal courier, convinced the palace's sophisticated firewalls had intercepted his words, mistaking his love for a security threat. Each message was a fragment of himself-his hopes, his growing frustration, his memories of their childhood with his sister, Myar. The ghosts of their library kingdom populated his sterile room: Myar, her bronze skin aglow under candlelight as she braided Mia's golden hair; himself, a clumsy, playacting knight, blushing furiously when Mia's voice wove the fabric of a love poem. He remembered one summer, when they were ten, Myar smuggling honeyed figs to their "secret kingdom," giggling as Tarkan tripped over a rug in his haste to crown Mia their "queen." Those days were a golden thread, a lifeline he clung to, now chafing against the raw wound of her absence.

Months bled into a year. Her silence ceased to be an absence and became a presence-a poison seeping into his bones. It was a mirror, reflecting his deepest insecurities. Had she laughed at his note, dismissing his fervent vow as a boy's foolish fancy? Had his mother, the formidable Queen Faya, discovered their kiss and silenced her with a threat? Or the most unbearable thought of all: had their connection, that desperate, soul-searing kiss, meant nothing to her? The questions became a venomous litany that gnawed at him in the dead of night, twisting hope into a bitter, hardened resentment. If she would not answer, he would build a fortress around her memory and let it starve.

Tarkan threw himself into the life the world expected of a prince abroad, his natural charm becoming a polished, impenetrable shield. The international press, hungry for royal scandal, gleefully dubbed him the "Playboy Prince." His image was splashed across tabloids, a parade of elegant and beautiful women on his arm-Parisian debutantes, Roman actresses, ambitious students seeking the thrill of a royal liaison. Each practiced smile, each meaningless dance, each hollow night was a performance of indifference, a defiance of the pain he refused to name. It was another brick in the wall he was building around his heart. Yet, in the quiet moments after the parties ended, lying in the arms of a woman whose name he'd likely forget by morning, he would see only Mia's sapphire eyes, her blond hair catching the candlelight of the library, the taste of her kiss lingering on his lips like an unwritten verse.

On the eve of his return to Klbas, four years later, Tarkan stood on a balcony overlooking a glittering, indifferent city. He was twenty-two, a man shaped by loneliness. Ramzi, his aide and the one person who had witnessed the slow erosion of the boy into the man, joined him, two glasses of amber whiskey in his hand. Ramzi's lean frame and steady gaze were a constant, but even he had learned not to pierce Tarkan's armor.

"The jet is ready for dawn, Your Highness," Ramzi said, his formal tone softened by years of friendship and concern. "Are you ready to go home?"

Tarkan took a slow sip, the liquor's burn impotent against the familiar ache. To admit the truth felt like lancing a wound. "She never wrote back, Ramzi. Not a single word."

Ramzi's expression softened with a knowledge born of long observation. He knew exactly who the "she" was who haunted his prince. "Perhaps she was afraid. The Queen..."

"I could have protected her!" Tarkan snapped, his voice raw with the anger of a four-year-old failure. He exhaled, the fight draining out of him, leaving only the hollow truth. He stared at the city's lights, a million fractured stars, but saw only a girl in a library, her blue eyes wide with unspoken promises.

"All of this," he said, gesturing to the invisible trail of parties and women that marked his time in Europe, "was just noise. A desperate attempt to prove she didn't matter." He turned to his friend, his own polished mask finally cracking. "And all it proved, Ramzi... was that nothing else did. I'm going home, but the one thing I want... I don't even know if it was ever real."