Still caught up in the memory of that embrace, Flora snapped back to the present and got to work.
She prepared some simple cookies with her own hands and packed them into a basket, hoping they would be enough.
On her way to his office, a voice called her name.
It was Lady Evelyn, who greeted her with a polite and knowing smile and remarked on what a coincidence it was to meet her here, of all places.
Flora noticed the tray in her hands. It held a set of perfectly crafted cakes, glazed and layered and clearly the work of a professional kitchen.
Evelyn asked whether the empress was also on her way to see Ottol.
Her gaze travelled from her own elaborate cakes to Flora's plain basket of cookies and back again.
Flora confirmed that yes, she was bringing them to His Majesty.
And Evelyn, with a saccharine smile, dropped her bombshell.
The emperor had been traumatised as a child, she said. He had choked on a cookie.
Flora was stunned. She had had no idea.
The lady then suggested smoothly that Ottol could simply eat her cake instead, and reminded Flora that as his childhood friend, she naturally understood him better.
Feeling dejected, Flora walked on, thinking about the depth of history the emperor and Lady Evelyn must share.
Her confidence crumbled with every step. She imagined the two of them through the years — as children, as adolescents, as adults — an entire life braided together before Flora had ever existed to him. In comparison, she felt as though she had barely scratched the surface of knowing her own husband.
Doubt crept in. Could she ever measure up to a bond like that? Could she ever catch up to it at all?
Just then the captain of the imperial guard appeared and looked surprised to find both ladies standing in the corridor. With a polite bow, he offered to announce their visit to His Majesty.
Lady Evelyn informed him coolly that she did not require an announcement in order to see Ottol.
Defeated, Flora told the guard to let her go in first.
But the guard apologised. His Majesty had given strict orders today. No one but the empress was to be admitted.
Evelyn was floored. She asked whether that meant even she was barred from entry.
The guard confirmed the order.
Playing it off, Evelyn declared that the emperor must simply be busy, and turned to leave.
Before she could, Flora called out for her to wait.
Evelyn scoffed and twisted the kindness into an accusation before it had even been offered. Was the empress bragging, she asked, about being the only person permitted to see him?
Flustered, Flora denied it. She explained that she had only felt it was a shame for the cookies she had baked to go to waste, and that Lady Evelyn was welcome to some.
Evelyn coldly rejected the offer and said she could handle herself.
Inwardly she seethed, furious past speech that a mere hostage from a defeated kingdom should dare to pity her, and she walked off without another word.
Later, Flora stood before Ottol in his office, and the first thing he asked was whether she had arrived together with Evelyn.
He noticed the glum expression she was carrying and correctly guessed that the lady had said something cruel.
Flustered, Flora denied it, but he pressed, asking why she looked so dejected.
He stepped closer and gently touched her cheek and confessed that when she was sad, it brought him down as well. He asked her to show him that cute smile of hers more often, and Flora's heart raced so hard she had to look away.
Internally, the emperor smirked. He had worked it out some time ago: whispering sweet things to her was the single most effective way to make her therapeutic scent grow stronger.
Changing the subject, he announced that he was starving, and asked whether she had brought anything sweet.
Flora presented the basket — and then quickly warned him not to eat any of it, explaining that Lady Evelyn had mentioned he once choked on a cookie as a child.
Dismissing the whole matter as ancient history, Ottol confidently took a bite.
And immediately began to choke.
And, despite that, stubbornly forced down every last cookie she had baked.
Some while later, an exhausted emperor lay with his head on Flora's lap while she smiled down at him and called him a stubborn child, completely touched by the ridiculousness of the effort.
Looking thoroughly drained, Ottol brushed off her concern about the cookies. They were nothing, he said, compared to the things he had eaten on military campaigns.
Before she could argue the point, he announced that he was sleepy and laid his head down in her lap.
A flustered Flora asked whether he could really rest like that — and then realised he was already fast asleep.
A soft smile came over her face. She marvelled at how close the two of them had become, and how impossible that would have seemed in the cathedral on her wedding day. She touched his hair gently, and her own heart began to race, and she was left thoroughly bewildered by herself.
As he slept, Flora noticed a book wedged down into the sofa cushions.
She pulled it out, her curiosity piqued, and opened it.
It was a journal. And as she read, her expression shifted into complete shock, because the entries in it detailed something horrifying.
She looked down at the man she had just been starting to feel close to, stunned by what she was holding.
According to his own journal, Ottol was meticulously planning to declare war on Pedania.
The tender moment shattered. In its place came a chilling picture of the emperor as the rest of the world knew him: the ruthlessness of him on a battlefield, the mountain of bodies she had been so afraid of at the altar.
With a growing sense of horror, Flora understood that the target of this planned war was her own homeland. The peaceful man asleep on her lap was, in fact, a conqueror plotting her country's ruin.
Her mind raced. Her first instinct was to send word to Queen Mila about the invasion plan at once.
Just then Ottol stirred on her lap, and she froze in terror. Thankfully, he did not wake.
As she watched him sleep, a wave of confusion washed over her. If the plans in that book were real, then what did he actually think of her? Had all of it been a lie — the shoes, the field, the dancing, every gentle thing?
Then a new resolve hardened her gaze.
She would not simply run for help. There had to be a way to avoid this war, and she was going to find it.