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smrttrtl · 2 days ago

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(this was inspired by the amazing @rawme-price ‘s royal!141 x war prize!reader!! Give him lots of love his works are absolutely incredible and so good 😩😩)

You were a prize of war, draped not in glory but in silence.

The day you were taken, the sun bore down mercilessly over your city’s broken gates, golden rays glinting off the broken helms and blood-slicked stone. The standards of your house- a serpent coiled around a silver chalice- burned upon every rampart. They’d taken everything: your home, your siblings, your legacy. All that remained of your royal lineage was a fine silk collar looped around your throat, a mark of your new station: property.

Not quite a prisoner, and not quite a guest.

They had taken you not for vengeance, though, but for ornamentation:

You were not dragged before the court in chains, nor paraded through the capital square as spoils. No. You were wrapped in silks and shadow, ferried through the marbled halls of the foreign palace like a prized sculpture- set atop a pedestal to be admired, pitied, perhaps touched, but never truly regarded. A concubine, they called you. A gift for the conquering King, a diplomatic token meant to warm his sheets and soothe his ego. But you were not soft like a prize. You were steel beneath velvet, and no man- especially not him- had thought to test your edge.

When you arrived at the palace gates, escorted by a pair of silver-clad guards, you expected confinement. Chains and surveillance. You expected to be summoned and summoned again, demanded of until you broke. But instead… they left you mostly alone.

There were rooms prepared for you- lavish chambers perfumed with foreign incense, mirrors taller than doors, baths warm with honeyed water- but no one came. No handmaidens lingered long. No courtiers whispered seductions or threats. You were given a name in the servants’ registry and little else.

Perhaps it was arrogance. That you, a silken shadow of a fallen house, posed no real threat. Or perhaps it was that none of them could see you clearly- not through the cloud of war, not through their own entanglements.

You were not their type, you quickly realized. Too quiet to entertain, and too proud to beg. And far too observant for the comfort of men who ruled through secrets and shadows.

Your presence made them uneasy, but not enough to stop them.

So they left you in peace, and like ivy in a forgotten garden wall, you grew wherever the stone gave way.

They were always busy with one another anyway.

King Price was a broad-shouldered monarch with a voice like flint striking steel, a man of battlefield charisma, not courtly grace. He ruled from a sun-drenched throne room hung with deep maroon banners and a mosaic floor of golden lions and azure wolves. On either side of him were his closest men- men you quickly learned were far more than advisors, more than knights, more than lovers of the realm.

They were each other’s.

Ghost, because you weren’t given any other name to call him by, was a thing carved from smoke and steel. He haunted the corridors in silver-threaded armor and scary bone-pale cloaks, his face masked and unreadable, his eyes like bottomless ink. He spoke rarely and only when necessary, deep and deliberate, every word a spear. You often saw him standing unmoving beneath the porticoes or looming behind the King like a silent omen. He noticed everything. You learned quickly to avoid meeting his eyes unless you wished to be studied like prey.

Soap, in contrast, was fire given form. He laughed like thunder over water, all teeth and mirth, his kilted form easy in every room. He danced through politics like he did through swordplay: reckless, sharp, and victorious. The nobles loved him, the servants adored him, and yet even his joy was a blade. You watched him, this flame-tongued warrior, wield charm and chaos as weapons. He made you uneasy, but not for the reasons one would expect. It was his brilliance you feared, not his touch.

Gaz was quieter than both, but you knew never less dangerous. His gaze flicked too quickly to be read, his thoughts fast-moving beneath the surface. He communicated in nods, in looks, in the press of his mouth and the sharpness of his shoulders. You caught him watching sometimes, not in lust but in curiosity- as though trying to read a passage he hadn’t expected in the book of war. He often lingered in the libraries. Sometimes, you found his annotations beside your own. The unspoken dialogue began there, but you didn’t dare consider yourselves allies, much less friends.

They were rulers in all but name, lovers in all but confession, bound to each other in something deeper than oaths. You were irrelevant to them then. But time- time would change that as patiently as water eroded the cliffs.

They moved around each other with the familiarity of shared campaigns, shared wounds, shared beds. It was no secret. Not even whispered. The palace knew. The court knew. You knew, from the very first night you arrived and wandered too far in silk slippers, only to hear the unmistakable sounds of pleasure echoing behind a half-opened door. It certainly wasn’t your name they moaned, and it wasn’t your skin they touched.

You were a relic, a prize kept on a shelf, unbothered, unwanted.

Which suited you just fine, because they let you roam- perhaps assuming your silence meant submission.

You slipped through their world like a ghost, always in the background, always silent. You learned the layout of the palace quickly, and found the best corridors for avoiding the guards, the quietest corners of the library, the sunniest courtyard to sit in when the day was soft and the wind carried the perfume of the citrus groves.

But silence, in truth, is the perfect vantage for listening.

And listen you did.

You sat in on council meetings when no one noticed your presence, tucked behind pillars and veiled behind sheer drapes. You learned of failing grain routes, corrupted tax collectors, nobles whose coffers jingled with coin minted in enemy nations. You listened to a young Lord boast of “diversifying” with investments in your fallen house’s overseas mines. You heard a noble Lady laugh about how many of her letters made it past the border through “trusted hawks.” Trusted hawks who worked for other kingdoms. Corruption ran smoother than the wine they indulged in.

And King Price… didn’t know.

The thought struck you odd and cold: he fought wars to protect this realm and yet knew nothing of the rot within it. A man can’t guard against betrayal if he doesn’t even know it’s in the room.

You said nothing until you couldn’t hold it in any longer.

One night, you stepped into his war chamber, where torchlight spilled across parchment seas and carved lions guarded the windows. He stood at the map table, sleeves rolled to elbows, neck glistening with sweat. His crown was absent, but the weight of it was still there in his posture.

“Your Majesty.” You said, and your voice was a clean knife through the stillness.

He looked up sharply, surprised not by your presence but by your tone.

You stepped forward, and for the first time since your capture, you let your tongue free and told him everything, the long accumulation of knowledge and fury curling like embers in your gut, too dangerous to burn, too volatile to ignore. Until at last the words clawed their way from you like smoke from a smothered fire.

And you told him. Every name; every treason. You recited them with the cold precision of an executioner: the barons laundering coin through offshore holdings once controlled by your House; the grain merchants funneling stock to rival kingdoms; the bastard son of a northern lord who posed as a loyal knight while his letters begged asylum across the border.

You spoke of ciphered routes your mother had crafted, letters tucked into false bookbindings, the bribery systems perfected over decades. You told him things he did not know- not because he was ignorant, but because his court had made him blind.

He said nothing. But the others began to arrive.

Ghost materialized from the shadowed alcove like a summoned revenant. He did not speak, only watched, his body tense with awareness, and Soap strode in halfway through, still armed, a cloak flung carelessly behind him. He leaned against the stone hearth but didn’t interrupt. Gaz entered last, quietly standing neside Ghost, hands behind his back, listening intently.

You stood before the four pillars of the kingdom- untouched, unclaimed, and now undeniably seen. You poured poison like wine, and they drank every drop.

By the end, Price’s knuckles were white on the edge of the map and his voice was more gravel than human:

“Why tell me this now?”

You looked at him, all the tired regality of your bloodline pressed into your spine. “Because my family is dead. And they don’t deserve their secrets kept.”

From that night forward, you were no longer just a prize.

You became something else: not a concubine, not a captive, but a whisper in the King’s ear; a blade turned inward; the rot-teller; the court’s living reminder that shadows bloom even in marble gardens. A walking threat to anyone in the court who thought their sins were buried too deep to be dug out.

They didn’t name you as such, of course. They couldn’t- not in court, not in record. But your presence at meetings became expected. When the King entered the council chamber, you followed. When reports arrived from the border, he read them aloud for your eyes. When suspects were named, your opinion was the blade that tipped justice’s hand.

And suddenly, the court began to fear you.

They whispered that you were a sorceress whom had enchanted their King. That the bloodline of your House had carried poisons in its tongue. That you bewitched the lions of the realm. That perhaps, perhaps, the fall of your kingdom was not the end of your reign- but only its metamorphosis.

Your new home stood higher than the falconers’ roosts, wreathed in mist and paper flowers (bougainvillea). Its terrace overlooked the rose gardens, where nobles strolled with masks of silk and secrets, and the sparring fields where sweat and metal still ruled over perfume and lies. You were given robes of maroon and pearl, the kingdom’s colors, though no sigil adorned your breast. You bore no crest. You were still, technically, a concubine. But no one dared call you so now.

The collar was gone, too.

And thus, they… began to look:

John’s eyes lingered, not in lust, but in something slower, a tension made of weight and wonder and want. Simon began appearing more often in your path, his silences thicker but more comfortable, his proximity intentional. Johnny’s flirtations sharpened, no longer jokes but invitations- his fingers brushing yours beneath council tables, his laugh darker, hungrier. Kyle spoke to you so often in the garden, bringing citrus fruits, asking about old customs, foreign songs, little things- anything to draw more of you into the light, into his lap and arms.

They looked at you like men who had conquered nations and found, at last, something unconquered; something they no longer wished to ignore. They watched you the way lions watch a lamb- strange, sharp, other, but so greedy to sink their maw into.

And slowly, the dynamic shifted.

Their devotion to one another remained- unyielding, unspoken, forged in blood and loyalty. But you had become something they could not and did not want to ignore. Your insight was a blade none of them had ever wielded, your presence a quiet gravity that drew their eyes before their thoughts could catch up. You were intelligence made tangible, sharp where others dulled, and though they had not touched you, they had long since ceased to overlook you.

So the harem grew, though it remained unspoken of. You were not meant to be their equal, and yet you still became it not through seduction, but through strategy and dominion.

And when at last one of them reached for you with quiet, reverent hands, it was not out of pity. it was worship. Lust so hot it bordered on sinfulness, for you were not their first love but you became their favorite sin.

In the court of lions, you had been a lamb.

But lambs, too, can learn to bare their teeth. That is what you think as you feel hot, heady kisses pressed against your nape, your naval, the small of your back and between your thighs, a crown tilting dangerously on your head until hands fix it back in place.

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