Chapter 408 --408
But as Elara’s eyes scanned the elegant, sweeping script of the main brief, her eyes narrowed slightly.
The delegations weren’t coming for Samuel. They were coming for her.
Inside the portfolio were five distinct, highly detailed marriage proposals. Each one was backed by a powerful foreign kingdom, and each one came with a strong, unified endorsement from the domestic imperial nobility.
Elara leaned back in her chair, the leather creaking softly in the quiet office. *What nonsense is this?* she thought, though the thought was entirely clinical, devoid of actual heat.
She turned the pages, examining the attached portfolios of the suitors. Visually, the men were exceptional. The portraits showed sharp jawlines, poised postures, and clear eyes. Their backgrounds were immaculate—they were highly educated, trained in military tactics, fluent in multiple languages, and possessed significant personal wealth. They were, by all objective human standards, incredibly good-looking and immensely talented.
Normally, a retired emperor who had explicitly stated her lack of interest in marriage would have been left alone. But the portfolio made the reality of the situation glaringly clear: the nobles were forcing her hand. They were putting immense, coordinated pressure on the imperial house to ensure Elara accepted one of these offers.
If you asked a sentimental person why the nobles were doing this, they might say it was out of concern for the princess’s future, or a desire to see her happy. Elara knew better. The nobles were forcing this because they were terrified of her.
When Elara had been the emperor, she had worked ninety percent of the day, leaving herself absolutely zero time for a personal life. Any marriage proposal that came across her desk back then was summarily rejected before the ink could even dry. She had been too busy hunting down corrupt factions, balancing the treasury, and rewriting the legal codes to care about alliances of the heart.
But right now, the landscape had shifted. Everyone within the empire—and every neighboring kingdom outside of it—knew the truth: Samuel wore the crown, but Elara held the true weight of the empire. She was the one who had cleared the bloodline. She was the one who still signed the critical ten percent of administrative documents that kept the kingdom from fracturing. She was, without question, more powerful than the emperor himself.
To the domestic nobility, a woman like Elara—unmarried, unbound by an alliance, immensely powerful, and holding the pure imperial bloodline—was a massive, unpredictable wildcard. As long as she remained single, she was a threat. She could choose to take the throne back tomorrow, or she could marry a rogue faction leader and completely upend the balance of power. By forcing her into a foreign marriage alliance, the nobles hoped to either anchor her with domestic responsibilities or, ideally, export her immense influence to another kingdom entirely, leaving Samuel easier to manipulate.
Elara didn’t find it strange that they were trying this. It was a logical political countermove.
What made her pause, however, was the actual quality of the prospects. She laid the five portfolios out across her dark wooden desk, studying them side by side. For the first time in her life, she didn’t immediately reach for the rejection stamp.
She genuinely looked at them, evaluating their worth not as husbands, but as assets.