Antwerp did not sleep at night. Number 34 Plaats leaned like a body that had forgotten how to stand. The brickwork dripped with mildew and silence.
The butcher shop had no sign, but it had a frost-glass window with lace curtains that never moved. Inside, the walls pulsed. Strangers said it smelled like bleach and wet iron.
She came without procession beneath an alien name. Daughter of Luxembourg's shame and Spain's mistake, she was orphaned in the sealed estate of Bergans Friedman.
No one dared to call her royal. Yet her bones remembered palaces. Her smile bowed old men over, not knowing why. She walked through Belgium like a ghost seeking revenge.
They fed her to the clubs. There were parties held beneath Catholic spires. The music was velvet. The wine, synthetic. Each man had a script learned in advance.
Two were selected for her. One from Poland, loud and golden. The other, Lithuanian, sharp-faced, quiet, with eyes that had seen mines collapse and families disappear.
He wore a moustache in memory of a Dutch woman who had drowned near her own front gate. His phone brought him Thailand calls, where his children lived, exiled by business.
She met him at the fifth meeting. He looked at her as though she was a puzzle he once knew how to solve. The Polish boy still smiled, but his hands shook.
They slipped something into her drink. Not poison. Not love. Something in between. She tasted peaches, then snow, then the feeling of her teeth sinking through silk.
At the seventh party, she slowed down. Her words fell into corners. Her dress slipped off one shoulder, and no one came to help. The cameras turned away.
She was led from a back door without disturbance. Her voice fought to scream. It came out as breath, not sound. The doors closed behind her in the car.
34 Plaats yawned open as if it had waited years for her arrival. The floor was damp. The stairs tilted to the left. Everything smelled of patience and death.
She was laid out on a butcher's block. Her necklace broke. Pearls skittered toward the drain. A bucket caught her reflection and distorted it into something grotesque.
The African man stood over her, a curved knife in his hand. He did not speak. His apron was unstained. His breathing was gradual. One of his eyes twitched rhythmically.
The Lithuanian was standing with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He turned away when the Polish boy undid his shirt. Their laughter had no echo and fell flat.
The Afrikaner entered then. He did not say anything, nor did he twitch. Just his boots made noise in the room. He looked at her face, then at them.
Something snapped within him. He moved without warning, without rage. Both boys were yanked backward. Something tore. Screams dropped to the ground.
Her body fell to the tiles. One hand reached out and brushed against a corroded hook. Blood seeped along the groove in silence. She blinked once. A voice resonated from the drain. It was not hers.
The sound in the drain was neither whisper nor cry. It had no language. It rose like a sigh from a corpse that never learned to sleep. Her fingers trembled on the rusty hook, nails grating old stains that would not dry.
Afrikaner was still. His hands were sweaty now. Blood clung to his sleeves like memory. The Polish boy crouched by the meat sink, his teeth scattered like chicken bones across the tiles. The Lithuanian groaned behind a screen of dust and spittle, one eye shutting.
She tried to speak. Her voice wouldn't. The air in the room grew thick, refusing to carry sound. The only movement was the bulb above, rocking slightly as if something had passed through it.
The African co-tenant looked down at her. The knife was not in his hand. His face had not changed. He knelt down beside her, not to harm her, but to take her pulse. She did not resist him. She no longer remembered resisting. Her body reacted by instinct, but her mind floated, half above, half below.
He growled something in a language she couldn't understand. There was no echo to his voice. It hung on the walls and disappeared.
The Afrikaner stepped forward. His boot slipped on blood. He saved himself and stooped down. Not to strike, not to lift up. He tenderly drew her dress over her legs. Then he turned to the others.
You were not supposed to break her," he said. His voice was carved from old wood. "She was supposed to be given. Delivered."
The Lithuanian expectorated a tooth. "She was promised to the Prince," he muttered. "We were only preparing her.".
"No," said the Afrikaner. "You turned this into filth."The Polish boy whimpered, half-conscious. The Afrikaner grasped him by the ankle and dragged him from the room like a sack of meat. A door slammed in the distance.
There was silence once more. The African co-tenant fetched her water. She drank it absent-mindedly. His hands were guarded, distant, professional. He did not once look at her.
She sat up slowly. All her joints ached as though she had been opened up and sewn together once more. She took in the grimy hanging hooks, the buckets, the stained tile mosaics that told of older rites beneath commerce and butchery.
"You remember nothing," said the African man. "I remember everything," she whispered. "Even the part they tried to bury."He nodded. "Then you are awake now."
Footsteps returned. The Afrikaner came back by himself, wiping his hands on an apron. He was wearing a new shirt. He extended a folded letter. Read it outside. Not here.
She took it with both hands. Her hands trembled as she tucked it under her coat. Her body was hers again, but something else had taken residence inside. Something older than fear.
The African led her out. The Antwerp evening smelled of beer and wet dogs. Taxis glided past like ghosts. She entered the back seat of one without checking the plates.
As the car pulled away, she opened the envelope. One page inside, handwritten, no signature:
The Kingdom agreed. No offspring should be born of your line. They fear blood more than treaties. You were not meant to fall in love. That is your curse.
The playboys were bait. The butcher's room, a sign. The Lithuanian? An arms dealer. The blood that flows through your family is fit for war treaties, not weddings. His dead Dutch girlfriend knew the truth. That is why she drowned.".
There are no accidents in royalty. Only executions with more light."
She folded the letter, held it to the car lighter, and let it burn in the ashtray. The driver said nothing. He turned the radio up, where a choir sang in Latin against a slow funeral organ.
The orphan, princess, mistake laid her head against the window and watched the city pass in blurs. Her reflection blinked back, unfamiliar.
Two kids in Thailand waited for a father who had traded bullets for the privilege of touching silk. Contracts were being signed by candlelight in Brussels with her name as collateral.
At 34 Plaats, blood still dried. The hooks swayed gently. The African man ran bleach into the sink and shut the door behind him. The Afrikaner smoked a cigarette and watched the lace curtain settle back into stillness.
And under the butcher's floor, where old drains met secret stone, something breathed, something the kingdom left there when they first deemed the girl disposable. she was no longer theirs.