Play Me Once, Your Highness by itsvlada
Play Me Once, Your Highness
Description
The Crown's Trial is a video game that has twelve suitors, one hidden Prince, and a rule so simple even a seven-time loser understands it: give your virtue to the wrong man, and you wake up in a brothel. Tessa Greer is the world's foremost expert on giving it to the wrong man, virtually speaking. Then she falls down a staircase and wakes up in the Arrival Hall of Vaelith. The court knowledge she has thanks to all the previous walkthroughs would be genuinely useful if the game's villain hadn't spawned with her stepfather's face, the one who destroyed her ability to trust men. Now, Tessa knows the rules. She knows the traps. She knows exactly which suitors are worth her time. What she doesn't know is why the one man she keeps ending up in the same room with has no duchy, no campaign, and the most inconvenient habit of being exactly what she didn't come here to want.
Chapter 1
Jun 5, 2026
Tessa's POV
Brian picks up his wine and says something about a movie he saw last night, and I think he might be the one.
Really, he's gorgeous. Dark hair, clean jaw, shoulders that make a button-down look like an engineering problem the shirt barely solved. Ten dates. A month of dinners and walks with a man who texts back within the hour and asks about my day.
By every metric I have, Brian is the best man who's ever sat across from me.
"You're staring," he says.
"You have wine on your lip."
He doesn't. He wipes it anyway, smiling, and the smile is warm and real and I catalog it like evidence for a case I'm building against myself.
See? He's kind. He drove forty minutes for a restaurant you mentioned once.
Brian reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine.
My chest goes quiet. Restaurant noise — silverware, couple arguing two tables over, jazz that's not good enough to play this loud — recedes into a flat middle distance, and what's left is his palm on my knuckles and the familiar sensation of my body beginning to leave.
I squeeze his hand.
You stay right here.
"I made a reservation at the dessert place on Fourth," he says. "The lemon tart one."
"You remembered the lemon tart."
"I remember everything you tell me about food." His thumb traces a line across my wrist — small, tender, perfectly calibrated, and my nervous system reads it as perimeter breach.
My pulse spikes. A cold thread pulls tight behind my sternum, breath stalls halfway up, and my fingers go rigid under his palm like something inside me just flipped a breaker. A full-body no that fires before my brain can overrule it.
Gerald did this. My stepfather walked into my life at twelve, raped me at sixteen, and installed a security system that can't tell threat from tenderness.
My mother saw the proof, picked the mortgage, and I was out at seventeen. Gas station, studio apartment, two lessons: bodies can be taken without permission, and then they stop cooperating entirely.
I'm twenty-one now. The best man I've ever met is touching my wrist in a candlelit restaurant and my body is running evacuation drills.
"Tessa? You okay?"
"Perfect." Smooth, bright, nowhere near true. "Tell me about the lemon tart."
He does. I nod, perform Normal Girl On Nice Date until his shoulders relax. Meanwhile I'm calculating whether you can want someone this badly in theory and be this incapable of letting them touch you.
I've liked Brian since date two. By six his name was showing up in the margins of my grocery lists. By eight I pictured his hands on me and the picture was good, it was vivid, and for forty seconds I believed I'd outgrown the damage.
Then date nine. He kissed me in the parking lot and my jaw locked and my hands went numb and I smiled for four seconds and made a joke about the cold.
"Hey," Brian says, setting down his glass. Pre-serious face. "We've been doing this for a month."
"We have."
"And I think it's going well." A rehearsed pause. "Come back to my place tonight. I have a surprise for you."
Every organ sends the same signal.
I look at this man who has been patient for thirty days and I know that no amount of kindness will rewire what Gerald did. Not ten dates. Not a hundred.
I see it all at once — the whole future laid out like a sentencing.
Tonight he'll touch my shoulder and I'll flinch. Next week he'll reach for me in bed and I'll go somewhere behind my own eyes where no one can follow.
He'll stay gentle for a month, two, three, because he's decent, and then the patience will curdle into questions.
What's wrong with you? Why can't you just relax? Am I not enough?
And I'll watch the warmth drain out of him, and it will be my fault, and he'll never say so.
"Brian." My voice is steady thanks to years of practice. "It's over. I'm sorry."
Confusion, hurt, then the careful blankness of a man choosing not to make a scene. "Did I say something wrong?"
"No. You said everything right." I grab my bag. "I'm sorry. You're a good person and this isn't your fault."
I leave before he answers.
The drive takes twelve minutes. I cry for eleven. By the time I park I'm not sad — I'm angry at a body reprogrammed at sixteen that refuses every update since.
My apartment is dark and small and exactly the right temperature. I lock the door, kick off my heels, and sit down at the desk before my coat is even off.
The monitor glows. The Crown's Trial loading screen, still up from this morning. I click PLAY and finally get to spend the evening with my favorite men in the game that will never hurt me like reality does.
Maya, my best friend and the only person who knows about Gerald, thinks I need to date actual men. But real men are horrible, are they not? In bed and otherwise.
I do want to have sex. But my body cooperates only under sealed-lab conditions when I am alone in front of a screen or reading fiction when no one can reach back.
The Crown's Trial gives me Liam, commanding and possessive in a way that never crosses a line because the line is the screen. Johnny, soft and earnest, whose hands I can almost feel. Carter, who calls me princess and means it.
These men give me want without consequence, heat without contact, the only intimacy my body doesn't treat as invasion.
The game loads. Vaelith fills the screen — blue drapes, candles, the court of a kingdom that doesn't exist and matters more to me than most things that do.
The rules are simple. I play a gem, a noblewoman presented to twelve suitors at the Royal Court. One of them is the true Prince. The rest are pretenders.
My job is to figure out which one is real before I give him my virginity on the wedding night. That is, if I don't lose it before that night even arrives. The royal court is a dangerous place for a woman, you know.
If I choose right, I become queen. If I choose wrong, I'm discarded and shipped off to the Wet Rose Pleasure House, the game's cheerful euphemism for a brothel, where the failed candidates go to serve the men who tricked them.
No second chances within a playthrough. Just restart and try again.
I have given my virginity to seven wrong men in six months. And I still have no clue who the Prince might be, no matter how hard I am watching for the game's tips.
This time, I'm sure it is Horace, Duke of Ashenmere. He has a duchy. The game doesn't hand a fake prince a duchy.
Besides, I've checked his dialogue against every prince-coded flag. He knows the old queen's maiden name. When I chose the emerald gown for the fifth banquet, he said 'My mother wore that color' and looked away.
The game gives me the choice: [Give yourself to him] or [Wait another night]. I've waited seven playthroughs. I click Give.
The intimacy scene is tasteful but quickly fades.
The screen goes dark. One beat. Two.
💔 TRIAL FAILED 💔
You have given your virtue to a pretender.
The Wet Rose Pleasure House is expecting you.
Better luck next time?
[RESTART] [QUIT]
"You lost again," I say to the ceiling, to God, to the smug broken heart that has no business being this cheerful about my eighth trip to a pixelated brothel.
I throw my headphones. The cord catches my ankle, pulls taut, redirects the whole thing into my shin. Left ear cup hits bone.
"FUCK!" The pain is sharp and radiating outward. There's a red mark that'll be purple by morning.
I limp to the bathroom to find a first-aid kit. My shin is throbbing. My eyes are blurring — tears or exhaustion or both, doesn't matter, because my foot catches the bath mat and my hand grabs the towel rack for balance.
The rack was never properly bolted, so it tears free. I go sideways. Shin meets the toilet base, and then I'm falling for real, no hands, nothing to catch, just tile rising fast.
The back of my skull hits the floor.
Well, what a pathetic way to die. Dumped a good man, lost a fake game, killed by my own towel rack. If there's an afterlife, I'm not telling anyone how I got there.
I come back to silk rustling, soft voices, and ambient noise that belongs nowhere near a bathroom in Ohio.
I open my eyes and see a high stone ceiling, candles everywhere, and women in corsets adjusting each other's sleeves.
I'm standing in a long, vaulted room with pale blue drapery. And I know this place.
The Arrival Hall of the Royal Court of Vaelith.
No fucking way. What am I doing inside the game?
Play Me Once, Your Highness
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