Inés had seen what happened to the other brides.
Prince Adrián kissed each one before the royal court and, seconds later, her skin turned white and rigid until she became stone.
Thirteen women already stood like statues throughout the palace corridors.
When Inés’s turn came, everyone expected the same ending.
Adrián approached and kissed her.
One second passed.
Then another.
Inés looked at her hands.
They were still warm. She was still breathing.
The prince stepped backward, pale.
“Why aren’t you turning to stone?”
Inés didn’t answer. She ran toward the statues and stopped in front of Teresa, the previous bride.
She took the stone wrist and placed two fingers against it.
Then her eyes suddenly widened.
“She has a pulse…”
Adrián froze.
Inés looked at the thirteen white figures filling the corridor.
“Adrián… they’re alive.”
For several seconds, neither of them moved.
Adrián stared at Teresa as though Inés’s words had stopped making sense.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered. “I watched them change.”
“So did I,” Inés replied. “But she has a pulse.”
She placed her fingers against Teresa’s wrist again.
Weak. Slow. But unmistakable.
A heartbeat.
Inés moved to the next statue.
She had a pulse too.
Then another.
And another.
All thirteen women were alive.
Adrián moved to call the guards, but Inés grabbed his arm.
“No.”
“They need doctors.”
“And who controls the palace doctors?”
Only then did Adrián understand why she had entered the ceremony seemingly prepared for something.
Inés touched the enormous blue pendant around her neck.
“My sister’s name was Clara,” she said.
Adrián frowned.
“There was never a Clara among my brides.”
“Because here they called her Teresa.”
Inés pointed toward the statue whose wrist she had just examined.
The color drained from Adrián’s face.
Inés explained that her sister had arrived at the palace six months earlier. Soon afterward, the family received an official letter saying Teresa had died during a sudden illness.
But the palace never returned her body.
Then stories began spreading about the prince’s “stone brides.”
Inés had recognized her sister in a painting secretly removed from the palace by a servant.
From that moment, she began investigating.
Every missing woman had one thing in common: before the ceremony, she received a ceremonial necklace with an enormous blue stone.
Inés had received one too.
But the night before her wedding, she examined the pendant under candlelight.
She found a tiny hole in its setting.
She took the necklace to an elderly apothecary who had once worked for the royal family.
The man turned pale when he saw it.
Inside the gemstone was a tiny compartment.
There was no magic inside.
There was a substance.
A dose could leave a person conscious but unable to move, slow her breathing and temporarily alter the appearance of her skin when it reacted with another compound placed on the prince’s lips.
The “cursed kiss” was a trick.
Before entering the hall, Inés had replaced the gemstone with a glass imitation.
That was why she survived.
Adrián stared at her in horror.
“I knew nothing about this.”
Inés studied him for several seconds.
“Then let’s find out who did.”
That same night they entered the palace’s private archives.
Adrián knew an old staircase once used by servants. At the end they found a locked door that could only be opened with the royal seal.
Inside were account books, letters and files.
Thirteen folders bore women’s names.
Adrián opened the first.
They were not marriage records.
They were medical files.
Every one carried the same signature:
Queen Leonor.
Adrián’s mother.
Inés felt a chill.
Then they heard a voice behind them.
“You should have accepted the story about the curse.”
The queen stood in the doorway.
She did not look surprised.
Adrián stepped between her and Inés.
“What did you do to them?”
Leonor walked slowly into the room.
“I kept them alive.”
“You made them prisoners!”
The queen shook her head.
“You don’t understand what I was protecting.”
For generations, she explained, the crown had used marriages to secure alliances with the kingdom’s most powerful families. But several of the chosen young women had discovered documents proving that Leonor was diverting money from the treasury and buying the loyalty of generals and judges.
She could not allow them to speak.
Killing them would have triggered investigations.
Making them simply disappear would have raised suspicions.
But a “curse” was perfect.
The people were afraid to approach the statues.
Families accepted that their daughters had fallen victim to something supernatural.
And Adrián, without knowing it, had become the center of the lie.
“You made me believe I was killing them?” he asked.
For the first time, the prince’s voice trembled.
Leonor remained silent.
That silence was enough.
Adrián pulled the thirteen files from the drawer.
“It’s over.”
The queen smiled.
“And who will believe you?”
Inés lifted a small service bell she had found beside the archives.
“They will.”
Adrián had already secretly sent two guards he trusted completely to bring the city physician and several members of the council.
They were now entering the corridor.
Leonor ordered them to arrest Adrián and Inés.
No one obeyed.
Before dawn, independent doctors examined all thirteen women.
They confirmed that every one of them was alive.
Reversing their condition took hours.
Teresa was the first to respond.
Her fingers moved.
Then she slowly opened her eyes.
Inés dropped to her knees beside her.
“Clara…”
Her sister’s lips trembled.
“I knew you’d come.”
Inés began to cry and carefully embraced her.
Over the following days, the other women woke.
And they spoke.
Each told the same story: the necklace, the ceremony, the kiss, and then months or years trapped inside an unmoving body, conscious of the voices and footsteps around them.
Their testimony, the medical files and the financial records made the truth impossible to hide.
Leonor was stripped of her authority and put on trial together with the doctors and officials who had helped her.
Adrián voluntarily surrendered his royal privileges until an investigation established that he had never known about the plot.
Months later, the palace’s great corridor reopened.
The thirteen statues were gone.
In their place hung thirteen portraits of the women, each accompanied only by her real name.
Teresa returned to her family.
The others began new lives too.
One afternoon, Adrián found Inés standing where the first statue had once been.
“I suppose after everything that’s happened, you don’t want to marry a prince anymore,” he said.
Inés looked at the enormous blue pendant he held in his hand.
It was the false necklace that had saved her life.
“A prince? No.”
Adrián lowered his eyes.
Then she smiled.
“But perhaps someday, Adrián.”
One year later, they married.
There was no ceremonial necklace.
There was no test.
And before he kissed her, Adrián asked:
“Are you sure?”
Inés looked toward Teresa, alive and smiling among the guests.
Then she took Adrián’s face between her hands.
“This time, yes.”
They kissed.
No one turned to stone.
And for the first time in many years, when the palace bells began to ring, they were not announcing another victim.
They were announcing a wedding.
