HIS PRINCESS | K.TH

The Shadow

Six months later

V

It's past noon.

Thick sunlight spills through the curtains, no matter how tightly I seal them. The air is dry, and I thirst for water. I lick my lips, my tongue running over chapped skin.

Today was one of the rare days I didn't have anything to do.

But these were the days that proved most painful.

My mind is full of her, with nothing to distract my thoughts. I stay in bed, buried deep in the blankets. I can't feel my own hands, from last night. Bruises litter my knuckles.

Every night.

After that day I'd fought Jungkook in the Ring, he had never stopped me again. He was only there after, when I was too weak and exhausted to take myself back to the Skygrounds.

Pain seizes my chest. It feels fresh now than as it was seven months ago.

Why.

Aeri, why.

The pain slowly deepens. And soon I find myself rasping for breath, hand pressed to my upper chest. I shiver— feeling cold when I shouldn't be.

How could you do this to me.

Nightmares, every single moment I was asleep. Of the things that could be happening to her when I wasn't there, of the last expression I'd seen of her. Her face is burned into my mind.

But her voice.

I'm slowly forgetting the sound of her voice. She doesn't talk in my nightmares any longer.

My memory is fragmenting.

Every day I feel as if I'm slowly going insane. I'd considered suicide multiple times.

The only reason I'd stopped myself was because I knew how much it would anger my father. He'd kill Aeri and leave her in pieces. He was the only one who knew where she was, after all.

I had to kill him.

Kill him to find her. I'd rip his throat apart, but I had to be patient. There would only be a single chance. I had to wait.

And hope that the time would come before I lost my own sanity to myself.

________________________________

AERI

I wonder if he's looking at the same moon I look at now.

The room is cramped. A small window lets the pale moonlight in, washing the single room in silver. My back aches from the cold, hardwood floor.

This place had been the only one I could find. The one as far away from my home as possible, somewhere that not even Rin could find me.