Broken But Unburnt

Chapter 45 - Gisella

Chapter 45: Gisella

Palace of the Centauri Throne: Kingdom of Karil

Sara had been watching Gisella all morning and, as badly as she tried to hide it, Gisella was well aware. Her maid was worried about her and rightly so. Gisella had been having trouble sleeping ever since her late night visit from the Chaos himself. Every time she started to drift off, a breeze would blow in from the window and she would sit bolt upright in her bed, reaching for the dagger she now kept hidden beneath her pillows.

Her insomnia had only worsened with the recent invasion of the palace. Servants had spent days afterwards mopping up the blood and disposing of the corpses. Some she knew, some of the faces she recognized. The girl from the Rising Star, some others she had seen there. They had already been in the palace. They had been her spies. She was the one who had let them in. And she knew that Nicolas saw it too from the way he watched her on the first day that they carted away the bodies of Fermo and Iva. She hadn't seen Nico. That had chilled her blood even more than the others. If he had managed to escape with the information he had gleaned in the attack. She hadn't brought them on fully, not yet, and she would never trust them with the tasks she gave Freya and Leon but she had vouched for them, she had brought them into the fold.

Nicolas hadn't spoken a word of it to her. But she felt the distance yawning wide between them all the same. A little bit of his trust in her had wavered that day and she wasn't sure she could ever get it back.

Since then, she hadn't seen him. Not once. She had assumed he was avoiding her until one morning, a few days later, there was a knock on her door and she asked Sara to open it. Freya and Leon waited on the other side.

"You look like shit," Leon observed honestly as the two of them barged in in their usual way. Sara looked appalled as she scurried out of the room to take Gisella's laundry for washing, shutting the door tightly behind her.

"How kind of you," Gisella groaned in response. "I presume you have something to tell me?"

"A bit of gossip," Freya nodded, bouncing onto her bed. "It might be nothing but you said to come to you if anything felt out of place."

"What is it?" Gisella asked, leaning forward to examine the darkening skin under her eyes in the mirror in front of her.

"The king hasn't left his room in four days."

Gisella's gaze snapped back to them.

"Four days," Gisella repeated. "You're sure?"

Freya nodded.

"He's seen no visitors but the Captain," she said.

"None?"

"Not even a whore."

Gisella raised a brow. That was new.

"Good work," she told them, already reaching for powder she hoped could mask her exhaustion. "Now go."

They obeyed her command, hurrying off to their next assignment. Gisella rose from the vanity table, once she was satisfied that she no longer looked like the living dead, and dressed. Fresh tunic and pants, new boots laced up to her thigh, she made her way from her room and toward the king's. She could stay in bed for days, lamenting the loss of her badass credentials. He could not. He was the king, after all.

His guards were apparently instructed to turn her away. Unfortunately for them, Gisella was not so easily dissuaded. She brushed them off and pushed past them to his door, pounding on it with a fist until it swung open, revealing the young king himself, bed-tousled hair and unbuttoned shirt revealing his smooth, muscled chest beneath.