Royal with Rebel (Royal #2: Book 2)

8

-• monsters of the past •-

Sara Rajawat

I open my eyes to a bright sunny day.

Except that I loathe everything about today. Twenty- two years ago on this day I lived a reality that became my nightmare for the rest of my life. It's the tenth of September. The day I lost my mother, the day I lost my sister, the day I was born. Or the day I wasn't supposed to be born. I think about a lot of things that could have happened right if I didn't exist. Starting from my mother, because she would have been alive still, then my sister who could have lived her own life instead of sacrificing it to make sure I live according to my own choices and build my own dreams. It is everyday that I resent my existence, it is on this day I wish to obliterate it into oblivion. Of all the things that I'd change if given a chance, not existing would be perhaps the first of it, and the last.

I've never celebrated my birthday. Not when I was a child, not when I was a teen, not when I became an adult. Nobody was as enthusiastic about my birthday as my sister was, but she never forced me to celebrate it either. She won't wish me, because that'd ruin my mood for the rest of the day, so she'd only cook me delicious food and sneak me into her room and we'd dance the whole night away.

My sister wasn't a Princess because she was born in a castle with a crown, she was a Princess because she wasn't afraid of sacrificing herself for everything she loves. She had a mind far more vast than the universe, going far down deep than the ocean. She could surmount the world within herself, all aspects of it; the good, the bad, the worse, the evil, and still be lenient enough to offer her kindness. She didn't deserve to lose against death like that. She didn't deserve to die in the cruel hands of the monsters who had abandoned humanity and thrived with sins in their blood. They had taken what wasn't theirs to take. They might have been the monsters in my sister's life, but I'd be the monster in theirs, and I'd make sure none of them live to tell the last tale I'll write with their blood.

Releasing a strangled breath, I open my eyes again, glaring at the sun that streams through the blinds. I go to tug out my hand to shield my eyes but find it interlaced with the man I was hoping to forget about. He has his fingers tightly knit into mine, dishevelled dark hair falling loosely over his forehead, soft breaths escaping his lips as he sleeps peacefully with his forehead on our connected hands. I don't want to wake him up because it's only going to make everything even more awkward. So I go to remove my hand from his carefully, but as my luck goes, his lashes flutter open and the onyx eyes reveal themselves; the eclipse of his own sky, bathed in darkness sans any hope for the light to shine through.

Lately, they've turned warm.

There's a myth in Hindu mythology, you don't look at eclipse because it's a bad omen. During this phase, the demon God holds the sun and the moon by his mouth, thus obscuring any light to pass through, emitting the evil energy in all its glory.

I hated looking into his eyes in the past. They were the embodiment of everything evil. He didn't care who he trampled on as long as he was charging forward with all his power and forces. His eyes obscured all the lights he might have held from within, only emitting cruelty and rage. He was the eclipse in his own life, darkening his own days, demon to his own morals.

People have their dark days, he was entirely in the dark.

I envy him now.

Because it feels like we've replaced ourselves in each other's life.

His eyes, despite being the same, don't remind me of eclipses anymore. But of the cold nights when you greedily soak up the warmth inside your homes. I'm not sure which part of that analogy is he though. The cold night or the warm home?