When vengeance strikes in the form of a bullet out for the princess's blood, Princess Aleia VonAuclair must flee the heart of her country in order to protect the people she loves and take back the pieces of her soul she'd lost to the girl she once l...
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An agonised groan shattered the peaceful darkness.
My fingers dug into my skin as another surge of cramps pulsed down my spine and into my stomach, shooting needles in my lower back.
Burying my face into the couch cushions, it took everything in me not to burst into tears. The pressure in my abdomen doubled over and whenever I shifted even the slightest bit over to the right, it felt like my stomach was a breath away from exploding.
I'd tried to sleep but even in a fetal position, the tension radiating through my body wouldn't subside. In fact, nothing helped. I needed a hot water bottle, and I needed it desperately.
Greta was most probably gardening out in the backyard at this time of day, Bryan didn't shadow me when we were home and Nate was in the den with a bunch of his friends doing Lord knows what, which left me all alone up here.
Not even a guard in sight in the hallway. It was customary rule for guards to take shift only at the stairwell entrance of the royal quarters. It provided us a sense of privacy while still maintaining a relatively safe distance for security.
I hated it a little right now.
With each torturous second that passed by, I grew more and more desperate to ease the extreme discomfort rippling like a torrent through my body, especially when it hurt even to breathe. The cramps were manageable - I was blessed with tolerable cramp levels -, but the bloating on the other hand...
With a shallow, aching breath, I threw the covers off of my body and slumped off of the couch towards my bedroom door.
The hallways beamed with rays of afternoon sunshine, piercing through the floor to ceiling wall of windows and showering the air with scintillating, warm light.
The sudden contrast from the pitch blackness of my room to the blinding hallways triggered the beginnings of a migraine.
How lovely - just the cherry on top.
I inched down the stairs painfully slowly and the shooting pains began to bullet down my legs.
A hiss forced itself past clenched teeth, but I made the trek into the kitchen, my hands clutching my stomach in a futile attempt the opposing pressure would dull the ache. It didn't - much to my discomfort.
The electric kettle was broken because my idiot brother had left the electrical switch on and sparked the fuse, frying the kettle's wires. I rolled my eyes just from the memory, and a renewed wave of irritation flooded me now that I had to ransack the pantry for the whistling kettle and boil water over the stove all because Nate had been a complete dumbass.
After ten minutes of pure agony, I finally found the whistling kettle tucked in one of the storage containers at the bottom of the pantry. I dragged my feet over to the sink and bowed over the counter when the next wave of cramps stabbed at my lower back and pelvis.
