Keep Your Enemies Closer

Epilogue

-Everly-

My brother's blood has barely dried when they drag me to the Throne Room in a flurry of helmets and armour. I'm too shocked - too numb, to fight off their grasp around my waist as they lead me there. No, I'm too occupied with the thoughts swirling in my brain - thoughts of a throat slit and a heart stabbed. Because there he was when I heard the screams from servants and maids to find him dead on his bed with his bride beside him. They were already dead and there was nothing to be done. The wounds were fatal and manic, the killer clearly making sure they were dead. And that killer has a name, one I wish to spit upon. Reyna Aldine. Once she was my greatest friend and now she is my greatest enemy. 

An enemy who has killed my brother, my future sister in law, my lover and my friends. A fraud who came here on behalf of the Witches to spite us, to humiliate us, to punish us. And we let her, let her worm into our lives with her pretty face and kind smiles. My fingers clench to a fist as I am finally dragged into the Throne Room and stationed beside the Throne where my father will sit. They mean to pronounce me heir in my nightclothes and rumpled hair while Donovan's body is still on that bed and not yet in the family vault beneath the Palace. And while he lays as a lifeless soulless corpse I am here replacing the job he was supposed to have as heir to the Crown. The job that was never supposed to be mine. 

Because if I was to be Queen someday I would never be able to marry who I wish to, marry the girl I love but instead some wealthy Lord. So I was content to let Donovan have the duties that came with being King in a distant future. But I suppose now it does not matter because she is dead, her body who knows where. In some distant river or sewer perhaps? 

My hands shake before the Throne, looking at the Throne that will one day be mine and then my children. A Throne that will be stained with blood and gore and the bones of malicious Witches cowering in their forests. 

I let my Father shove me to my knees before him on the cool marble floor, let my eyes of defiance meet his - his that show the well of grief residing in him he cannot reveal. I let him drag the ceremonial sword across my throat without so much as a flinch, barely blinking even once despite the unusual sensation of its sharp metal against my skin. One wrong move and my throat will slice cleanly just like Donovan's did. Blood with gush out like a river of red wine until it pools at my feet and I will collapse in it before it swallows me completely. And then they will take my carcass to the family vault with the blood still dripping like droplets of rain from my neck and lay me down besides my brother so that we are reunited in death and vengeance. 

I keep my eyes on my Father as his sword caress my shoulders and then the top of my head, blessing me in name only. Like I'm not cursed to loss and sorrow. There's a scattered applause from various servants and maids but I don't spare them a glance as I stride back to my room, feeling Father's eyes boring into mine on my back. 

I give up on walking at some point in the endless hallways and run, run until my lungs squeeze with the need for air I cannot provide and race to my bathroom before I throw up my guts. I heave and I heave and I heave until there's nothing left in me to get out. And then my hands are clutching my hair in two fists as I lean against the sink, eyes spotting black like an ink across a canvas. My ears ring about my head, shrieks that bounce around the walls of my skull like a ping pong ball across its table. And with each bounce it feels like a tiny knife of pain is being twisted only slightly but enough for me to move my hands from my hair to my head and fall to the floor as they all pinprick into my brain in a rapid succession. I'm not even aware I'm gasping for breath as I crawl into a ball on the tiles hands grasping for anything to cling onto. 

But they find nothing and eventually I have to focus my attention on the sequence recurring in my brain. 

A brown haired woman's eyes pecked out by crows that have already feasted on the rest of her - a sergeant's throat being ripped out by a wolf's claws - a man with the eyes the same hue of mine laying strewn across the bed matted with blood and gore, eyes open but unseeing and glassy, body strewn like the rag dolls I used to play with when I was a child - a dark haired beauty shoving me into an ice cold bath again and again until I'm gasping for air and she looks at me with merciless eyes brimming with contempt -