MAFIA'S WRONG TARGET

39: TIME NEVER HEALS

SYBIL'S POV

Kingland,
08:33 pm

Now I understand why kings never harm babies. Now I understand why he saved that child in the hospital.
From his perspective, the story was entirely different.

It wasn’t that his actions could be justified—but they weren’t meaningless either. There had always been reasons. His ways of solving things were brutal, unfamiliar, forged in a world far removed from mine. He had been built this way. Shaped by a reality I had never lived.

I couldn’t move. I stayed seated where I was, frozen in place.

With nothing but fragments of his past, he had pulled me into a world I had never imagined for him.

For a moment, I forgot what he was feared for. I forgot the blood, the power, the name that made people tremble.

I remembered that he was human. That beneath all that control, there was a heart—one he had learned to bury too well.

I had never allowed myself to see him this way. To consider that he, too, carried wounds. That he had been hurt so deeply some scars never learned how to fade.

I had thought his cruelty was indulgence. Entertainment. Choice.
But it wasn’t.

It was vengeance.

When people like us lose anything, we cling desperately to what little power we have left and want revenge. So how could a man who controls countries sit still and watch his family be slaughtered—without turning the world upside down to destroy whoever caused it?

I had believed what he did to me was the worst of him. But I had forgotten—what he did to me was mercy compared to what he was capable of.

He had been a child. A child forced to watch his sister die. His mother die. And just when time should have softened the blows, fate took again—
His love left him too. Not all at once.
But enough to break whatever had survived.

And suddenly, the monster everyone feared looked terrifyingly… inevitable.

Behind those dark orbs wasn’t an empty soul—
but a son.
A brother.
A man who wanted justice.
And he would go to any length for the people he loved. He already had.

Years upon years of pain—endured, carried, buried. And here I was, breaking over a few months of uncertainty in my own life.

The way he had forced me to become stronger…

I felt an unexpected urge to stay seated and listen to him speak.
To know him. Or maybe—just maybe—to console him.

The electricity came back suddenly, blinding me for a moment.

I almost forgot I had been sitting in the dark—comfortably so. For the first time, darkness hadn’t frightened me.
He turned his face instantly, but not before I caught it— unshed tears glittering in his eyes.

He's crying?

I stared at his turned head. Perhaps he was hiding the weakness he never allowed the world to see.

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured. The words were quiet, but genuine. I felt it—for him, for his family.

“I want to hear it from those murderers,” he said coldly, finally looking at me. The tears were gone, replaced by rage. “Not to forgive them.” Words were strong, voice was steady, he did sounded like Hunter King we all know.

But something had changed, perhaps the way I used to see him, right now I was seeing beyond what he always aspire to show.

As much as I've understand him, he wouldn’t have liked to be pitied or sympathized with.