Killing Softly ✞ (gxg)

27 | you & i

Lily laid in the tub of the bathroom, eyes closed, breaths trembling, and the poem Rose had written her pressed right against her chest.

She almost wished she could've opened up her chest and stored the paper in the chambers of her heart, but the closest she could get was folding it up neatly and tucking it inside her bra on the left side so that it laid right against her heart.

As she readjusted her dress, exhaling a deep breath of somewhat relief and comfort, she suddenly heard a loud ruckus come from outside the castle. Not being able to simply sit in the tub, she quickly jumped up and swung the curtains away, stumbling out of the tub and out of the bathroom.

When she opened the bathroom door and ran into her room, she saw that Holden was already kneeling on her bed and peering out the window, his lips parted in shock.

"What is it?!" she exclaimed, her blue eyes wide with fear as she climbed up onto the bed next to him and reached up, peering out the window herself.

Outside the castle in the near distance, where there was usually a line of guards encircling the entire premise, there was instead a line of dead guards laying all around in the snow, their dark red blood seeping into the area of snow upon which their bodies laid. To her stomach's misfortune, the girl also saw heads rolling away from the bodies, having just been cut off by the next thing her blue eyes saw—figures dressed in red walking towards the castle.

"It's the rebels," Holden whispered grimly, watching as a few of them carried a large wooden plank so tall that when they threw it down in front of the moat surrounding the front of the castle, it reached all the way across to the other side. Holden watched in horror as the rebels began marching across the moat, headed straight for the castle doors.

Lily gasped, slowly leaning away from the window as her heart began pounding in her chest. "But I thought Rose went to them with an army," she spoke softly, as if she was afraid someone would hear her. "Is that the same army? Oh my God, did they defeat them?! Is Rose—"

Her words were cut off when Holden quickly slapped a hand over her mouth, leaning close to the girl who trembled and gasped under his palm. "You can't worry about that right now, Lily. This castle is being invaded and we have to focus on not getting killed."

The blonde's eyes brimmed with tears of fear, not for herself, but for Rose. If the rebel army invading them was the same army she had went to fight, that meant she was defeated. It made her heart feel like it had been shot right in the middle, catastrophically causing a crack to travel over the expanse of the organ, shattering it to pieces right there in her chest. She felt her stomach shrivel up and twist into knots that could never be untied.

The only thing she wanted to think about was Rose, that tall brunette vampire who had suddenly become the most important thing in her human life. She was her everything, and even though Rose was usually the one protecting Lily, the girl felt a sudden urge to protect her and to find out if she was safe and to do something, anything to ensure she was okay.

But Holden was right. The castle was being invaded, and it was only a matter of time before they came barging into that room and outnumbering her and the curly-headed guard who had become her best friend. She needed to think as clearly as she could, to focus on surviving and then dealing with the repercussions of this bloody war later.

Holden watched her eyes, which had been misty and panicked and full of unwarranted consternation, slowly harden themselves, like a warrior rising up valorously in the midst of battle. That obstinacy, that determination and fiery fight to survive that he saw in her eyes the very first second he met her, returned in those crystal orbs, and he, himself, felt tremors of honor at the sight of it.