“No, you’re not,” he said.
“Then, tell me!”
“I can’t.”
“So, now what, you are to go back into the dark recesses of that wing and not give me the answers I desperately want no—need to know all things considering?”
“It’s better this way.”
“Better!” I scoffed, driving my feet down to the floor and driving myself to him. “Nights on end, you ask me the same bloody question. You come back from gods know where in the dead of night covered in blood yet claim you only drink from the willing. You disappear into the west wing that I am not to go anywhere near with a door of shadows that nearly killedme. I have more questions than answers and you are either avoiding it or hiding them from me.”
I beat his chest, my fists balled against the fabric of his shirt. I rested my head on him, and there was not a single heartbeat. Not one.
Silas raised a hand, resting on the back of my head, taking a few hard exhales. His other hand shook at his side, and I did not dare to gaze upward. A beast—a man struggling against the inner demons inside his own mind.
I closed my eyes. The thumbing in my chest grew louder as the terrible decisions I had made pushed me further into danger. My head was muddled and confused by not the man in front of me but of the strangeness of it all.
There was much in this muchness drowning out sanity in which madness had brought me to.
“Say something,” I said, my own heart ravished inside my chest.
“You called me a beast, and you choose to believe what others have to say. I also hurt you and I do not want you to get hurt because of me, so this is simply the best I can do.” Silas pushed me away, retreating behind the door. “Stay out of the west wing.”
Silas swept the door closed, leaving me alone in silence.
May 20, XXXX
I write this date out as a reminder to her. I have written many of my stories in these pages. It was right before the summer. My father had taken ill, and it had been becoming clearer that I, as the crowned prince, would be assuming the throne the close to death he stepped. The weight of the crown becomes hard to bear to where I wish I was a stranger, a faceless man living among them to do whatever it is I desire to do. I sit here writing all of this, and I am still unsure of what it is that I want out of life. The only choice I have is breathing down my neck, telling me it is the only way, the only choice I will ever have in this puny existence that is my life. Now, I have two days left before I am crowned King. I know there are plans to dispose of me. The entire court acts as if I do not know that they disapprove of me. That loving my enemy was the reason for all our woes that she is responsible for her country’s actions in which she is not the ruler of.
I still can see her, her fiery red hair among the red roses of the courtyard, with the daylight caressing her skin in ways I could not. At least not in the way that I wanted to.
When we first met, this was where I found her, nestled between the hedges, clipping the bushes with tender lover and care. There among those mazes I fell in love with her and how she gave such tender love to the roses to grow them so well and high. Even then, there was no way we would be able to be together. I was the crowned Prince of Amaris, and she was a princess brought here to unite us yet is not whom I saw in those softer moments mistaking her for the daughter of a gardener and she mistaking me as the same.
The simplicity of her life without the weight of a country to bear to only be concerned with tending to roses. I know I have simplified her life so that there was more to her and to the struggles she faced before we had ever crossed paths. I was right to not underestimate her, as it turns out she was the princess, and I fell harder than I ever did before.
Then, like that, she was gone. Murdered by the same people who wished for war and to ensure that I was trapped to be nothing more than a puppet.
A measly puppet.
Even the Nicholaes are getting antsy with my engagement to Narcisa. They want us to be married within days of my coronations, ones I have disapproved of. Thereis not much there to persuade their minds further from any other notion than to seal the alliance between our two families in marriage. I am sickened by this barbaric notion and Narcisa has been trying the last few weeks since her death to try and replace her.
“You will come to love me” is what she said at the time.
Narcisa was the reason she may have been dead.
I can’t let her know about the fact that the love of my life is dead. She would have had my head if she knew that it was the enemy. “Then we can take care of {REDACTED} to bring prosperity to our countries.”
It was hard to sit there in those meetings as my advisors spoke on how the coronation should look or the pending wedding. Narcisa flitters around the castle now, talking at lengths about what will change once she is crowned queen. She controls the meetings; she seems to have found her way into the council meetings conspiring with the nobles in how best to launch an attack after the attempted murder of the prince.
I did not tell them the attempted murder was on the crown Princess of {REDACTED}. If we did not meet in the garden after the party, if I did not sendthat note to her—would things have played out differently. Would she have been alive right now? Or would there have been a war waged against our nation where a choice is to be made?
To love or to die.
R
Fifteen
Day turned to night, and I sat in the seat where, night after night, Silas asked for his name in which I never have a name for him. That night, it seemed different.
