“Good night.”
And with that, she walked away from Lorent. She grabbed her own hands, they were trembling, the voices in her head were getting louder, mocking her and laughing at her. Telling her the same thing that Lorent said.
Zuri felt like there was fire inside of her body, which was hard to be extinguished, it gnawed in her chest and burned her with anger.
Her whole body was trembling, it was overwhelming, but what was harder to control was her rage. Her desire to kill someone to quench the fury that gnawed in her mind.
Frenzy thoughts flashed in her mind and she didn’t know where she was going, this garden was confusing, there were so many red colors around her. The color of blood. She wanted to see blood…
“Great Queen Zuri, are you, alright?” A warrior on patrol asked her, he looked so young and he must be younger than Zuri.
Zuri didn’t answer him. She stared at him, because she didn’t know what he was talking about. The voices in her head were getting loud. She needed to get to Khaos. She knew how to shut them up.
“I will walk you back to your quarter, if you don’t mind,” he said, the look of worry on his young face. “Come here, follow me.”
Zuri didn’t even realize that she was panting. She didn’t feel good. She couldn’t hear what he said, but she followed him anyway. She needed to get out of this garden. The color of red rose around her made her sick to her stomach.
They looked like blood, as if someone had a lot of free time and painted them with real blood.
“Great Queen Zuri, what are you doing in the middle of the night here?” the warrior asked her again, after they finally came out of the garden rose and Zuri could finally breathe. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
“What’s your name?” Zuri suddenly asked, she stopped walking and then stared at the warrior’s boots.
“Me? I am Collin.” The warrior stopped walking too and looked at her with confusion because she didn’t walk with him. “Something is wrong Great Queen Zuri?”
“Why do you patrol alone?” Zuri lifted her eyes to meet his.
“It’s normal to patrol alone in this palace.”
“Is it normal to have dirty boots walk around the palace?” Zuri nodded at his boots. “It’s not raining for a few days, there is no muddy ground around here. Where that dirt come from?”
“Huh?” Collin looked down at his boots and then laughed sheepishly. “I was…” he made a wrong gesture that triggered Zuri and this was fatal for him, because the next thing that he knew, Zuri had slit his throat.
It almost felt like an instinct for her. She saw this gesture as a threat, especially when she was not in her right mind and he reached to his pocket. It reminded her of when his father took out the needles from his pocket to hurt her.
“Zuri… Zuri!”
Zuri snapped back when she heard her name was being called and lifted her head to see Caiden was standing not too far from her and when she looked back to her hands, she saw they were bloody. The warrior’s head was mangled. It seemed, she had been clawing him relentlessly.
Caiden didn’t immediately approach her, he put distance from her, since this was not the first time for him to encounter Zuri when she was losing it and he learned a hard lesson no to approach her if he didn’t want to be the next victim.
Instead, he called for Khaos.
“It’s okay, it’s okay… he is only dead. It’s okay… no problem.”
Caiden glanced at Khaos and then Zuri, who was sitting next to him.
“Yeah, I killed him. I figured he is not one of the royal guards.” Caiden then pointed his finger at the man’s boats. “See? There is mud there. He is not from around the palace.”
Yes, Caiden took the blame for the death of the young guard, because Khaos told him to do so. He didn’t want the attention fell on his mate.
Meanwhile, the two of them had not yet talked about why Zuri sneaked out of the bedroom in the middle of the night. They had no time to discuss that with the dead body before their eyes.
“There is a silver dagger in his pocket,” one of the warriors, who checked on the dead body reported. He took the dagger from the pocket and then handed it to king Eyren.
“The rebels,” Lorent said, once he saw the crest on the dagger. He glanced at the young rebel’s dead body and scrunched his brows. “He is the rebel. You need to tighten the security around the palace. One of them managed to sneak into the palace, it meant, there will be more, who can do that too in the future.”
Currently, they were standing in the same hallway, where Zuri had murdered the young rebel. When it happened, Caiden caught her and he immediately called for Khaos to come over, while Zuri cleaned herself up.
That was why, no one suspected her for the crime.
However, Lorent looked at Zuri in a way that she was sure that he knew she was the one, who had killed the young guard. He knew that she was the Shell, what else he couldn’t guess? Eyren was simply too full of himself to see the obvious.
And the way Lorent looked at Zuri didn’t go unnoticed by Khaos.
“Strengthen the security around the palace!” Eyren ordered furiously. He grumbled about how these rebels came to kill him because he agreed to put Wolfdale kingdom under the lycan’s flag. “I want everyone to be checked!”
“Let’s go back to our room, we need to sleep,” Khaos said, as he grabbed Zuri’s hand, couldn’t care less with Eyren’s rapid order to the warriors around him.
Zuri followed him, so did Caiden, but once they had put distance away from the commotion, Khaos stopped walking and turned around to look at Caiden.
“Leave.”
“Hm?” Caiden stopped walking too and looked at Khaos with confusion. His mind worked slowly to read the situation.
“Leave us alone.”
“Oh, right. Sure.” Caiden waved his hand. “Bye.” He then walked away from the two of them. He didn’t know what they were going to talk about, but he didn’t want to know either. From the look of it alone, he was sure that Zuri was in trouble.
He didn’t want to get into trouble with Khaos when he looked upset.
“Tell me, what are you talking about with him?” Khaos asked, his voice was neutral, but his eyes were sharp.
Zuri could see this coming and she didn’t see the benefit of lying to him. She had never intended to lie to him in the first place, so she told him everything.
Once she was done, it was so hard to tell whether Khaos was angry at her, or he was disappointed, or what. She couldn’t gauge his emotions.
“That woman is a lost cause,” Zuri said. “I would rather die than to be like her.”
Khaos closed his eyes and when he opened them again, his gaze softened a little bit. “You will not be like her and you will not die.”
He cupped her face gently and this was enough to make Zuri relaxed a bit. She liked his touch. She liked the close proximity between them and more importantly, she liked how gently his voice was.
He loved her, right?
He loved her enough to choose her.
“Will you continue to create a beauty blood?”
Khaos didn’t answer that question, he backed her to the wall and start kissing her, until she forgot the question and relished the moment with him. She wanted nothing else, but his love. His genuine love. Did she already reach that?
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