Royal On The Run (unedited)

Twenty-Eight

Deacon

When Amara's voice faded to nothing, I stared at Sebastian. He'd been playing a game of scrabble with Naomi when we'd heard the voices, and he'd shot up from the floor to the communications desk like a cheetah chasing its prey.

"They got Natalie, Sebastian. What do we do?" We couldn't just sit around and wait. I was tired of waiting. We had to take a stand, do something, make Anthony pay for what he'd done to us, to this country.

Sebastian stared at the communications desk for minutes, saying nothing. He was breathing heavy, focused on nothing, his mind in overdrive.

Naomi was cleaning up the failed game, her eyes on Sebastian as well. Then her eyes turned to me as it was evident, we weren't going to get Sebastian to speak.

"Maybe it was part of Natalie's plan."

I shook my head as Sebastian grunted his thoughts on her statement before going back to ignoring us. "No. Natalie doesn't get captured in the first place, let alone for a plan of her own creation."

She'd put the last tile in the bag, putting it to the side carefully. "But she got caught this time, Deac. Something bigger is going on here, I'm just not sure what. All Amara said was to keep me far away, and she'd keep Natalie and Brooklyn safe." She stood, walking to the waterfall, I followed. "We have to trust Amara."

It was so like Naomi to put her trust blindly into people, even those we were sure would never betray us. It was funny how things came back to bite us in the arse like that.

"We can't trust everyone, Nai. The past couple of weeks have proven that."

"You're right." She admitted. "But there are still people I know without a doubt in my mind that we can trust." She pointed at me. "You." She pointed at Sebastian. "Him. Natalie and Amara and Brooklyn. You seem to forget that Amara is a sneaky little thing, don't doubt her. She hates when people doubt her."

That was a fact I couldn't deny. There'd been many instances where Amara proved that fact to me. The one I'll never forget was my first day of training.

Anthony had assigned some guards to challenge us on what we knew about hand-to-hand combat. Amara got assigned to me, much to Natalie's delight who stood next to Anthony as they observed.

As I was distracted by finding my guard, Amara took it upon herself to throw a punch right into my jaw, sending me down with blood spewing from my mouth. Rolling onto my back, I stared up at her. She knelt over me, a smirk on her face. "Do you know how incredible it is to know that during your training, I can knock you on your ass as many times as I'd like in any number of ways and there's nothing you can do about it? No punishment will come to me. You, however." She shrugged her shoulders, standing back up. "Well, I can't say the same for you. You're training to be a part of the guard; you might want to act the part. It's possible for you to be Prince and a guard, you need to know when you're one or the other."

I stood with her help, rubbing my jaw line. "That bloody hurt, Amara. Could you have not put everything you had into the first one you gave me?"

She laughed then, a howling kind of laughter that had my fellow classmates along with Natalie and Anthony to stare down at us. Normally I would've been embarrassed to be stared at like I was, being the Prince and all but my father had told me that humility was something to learn from, not to be ashamed of. I puffed out my chest and let the stares keep coming until the guards knocked some sense into their own partners.