Algernon Black

(Chapter 13) The Awaited Arrival of the Psychotic Prince

Selice assumed it must have made Loy's mother happy to know that her husband wouldn't be making any more heirs other than the one and only she gave him.

She just wished she had given him a more level-headed one.

Selice passed a fountain and looked at her reflection in the water. That familiar feeling of unsettlement worked its way into her mind as her charmed necklace made all of her feminine features a bit more angular and filled out, but she still kept her hair long enough to act as curtains to cover as much as they could without being too long to attract attention. She was also thankful to have colorless dull white hair that was common in every land across the world. It only helped her to blend in more. If it was a rarer color, she might have had to conceal that too, like her mother's dark red hair had been before she'd died. Her memories were foggy of her times as a child, but she remembered her mother as a very pretty woman with narrow cheekbones and long upturned slanted eyes. Selice took after her in that aspect, with smooth skin and soft brown eyes. Even with her charm, men at the castle still teased her for having girly features and jokingly asked her if she would ever go through puberty. They would soon leave her alone after she gave them a dead expressionless stare back that made them feel so uncomfortable, they stopped talking. But other than that, mostly everyone left her to herself. Except for Loy. Loy lived to irritate her. He notoriously prodded and heckled her whenever he was in. Be it she had to follow him around all day fulfilling his every order, or cling to her making her duties of the day all the more difficult. The worst was when he would follow her into town to make her errands next to impossible to fulfill as his big presence would garner all the attention of the citizens. She hated attention most of all. With the attention on her, she could get exposed, and if exposed, she would have nowhere to go, with no one to go to. That was if they didn't kill her for her deception. That thought always terrified her, and no matter how troublesome Loy could be, life as a servant in Etilia's castle was much preferable to abandonment on the streets.

When Selice got to the secret staff entrance of the prince's room and prepared herself to come face-to-face with the prince. She worried he might be in one of his physically affectionate moods and hook his heavy arm around her shoulder or force her onto his knee like she was some kind of lap dog as he often did to mess with her.

Selice sighed and silently opened the back door, which on the other side appeared as a panel of wainscoting on a dark purple wall.

She entered by the prince's bedside. The bedroom overlooked the foyer where a fireplace faced her as did the back of a purple velvet couch, and the naked back of a woman. A woman who was clinging onto the prince, as he was clinging onto her with their bodies pressed bare and tightly together.

Selice froze like anyone walking in on the scene would have. She had been quiet enough that neither of them had noticed her entering, but now she was stuck not knowing what to do as she watched the prince's head buried in the white long hair of the woman move in steady rhythmic grinds up and down. Or at least Selice assumed that was what was happening, as this was the closest, she had ever come to experiencing anything like it.

Selice glanced down at the tray, knowing she had to leave it on his bed before she left. It was the nearest spot to put it down, other than the floor, but it was also straight across from the seating area where Loy and the woman were so passionately in the midst of their act. She looked at the pair and hoped they would stay too distracted by each other to notice her as she tiptoed to the bed.

Selice kept her gaze on them as she did, part of it to make sure they hadn't caught her, and partly because she couldn't take her eyes away from the scene. She watched as Loy's thick arm wrapped around the woman to pull her flat against his body. The bulging muscles that ripped in his arms made a strange feeling swell inside herself and she paused. Loy had been trained from a young age to be the one to inherit the artifact of Etilia, and it made his body stout and muscular. She mentally reprimanded herself for staring at it too long and quickly made her way to the bedside.