In The Woods ➳ H.S.

☙ s i x t y - t w o

Pic is me when I finally finished this chapter.

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"Amazing how I leave you both in charge of a war, and only a few days later do I find out that both of you have bailed." The king spoke, and it was almost comical how he smirked down on us, his hands on the armrests of the chair that could barely hold him. "What was the point of all this, son? To save two whores and kill thousands of innocent people?" He taunts.

"The queen is not a whore, and neither is my sister." Lea growls, and to my shock she literally jumps onto the table, knife held out as she attempts to reach the king. She didn't make it far before Harry's arms reach out to contain her before the guards did.

It was slightly disturbing how much her blue eyes had darkened ever since we entered the room and she saw the king. Her hatred for him seemed to go over mine - that fact itself was terrifying - and she had been glaring at him, and fiddling with her knife this whole time.

"And of course the girl you choose to start a war for just had to be a blood relative of the great Owen Rither himself! Brilliant, you are, son. Good job." The king continues as if he wasn't interrupted and the tension rose to an almost electric level.

My hands were balled into fists at my sides, but I remained seated. I can't kill him, not with twenty guards that are hungry for blood stood less than ten steps away. I wasn't worried about my own head getting cut off, but I'd be damned if I let them touch Harry or Lea.

"Perhaps if you were a better man then you would have noticed your own wife's lack of satisfaction in bed in the first place." I say, letting my lips lift up in a smile that may have looked friendly if the words I had just said weren't meant to hurt his ego.

The king's eyes widen in shock before narrowing in rage at my words, though he clearly didn't know what to say as he had finally kept quiet.

I saw it as my opening - as my turn to finally say what I had always wanted to say to the king of the North Kingdom, even before I had run into this cabin the first time all those months ago.

But I wasn't the only one who saw the chance. Harry stands up, placing Lea onto my lap as he stared his father down.

Lea grips her knife firmly in her hand, which made me panic and wrap my arms around her to make sure she didn't jump the king again. She turned her head to look at me, her blue eyes were dark as she willed me to let her go, but I stayed silent. Only tightening my grip on her.

Seeing that much anger, that much darkness in a child's eyes is exactly the reason why Christian and I were set on keeping her inside the house. Our world was no place for a sweet child to live in, and I was sure an innocent person could not survive in it. And I'm right. Sure, Lea is breathing and alive at the moment - but she's not the same. The light in her eyes died some time ago while I was gone, and the little girl I held now wasn't an innocent child. It's someone who's seen and known too much of the world's terror at a young age.

So much knowledge, and yet at the same time - not enough. She knows so much about killing, and bad things that people can do, but she hasn't learned enough of how things really work. How you can't just stab someone because you don't like them.

And that mixture was a terrible thing. I feared, that one day, none of us would be able to hold her back.

My dark thoughts snap in half as soon as Harry spoke up, bringing me back into reality. "You brought me up my entire life making me think that the world revolved around me." He says, and his tone made it sound as if he was accusing his own father of murder. "You taught me how to give out orders for the simplest of things instead of teaching me how to do them myself. You said there was nothing wrong with what you were doing every time you hit a servant - you basically drilled it into my head that they don't deserve respect because they're poor."