The Prince's Songbird Slave ✔️

Gone

Thoughts around time of publishing - So I built a fort out of my duvet covers and wrote most of this chapter in there...

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I was in a nightmare – the worst situation I could ever have imagined.

It had taken several painfully long hours, trapped in my room, before the compulsion Evelyn had forced on me weakened enough for me to break, and when it did I ran from the lodge, ignoring the looks my startled parents threw my way. Like a mad man I sped to where I'd last seen her, tripping over my own feet more times than I could count in my hurry, but Evelyn was gone.

I hadn't liked the way she was talking right before she made me leave.

'I should put a stop to this'?

There was something very morbid about the way she had said it, something disturbing and final. I was worried about how she planned to stop it, what if she did something that couldn't be undone?

I shook my head desperately, trying to clear away the ugly twisted thoughts that were trying to crawl in.

For the next five hours I searched every corner of the place. I looked in the servants quarters, the slaves quarters, checked through every empty room. I went through the dining hall, the kitchens, the basement, the gardens, the maze, the rooms we were always being lectured in, and all of the residential lodges too. By two am I was seriously running out of places to look. With a suffocating, sickening feeling building in my stomach I went to check the pool.

For a moment I thought I saw her lifeless body sunk at the bottom, but it was just my paranoid mind and a deck chair that someone had pushed into the water.

And though I felt relieved that it hadn't been her, there was a growing feeling of helplessness that I couldn't escape from.

I checked the old building we had hid in two years previously, then the music rooms, but I couldn't find her or sense her anywhere. Finally I went to the library.

My heart leapt for a moment when I saw a shadow, dwarfed by the huge bookshelves, but my head knew it wasn't Evelyn long before I saw the waist length hair.

"What are you doing here Freya?" I asked suspiciously – after all it was no longer late, but not yet early.

"I read. Is that a problem?" she said testily, taking a book off of the shelf as if to prove her point.

I had looked for Evelyn without stopping, and I needed to sit down for a while, think things through, try and work out where she might have gone.

I pulled back one of the old oak chairs and collapsed into it, noticing for the first time the pile of books stacked further down. Freya added her new book to the pile and went back to the shelves, and I sensed it was more because she wanted to avoid me than because she was looking for a specific book. My suspicions were confirmed when after a few minutes of unsuccessful browsing she sighed irritably and asked "Why are you here?"

I hesitated, unsure of whether to tell her or not. I decided to tell her, just maybe she could help.

"Evelyn disappeared," I said.

"What, did the two of you get into a lovers spat?" she asked, not very interested, then she snapped around. "You can't blame me for what happened – that was your choice, I honestly never you would go through with it and sleep with me."

I gritted my teeth painfully at the reminder. "No, that wasn't it," I said, trying not to growl it. "It was something else."

"What?" she said taken aback, clearly the idea of me and Evelyn fighting was as impossible to her as it had been to me only a week ago.