UNWANTED

CHAPTER 16 - MT22.14 - LIZAVETA ET ILYAAS

LIZAVETA

The candlelight was keeping me awake.

Or maybe it was the heartache, I'll never know. It was the eve of my coronation, exactly midnight of Sunday. I sighed. There was no running now.

Three days ago, after I ran away from Ly and he didn't run after me, I realized our friendship was broken. Reparable, yes, but restored not to its former glory. Because all the past times I tried asking for his hand, I never meant it. Last Wednesday, I did.

Many of the princes and the first sons and the billionaires and those Nobel prize winners asked if I had time for them. Of course, I did. But in my current state of grief over a six-year friendship, I realized that if any of them showed me any trace of kindness, I might mistake it for the love I'd lost.

I was too young when I fell for Ilyaas. Too foolish. I trusted him to say the right thing, trusted him too much to break me, thinking he saw me the same way or at least loved me enough to lie.

He didn't.

I was too hopeful for someone to be able to love me... Onus. There was no use denying it now, was there? Something happened when my grandfather died; somehow, I became a little less human.

Who could I tell that the coronation that starts at daybreak was a crime?

I read about the death penalties against the Onus caught after the war and the Great Dying. Some were burned. Some were hung. Some were locked in coffins and thrown into the ocean. Some had the privilege of being killed by a needle. But those looked like lives from other dimensions. I barely thought they were real... That at a moment in time those judicial murders were real and glorified because the enemy was no longer seen as human.

How would they kill me?

My back was flat on the cushion of the wooden bed of Solomon I. This was the Chamber of the Ascendant - a room on the first floor of the House - the same room the first king slept in before his own coronation.

It was a pity Jazzy wasn't let in. It would be my first time in six years to sleep without her by me.

Candles were around the bed; so many of them that it all looked as if it was my funeral. Figuratively, it was. I, the Ascendant, would officially be her imperial majesty, the empress, in a few hours' time.

Thus, Princess Lizaveta of the West shall die. Tomorrow, the empress will rise.

Queen Aridni of England, the only relative within my fourth degree of consanguinity who was neither banished nor dead nor has abdicated was the only one who lit the candles earlier tonight. She told me she remembered doing it for her brother, and that back then, there were many of them who lit them when he was crowned. It was lonely for her to be alone, but I was happy I had someone at least.

"These candles are scented in rose." Aridni said. "Death and rebirth."

"You chose the scent?"

"Yes." She smiled at me, her light periwinkle eyes shining in the candlelight. She had flecks of gold in them - a stark contrast to her thick black waves. "I lit the same candles in the crypts a few days ago. I lit one for each tomb... well at least the ones I knew when they were alive. It's eerie there."

"It is." I remembered. Raza got back on time to seal my brother's tomb, thankfully. She had no questions.

She bowed to me and walked for the door, never turning her back to me. "I'm sorry this happened to you." Only those in the innermost circle knew how being crowned was equal to a death sentence. "Sleep well."

I didn't.

Tere I was, not sleeping well, staring at a persistent light, slightly hoping it would burn me.