When vengeance strikes in the form of a bullet out for the princess's blood, Princess Aleia VonAuclair must flee the heart of her country in order to protect the people she loves and take back the pieces of her soul she'd lost to the girl she once l...
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"You go ahead. I just need to talk to my dad for a second," Isabella said before she turned back towards the living room where her dad was sat, speaking to a member of parliament.
I walked the short distance to her room, crossing hallways and familiar pictures for the thousandth time in my life before coming to a stop in front of her wooden door.
Just as I went to reach for the doorknob, an odd, unpleasant smell slammed into me hard enough, it shifted me slightly off balance.
My eyes shifted from her room to the empty hallway. It couldn't have come from anywhere else seeing as I only noticed it upon reaching her door.
It was a smell I'd never smelled before and if there was a word to even remotely describe it, it would be rotting. Like the tail end scent of a disfigured corpse before they were lowered into their casket, and then their graves for good.
Steadying myself, I gingerly touched the doorknob again and pushed myself inside.
The rotting smell intensified, growing stronger and sicklier the further I moved into the room. I clamped a hand over my mouth and nose in an attempt to keep my breakfast down and my guts intact.
My insides roiled with revulsion, swirling around in a cocktail mix of disgust and intrigue. I had to physically force myself to push forward, to push closer to the source of the stink because good Lord, whatever that thing was deserved its own lab study for future human repellant.
I followed the trail of the scent to Isabella's closet. If I were in a cartoon, I could probably see green gas fuming out the crevices of her closet doors from how pungent it was.
Chewing the inside of my cheeks raw, I stretched my hand out and carefully pulled the door open like something was going to jump out at me.
When no such thing happened, my shoulders sagged a tiny smidge.
That's weird.
My gaze roved around the large space but couldn't pinpoint anything that stood out to me or at least something that looked as bad as it smelled.
Just as I was about to run back out for a fresh breath of air, a glimpse of flesh and something red caught my eye.
It was a severed hand. And blood. Oh god, there was so much blood.
A scream became trapped in my throat, my heart skyrocketing a mile a minute as I stared at the mutilated limb. I wanted to look away, I needed to, but something froze me in place, paralyzed me to stone. My knees buckled and if it weren't for the lining of shelves beside me, I would've fallen over.
I so desperately wanted turn back and pretend I didn't see it, but I couldn't and as I continued to stare, to watch, I noticed something else.
It wasn't just dead flesh. It was burned human flesh.
