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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NewChristmasYear had finally arrived on the second week of January. After the initial gossip channel scare, Edrian had called me in a fret, worried that I was freaking out over the photo and all the hate comments posted underneath about what a bitch I was.
He didn't need to know that I had freaked out but for an entirely different reason. The palace, according to Jake, Nate's guard, had thrown themselves into complete mayhem after the news of their princess's potential suitor reached their ears, but my mom had reassured me before she ended our call that she would handle it and if the Queen told me she would do something, you best believe she would succeed.
So, now, as I knocked three times on Edrian's front door, the first time I would be seeing him in almost two weeks in the madness of his upcoming championship games, the threat of the latest letter and the possible chaos breaking loose in the palace wisped away into the distant night sky with nothing else but a dull chime.
Bryan would deal with the gossip channel, as per his words, but since his job was to keep an eye on me at all times, he'd assigned an extra guard to keep track of any unusual movements within my perimeters. Be it the letters tucked into my car windshield or being slipped into my bag while unattended or the odd presence lingering around.
He would deal with it. I believed him.
Twisting my neck to peer over my shoulder, I admired the full cadence of the moonlit view from their front doorstep: the stone driveway meandering into the soft glow of the streetlamps over the neighbourhood, the lush hills sloping down into the the heart of the city beating below.
I would never get tired of seeing the city from all the way up here -like I was an entire world's away, watching as the rest of world went on without me. Time ceased to exist up here and for a while, just a while, I could pretend I was just Aleia Parks.
I breathed in and felt the air expanding gloriously into my lungs and just when I heard the front door swing open, it was all of a millisecond before an arm snaked around my waist and yanked me inside. A yelp sounded from my throat before the person who'd grabbed me closed the door and pushed my entire body flush up against the mahogany surface.
An instantaneous grin slashed across my face at the sight of those molten green eyes, and sunlight poured into veins, bright and warm until all I felt was shining, ethereal happiness.
"Do you manhandle all your friends like this?" I teased.
Edrian merely hummed and not a second later, his head bent down to connect his lips to mine. My mouth automatically parted to meet his.
Fireworks danced behind my eyes as I tried my best to breathe him in, to pour myself into his every cell to make up for all the lost time we'd spent apart with only calls and texts to pass us by.
His hand creeped upwards to wrap around my throat, angling my mouth for his better access as he consumed me whole, until every inch of me was pressed against every inch of him and I didn't know where I was and if he was the only one here with me.
