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2024-10-29 19:42:56No sooner had his mother led the mother-daughter pair away, Demetrius saw Cassidy nodding him up the stairs. The gesture put a pit in his stomach that made him want to turn and head back through the door. The morning had barely started, but the boy wanted nothing more than to take himself away. He would’ve loved even one quiet moment to clear his head and shake off the heaviness that settled on him, but he was starting to see he wouldn’t have that luxury.
Demetrius would have to wait a while longer for that moment. He took Jamie by the hand, leading her up the stairs behind his sister.
Cassidy led them back to her room, being careful to close the door behind her. It earned her a raise of his brow.
“What?” he asked, not in the mood for more surprises.
“She’s on edge.”
“Carlton?” he asked, assuming the man had gone ahead to give their mother an earful on his most recent act of wilful defiance. The
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Two men dressed in the garb of the palace’s guards approached the house. Demetrius crooned his neck to get a better look at him, all but forgetting Jamie’s request to know more about Scarlet. The men had become the more pressing matter for the morning, all the more so because he didn’t see his sister walking with them.“Stay here,” he said, rising to his feet. The boy waited for them to pass the veranda’s threshold before jumping from the roof and entering the house behind them. He felt a rush of wind at his back as Jamie descended the roof, but his attention remained on the newcomers.From the opposite, direction Cassidy descended the stairs. She froze at the sight of the uniformed men, but only long enough to orient herself to their arrival.“Mom!” she called, not wanting to find out for herself what they wanted. While they’d both been forced back to their duties as guardians, Cassidy had been unrelenting i
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The calm his mother had managed to project throughout the morning disintegrated in a matter of seconds. The woman’s face crumpled in on itself, her eyes flooding with unrestrained tears faster than anyone could process the prince’s words. Her hands moved to cover her face, muffling her sobs but the pain embedded in them was difficult to ignore.Demetrius had seen his mother sad on a few occasions, but never had the grief been so severe.His father looked helplessly from his wife to the prince. “I…I beg your pardon, My Prince. Perhaps my wife and I have misunderstood…”“I don’t see how,” Alexiel said, his mother’s tears not moving the man in any particular direction. He remained the picture of contentment. “Rejoice! You’ll soon be the family of royalty—there’s no higher elevation. You’ll be the guests of honour at the feast. Now, we don’t have much time to wast
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“Demetrius, stop!”He wouldn’t listen. The boy grabbed the nightstand that sat by his bed, tossing it with enough force to have it splinter as it collided with the concrete wall. He reached next for the headboard of his bed, yanking it viciously from the base. Slamming it to the ground, the boy shoved his foot in its middle before tugging on one end until it snapped in two.It wasn’t enough.None of it would be enough.The rage he felt had no outlet but the inanimate features of his bedroom. When he was done breaking them, his sister would still be held captive, and the wedding would go on. The futility of his violence only served to further stroke the flames of his ire, provoking him to the very edges of his sanity.Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could hear Jamie yelling for him to be done with the destruction, but he couldn’t stop. If not the furniture, he would have nowhere to discharge the excess of ill feel
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Demetrius grimaced as images of that night danced their way to the fore. “Scar’s only offense was politely refusing his advances. No one says no to the prince, after all.” The grimace deepened. “Dad told me I had to make sure I kept them both in my sights. The banquets had a way of getting…out of hand when the wine and blood began to flow. When Cassidy hadn’t come back from the bathroom, I left Scar to find her and when I got back…she was gone. I shouldn’t have left her alone.”Demetrius shook his head, trying to dislodge the images that etched themselves into the back of his eyes. “I…I wasn’t there.”“You can’t blame yourself for that—”“I should’ve known.”“Demetrius…you were a kid…you couldn’t have known. Your dad should’ve been the one watching her…watching all of you, just like he s
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Demetrius pulled for a patio chair, placing it by the table so they could have a look at the picture together. There was…a certain sense of relief, an undeniable jolt at the thought that something—if only very little—was going right.“I need you to tell me more. It might be the leverage we need for your case.” He could have it presented to the head guardian and with the right argument, they may even escape punishment. “Who were the people who attacked your family? What were they after? It doesn’t seem like you were entangled in anything massive enough to warrant such destruction.”“There was a secret that needed protecting and too many people who already knew it.”“Save the cryptic talk for after the hearing with the head guardian. What exactly were they after?” It was hardly the time to cling to those secrets and put him through riddles. Carlton would seek to have her punished to
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Carlton walked into the room looking about as pleased as Demetrius had imagined. The man’s grimace could be seen as he walked in. While his gaze was for the woman who summoned him, there was the briefest moment when his eyes met the boy’s and they conveyed all that needed to be said.It brought Demetrius back to the threat the prince’s guard had made at Jamie’s house, but there was nothing to be done. The boy needed to ensure he was the one who passed along the news to the head guardian—not for the praise he used to crave but to ensure no one could remove details that were less convenient or begin their own kind of coverup for the sake of preserving connections.It was well known that Carlton’s loyalty was first and foremost to the prince, but along the way he’d managed to form other little advantageous alliances that might prove themselves a conflict of interest.“I believe you’re looking for these,” h
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Her hands in his hair were enough to clear every thought from his mind. Demetrius felt Jamie’s urgency with each tug, responding with a hunger of his own.He’d convinced her to take a break. Having missed the revision week, she was thrust back into school with only enough time to sit her finals and it had made her worryingly preoccupied with verb conjugations and mathematical equations. There was a part of him that was surprised she conceded to his distractions, but another part of him was too busy getting drunk on the taste of her mouth.“We should get back to studying,” she whispered, teasing a nip at his lower lip.“I can’t hear you,” he whispered back before recapturing those saucy lips that sought to ruin his fun.How she managed a coherent thought with their bodies pressed so closely together was beyond his level of understanding. Demetrius could feel her every curve as her body fit itself into his contours.
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“Hurry up or we’ll miss it!” Megan pulled Jamie through the crowd of students that gathered near the football field. “He’ll be in detention until he graduates, I know it.”Megan shoved and elbowed the pair up into the bleachers where several other students had also managed to climb their way up. All eyes were cast toward the recently manicured lawn—the one the principal had paid landscapers to prepare for the upcoming track events to be held at the school.The entire student body had been abuzz from the moment the rumours first began spreading and those rumours had endured long enough to draw the crowd that they had.In the centre, sitting atop one of the school’s riding mowers was none other than Demetrius Nicholai Finley. He wore the widest Cheshire grin, overly pleased with the work of his hands and the crowd he’d managed to draw. The boy climbed atop the machine he’d stolen from the old shed, facing
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“You didn’t tell me you’d be coming over.” Demetrius watched Jamie scale her way onto the roof, taking great care with her footing before she made her way over to him. The boy’s gaze followed her as she took the spot next to him laced with questions he decided against asking. “I’d have come get you; we could’ve walked together.”Despite his extreme vigilance, the boy hadn’t found dangers lurking around each corner. That, however, did little to assuage his anxieties where she, or anyone else in his family was concerned. The boy had allowed himself to drop his guard and that was when disaster had struck.He wouldn’t be making that mistake again any time soon. Jamie shrugged. “It was spur of the moment. I didn’t wanna stare at my ceiling anymore or listen to my mother ask me how I’m feeling for the millionth time.” She looked out at the guard house, its figure silhouett
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“We’re leaving.” His mother’s words were sharp, final; they brokered no room for argument or negotiation. She’d barely gotten done listening to Demetrius’ account of the night when the women made the executive decision that they were all done with the follies of court and wouldn’t suffer another moment of it.“I need to find him first,” Demetrius said.“You’ll do no such thing,” she said, dismissing the idea the moment it left his lips. The woman turned to her husband. “Get my daughter or I will, but none of us is spending a single night beneath this roof.”His father’s face was drawn, worn thin by the events of the earlier evening and the truths he was forced to face. Demetrius hadn’t, at first, understood why the man wasn’t back in the banquet hall kissing the asses of all present while he begged their forgiveness for his son’s youthful obstinacy. It was
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Applause rang out from within the banquet hall, some guests rising to their feet in exuberance when Demetrius’ name was called. Those seated around him on the stage reached out to give him congratulatory pats on his shoulders or back and a few even hooted in encouragement.The presenter in charge of handing him his reward played up the work the boy had done in the last few months and the impact it had had on the Avendale Tower and wider mythical realm. The man was intentionally vague about his contributions at Central Bureau, but it left the audience no less impressed with what they did get to hear.It was everything Demetrius had ever dreamed of from the moment he first walked into the guard tower with his father all those years ago. The boy aspired for greatness, knowing he would someday be on that very stage by his father’s side. Back then, he knew he would hold his head high and feign modesty while he thanked everyone for their acknowledgements.
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Leave it to his father to want to mingle while his family waited for him back in the apartment. Within ten minutes of realising his father was getting comfortable with some of his former partners, Demetrius excused himself from the company of the men and started back. The rehearsals ran longer than he thought necessary, and he could only imagine his sister crawling out of her skin with impatience. In another mood, the idea would’ve amused him enough to slow his steps. He knew, of course, that with his mother around it was unlikely anything would happen, but it did little to quiet the erratic pounding in his chest. “I’m running out of options, Caspian.” Demetrius drew to a dead stop at the sound of the prince’s voice and the mention of the man who managed to keep him rattled despite his extended absence. The boy crept over to the door. “You could try releasing her.” Carlton’s dispassionate response rang as clearly from behind the door. “I’m sure her fa
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“Jerry…what…what’s this about?” “You’ve got some nerve,” he said, pushing past her to enter the living room. Behind him, four other men entered. They all did their best to avoid making eye contact with the woman despite having let themselves into her home. “Who are these people?” “The movers. Get the books off the second and third shelves,” he said. “Honey, I—” “Don’t call me that,” he said, snapping despite the lack of necessity for such hostility. “You don’t get to call me that, not after what you’ve done.” “Daddy,” Valerie tried, too cautious this time to reach out for him. “Where are you going?” The man gritted his teeth. “I’m not your father, despite what your whore of a mother’s led you to believe—the things in the third bedroom from the stairs, too, men. I want the nightstand, the dresser—leave the bed. That slut’s done too many things on there while I was at work. She can keep that for the next time she runs into
