Chapter 18 Please
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PLEASE
Iwas a child again, cowering at the sound of my stepmother’s footsteps echoing down the corridor.
Click-clack. Click-clack.
The precise rhythm of her polished boots against marble had been a warning bell, a countdown to pain.
My body remembered before my mind did. Muscles tensing, breath shortening, fingers curling into defensive fists.
I could smell her now—sickly sweet roses and musk, the perfume she wore like armor, the scent that had seeped into my nightmares.
“Stand up straight,” her voice hissed. “A king’s daughter, even a bastard one, does not slouch.”
My back ached with the pain of those corrections. How many times had I been struck for the crime of poor posture? For a glance that lasted too long? For resembling my mother in a moment when the light hit my face just so?
The first time the Queen had me whipped, I was nine.
The guards had taken me to a small chamber off the east wing, a room with no windows and a single iron ring bolted to the wall.
They’d tied my hands to it, the rough rope biting into my wrists as I struggled to remain upright, to show some fragment of dignity.
“Ten lashes,” she had ordered, her voice cool as winter stone. “She must learn respect.”
I remembered the whistling sound of the lash cutting through air before it found my back.
The first strike had stolen my breath, the shock of it greater than the pain.
The second had driven me to my knees. By the fifth, I was sobbing, begging, promising to be better, to be invisible if only she would make it stop.
She hadn’t. Ten lashes, as promised. Each one precise, each one meant to leave a scar.
“Perhaps now you’ll remember your place,” she’d said afterward, her voice as crisp as autumn leaves. “You are here by my husband’s charity, not by right. Never forget that.”
I hadn’t forgotten. How could I? She reminded me daily, in a thousand small ways that cut deeper than any whip.
But it was the public humiliations that had truly stripped me bare.
Standing in the crowded courtyard as my stepmother inspected me like a defective piece of merchandise. “Look at her,” she would say to her ladies, to visiting dignitaries, to anyone who would listen. “No grace, no breeding. The king’s great mistake.”
I learned to fix my gaze on distant points. The edge of a cloud, the top of a tower, the flight of a bird, anything to escape the reality of those moments. My body would be present, enduring, while my mind fled to safer harbors.
And so it went, year upon year, a dance of cruelty and endurance played out beneath those resplendent palace walls. Father remained distant as ever. If he knew what transpired within his own house, he chose not to see it.
And if he didn’t see it, it couldn’t be real. His silence was its own form of violence, a tacit approval that left me more alone than any cell ever could.
I curled tighter, drawing my knees to my chest. The chill seeped through my shift, into my bones, yet it couldn’t compete with the coldness that had taken root in my core years ago.
My cell was just another version of the life I’d always known.
Different walls, same isolation.
Different chains, same captivity.
The only difference was that now, the bars were visible.
Any value I had existed only in relation to others—as King Aeldrin’s shame, as Queen Ira’s burden, as Valen’s trophy, as a stepping stone for ambitious courtiers or a momentary diversion for bored noblemen.
Never as Mireille. Never for myself.
Why had my mother left me here? Why had she abandoned me to this half-life, neither fully accepted nor fully rejected? It would have been kinder to have smothered me at birth than to leave me to face daily reminders of my inherent worthlessness.
This cell would be my final home, I was certain of it now. Valen had no intention of ever releasing me.
And why would he? I was an unwanted thing. Created just to be discarded.
How ironic my life was.
I had been born unwanted, lived unwanted, and would die unwanted.
My eyes drifted to a dark corner of the cell where the shadows seemed to gather most thickly. How easy it would be to simply stop. To refuse food and water when they came. To close my eyes and never open them again. Death would be a mercy compared to this endless nothing.
Perhaps that was why Valen kept me alive—he knew death would be a kindness I didn’t deserve.
“I hope I die,” I whispered to the emptiness, my voice strange and unfamiliar after so long unused. “Please, let me die.”
The darkness gave no answer, but it seemed to deepen around me, as if in agreement. As if it too had been waiting for me to finally surrender, to acknowledge what I had always known but never fully accepted—that I never should have been born at all.