Twenty - Redric
As soon as our bedroom door shut behind us three hours later, after we’d left the Dame’s office and had tea, Evangeline threw up her arms and snorted.
“Can you believe all that crap? As if she really believes I have a soft spot for you just because I like to provoke you.” She punched me in the arm like we were two mates. “Do you have feelings for me just because you kill me? Um, no. I bet the only reason she goes by the Dame is so no one can check her credentials.”
Her eyes narrowed with an annoyance I didn’t quite share. All I could think about now that I wasn’t being forced to act, able to let my guard down in this private bubble, was that she’d been a kid when I’d first tried to kill her.
And I’d known that; I could do maths. I just…hadn’t seen her like that.
She’d first been a witch.
Then an enemy.
Then a fucking bitch who’d stolen my honour by not killing me. Over and over she’d left me glued to a tree with my pants around my ankles.
And there had been a lot of children fighting on both sides. Both our kingdoms had been fighting for so long, that the ages of enlistment had seemed to lower every year – Raza’s a lot more than ours. We had to be sixteen; I’d met Razians, though, as young as twelve.
Jace and Prince Richard had at least attacked me like warriors. Princess Aurelia and Tory Deirdre had avoided me, making sure to keep their distance, but they’d never turned their back on me, respecting my skill with a sword.
But Evangeline…
Evangeline had danced around me as if I was a joke.
Child or not, she had been a bitch.
But the justification of that didn’t seem as firm as it had a few hours ago, and my feelings of hatred sat a bit more uncomfortably in my stomach.
“Redric?” Evangeline asked, tugging on the front of my robes. Blinking, I focused on her upturned face.
“What?”
She groaned. “Please tell me you didn’t let that shit she said go to your head and now you’re going to be all weird on me?”
“Did you mean what you said in there?”
Rolling her eyes, she started to walk away. “Yep. You are going to be weird about this.”
I grabbed her arm but didn’t pull her back. “Did you?”
Sighing, she turned. “I told her what she wanted to hear.”
Some weird ass feeling, almost like disappointment, twisted in my stomach. I dropped her arm just as her eyes softened.
“But yeah, I meant it.” She shrugged as if it didn’t mean a thing.
And perhaps it didn’t.
Turning around, she headed for the bedroom, putting an end to the conversation.
*****
A few hours later, I laid stretched out on my back, on one of the most comfortable mattresses I’d ever been on, staring into the dark long after Evangeline had gone to sleep. I’d known she was weird. I didn’t trust her at the best of times.
But there was something horribly unsettling about her sleeping under the bed I was on.
She didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. But I could hear her breathing, and it was fucking eerie.
She’d claimed she couldn’t sleep if she was comfortable due to her stint on the frontlines. It was something I’d heard often from my comrades, but I had developed the opposite problem. If I wasn’t stretched out on a bed, I couldn’t sleep due to too many nightmares accompanying a hard, uncomfortable rest. I would flinch at every noise, expecting to be attacked at any moment.
But when I was comfortable, when I could drift away from the sounds of war and nightly raids, I could usually sleep.
Eventually.
When I didn’t have a fucking psycho under my bed.
Tossing over onto my side, I stared at the wall. Then closed my eyes, trying to ignore the fact that she was there.
But when I finally managed to stop thinking about her, I got stuck thinking about my breathing. Then the feel of my eyelids. Then the coolness of the room. I pulled the blanket tighter around me. Got too hot. Kicked it off. Then felt like I would get eaten by the monster under the bed. So I pulled it back on.
Oh my gods, just sleep already!
Eventually, some poor god took pity on me and pulled me towards the realm of dreams.
But just as I straddled the two worlds, a noise beneath the bed caused my brows to furrow, my eyes still closed. A movement beside me pulled me back to awareness, and my eyes snapped open to see what was there.
Screaming, I swung at Evangeline, whose face was a mere centimetre from mine.
Jerking back, she sucked in a breath, and a whisper of metal cut through the air as she unsheathed one of her many knives.
“Evangeline!” I shouted as I rolled backwards and off the other side of the bed. I hit it with a thump before scrambling to my feet.
“Redric?” she asked, her voice one of confusion, clearly coming out of whatever nightmare had driven her to haunt me. “Where are you?”
“I’m on the floor. You just tried to stab me,” I said as I rose, then reached over to yank the knife out of the mattress where I’d just been. I did not hand it back to her, my heart slamming against my ribs.
“Oh. Yeah, I sleepfight sometimes.”
“Of course you fucking do,” I muttered.
She yawned. “Well, now that you have my knife, you can rest easy.” Dropping back to the floor, she sidled under the bed, her skin rubbing across the wooden floor.
My skin crawling, I jumped onto the bed and snuggled –not hid– under the covers.
In no time at all, she was snoring softly.
I was still staring into the darkness.
My every nerve firing rapidly, my every muscle tense as I fully expected to be attacked at any moment.
But eventually, when nothing happened for nearly an hour, sleep came once more.
And once more, I was jerked back to awareness by did-I-really-just-sense-that-or-am-I-imagining-things-in-the-dark movement beside the bed. Only this time she was walking away from me. Opening the bedroom door, she exited into the living room. I hoped she stayed out there, but a few minutes later, she was back.
“All clear,” she said as she walked over.
“All clear?” I asked even though all I wanted was to go to sleep.
She nodded. “The rooms are all clear.”
Dropping to her belly, she crawled beneath the bed as I laid there stewing in rage, just knowing that this was not the last time she’d get up to check the fucking rooms.
An hour later, I was proven right. She even fucking smiled at me as she gave me the report. “All clear.”
Clenching my fists, I resisted the urge to jump off the bed and strangle her. Barely.
When she fell back asleep, snoring softly, my rage grew until I was rolling to the edge of the mattress. I was tired to all hel and there she was, peacefully under.
My teeth grinding, I waited for her to annoy me just one more time. An hour later, her arm crept out from under the bed. I rolled over the edge and onto her, pinning her down. A growl ripped from me. Her eyes popped wide. My hands went around her throat.
There was a moment of coldness in her gold gaze, an instinctive killer, but then they focused on my face, and she smiled.
Not even fighting me, she laid there and let me choke her.
Yesterday, I would’ve been annoyed at her lack of fight, frustrated that she was ‘making it too easy’ and ‘taking all the fun out of it’, but right now, I was too fucking tired to feel anything other than pure enjoyment. I squeezed until her face turned red, then blue. Squeezed until she was dead and the room was finally, finally quiet.
Sighing, I crawled back into bed.
Closed my eyes.
And finally went the fuck to sleep.