Chapter 35 Childhood Ghosts
"You think I forgot?"
Claus leaned in so close his nose bumped my shoulder. He wasn't talking about timber or steel anymore. His voice had changed. It wasn't just a threat, it was personal. Bitter.
"The training grounds," he muttered. "You were the worst of them. Every single time I stepped onto that field, you were there. Mocking me because my mother was just a favorite concubine and not the Queen. You made sure everyone knew I was the 'bastard' prince.
You threw my training logs into the mud, you paid the trainers to give me the broken gear... you did everything you could to make me quit."
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open.
Oh god.
I wasn't just a smuggler. I was a bully. I was a grade A, top tier villainess. Damn you Isle....
The weight of it hit me like a truck. I realized then that I wasn't just an imposter trying to survive a corrupt system, I had walked into a body that was already hated.
Deeply, personally hated. I wasn't the protagonist here; I was the character everyone wanted to see get dragged to the gallows.
And the guy pinning me to the shelf? He was the kid I'd spent years mentally crushing.
"I..." My throat felt like it was clogged with sand. "I don't remember any of that."
Claus went completely still. His eyes narrowed, turning into slits. "You don't remember?"
"No," I said, a little too quickly.
"Don't lie to me again," he hissed.
"I'm not!" I panicked. I could feel the sweat dripping down my back.
"I fell off a horse! Years ago. Before.....before everything changed. I hit my head. I lost a lot of it. The academy, the training, the way I used to treat people... it's all gone. I barely remember my own childhood, let alone what I did to you."
It was a shitty excuse. It was the oldest trick in the book, the "amnesia" card that every protagonist in a bad romance novel pulls.
Claus stared at me for a long beat. The silence was agonizing.
He looked like he wanted to choke me, but he also looked...
confused. He was searching for a smirk, a flicker of that old, sadistic girl he knew, but all he found was a girl who looked genuinely terrified.
"Convenient," he finally spat out. "You bash your head, and suddenly you're a saint? You're trading steel, acting like a logistics genius, and pretending you don't even know who I am? That's not amnesia, Ilse. That's a mask."
"It's not a mask!" I pushed against his chest, but he didn't budge. He was solid as a rock.
"If you don't remember," he grabbed my chin, forcing me to look him in the eyes, "then let me remind you exactly how much you liked to watch people suffer."
He didn't pull back. He leaned in, his gaze burning into me. My brain was screaming, 'He's going to kill you, he's going to kill you right here,' but another part of me a weird, traitorous part, was just freaking out because he was so damn close.
He seemed annoyed that he couldn't get a rise out of me. He wanted me to be that same mean little girl so he could justify his hatred, but I wasn't her. And the fact that I wasn't the monster he remembered seemed to drive him even crazier.
He was obsessing over me. And that was going to get me killed.