Page 73 of The Alpha's Cursed Queen

He told me to ignore the white witches, who were pressuring me to find Alice. I finally told them that she had died. They were skeptical, but there wasn’t much they could do.

I don’t know when I began to believe it, to believe that Alice was gone forever, but my heart has felt like a barren land for what seems like eons.

Seeing her again made me feel like I could breathe again. Like the air that had been stuck inside me all these years was finally released.

She has changed so much. The hesitance and naivety that was once a part of her personality has disappeared. She has become confident and alluring. Her eyes are sharp, filled with cleverness that perhaps was always there. And more than that, she has settled into her skin.

When she staggered in that boardroom today, the color leaching from her face, I wanted to shove everybody aside to get to her.

“Please! Just kill me! Darian!”

“Darian, please! I’m sorry! I’m begging you!”

My ears suddenly echo with her screams, the cries I’ve never been able to forget. They still haunt me in my dreams, in my every waking moment. The broken look in her eyes, the desperation as she tried to clutch my leg, begging for a painless death, pleading for mercy.

I crushed the prideful girl who had looked at me with such trusting eyes. I had finally managed to earn her trust, and then I was forced to break it. I was forced to see her scream in agony, her body contorting as the witches sealed her magic. I saw the light go out of her eyes, the dull acceptance of what was happening, and it killed me.

But all I could do was watch—because if I hadn’t watched, the fate that awaited her would have been far worse.

My chest tightens in a familiar emotion, a perpetual hopelessness, a guilt that has forever been carved into my soul. I look away from the apartment building.

“Let’s go, Jimmy. There’s no pointing staying here.”

Jimmy glances at me before nodding and driving away.

*****

It is unheard of for anyone in the royal family to stay anywhere aside from the royal residence in a given city. However, I don’t need the staff of these mansions reporting my every move to Willow, so I prefer staying in hotels where I can, especially when I’m conducting the kind of business I don’t want getting back to my in-laws.

I study the stack of files before me. After what happened with Alice, my father’s attitude toward me changed. He became colder, more withdrawn. His health also deteriorated around the same time, compelling me to take over more and more of his duties. Lucius, my father’s attendant, never left his side throughout his illness, and when my father passed, Lucius withered away, too. Despite my grievances with him, he did serve my father faithfully to the very end, so I set him up in a cottage on the palace grounds with double his pension. He lost his dearest friend the day I lost my father.

One of the last promises my father extracted from me was to weaken the power of the white witches. My interactions with the white witches had been minimal at that point. Before what happened that fateful night, I had never really paid much attention to them. However, after my father roused my suspicions about their interference within the royal palace, I started looking into them.

That is when I realized how deeply involved the white witches’ coven is in wolf shifter politics. They are ingrained in every aspect of the kingdom. Why, though? It didn’t make sense to me.

But the intricate web that I have begun to untangle over the past few years has had me coming to a conclusion, especially afterthe coven began pressuring Willow and me to produce an heir, a demand that my wife has insisted upon.

It is customary for a royal couple to produce a child within, at most, three years of their marriage. I discovered, to my surprise, that this unwritten rule was created by the white witches. Why the royal family ever felt the need to comply with the coven’s demand is beyond me.

It would have been easier to uncover the depth of the relationship between the royal family and the white witches’ coven had the witches not removed all mention of them from the royal library during my father’s illness. It was an unprecedented act, completely unheard of. The fact that the white witches were able to walk into the royal palace and walk out with documents has given me an ugly picture of how powerful they truly are. All my demands to return what they stole have been met with refusal. They claim that the records they took were ones they had loaned to the royal family. If that were truly the case, why didn’t they simply ask me for them?

No. Something fishy is happening. And I intend to uncover it.

The white witches are forgetting their place. Despite the deal I made with them regarding Alice, they’ve been going too far, crossing lines.

Unfortunately, with the coven so deeply integrated into every part of the kingdom, it’s not easy to work against them and try to find their weaknesses. Word of such actions can easily get back to them. That is why I set up a series of companies, including Acme Intech. The profits of these companies are directed toward my investigation into the white witches. I may be the king, but the funds from the royal treasury are closely watched byshifters who are also allied to the coven. And since the coven is supportive of Willow, things are even more tedious for me.

I look through the financial records before me. It doesn’t make sense to me how the coven is able to afford the luxuries they enjoy when their income should be quite limited. White witches are known for their healing powers. In the olden times, their skills often came in handy during battles, but nowadays, they work with healers to produce medicines that can affect wolf shifters. However, even with that work, the amount of money going out does not equal what is coming in. I can’t seem to make sense of the discrepancy. Yet.

There’s a knock on the door of my hotel suite, and I look up as Jimmy walks in. “I’ve got the report here.”

“What report?”

“You told me to look into Alice’s life.”

My back stiffens. Ever since I saw her two days ago, I’ve tried to forget about her. Bringing Alice back into my life, or even trying to wedge some space for me in hers, will do nothing but harm her. It’s better that the white witches’ coven continue to believe she’s dead.

“You can set it down there.” I gesture at the corner of my desk.

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