Page 27 of The Knight
Ryker:“I know, but he killed your family, Em, and I can’t just stand by and let him get away. No one is even looking into it.”
She didn’t answer my last text for a few minutes, and I wondered how she was feeling. I knew that she still had a hard time sorting through her emotions. I sat down on the bed for a minute, and then I called her.
“Are you okay?” I asked after she said, “hello.”
“I am waiting for all this to just be some horrible dream that I can wake up from.” Her voice was shaky as if she were about to cry, and I wished I could have comforted her.
“I just have to figure out the last piece of this puzzle. I am so close.” I wanted to reassure her, but I wondered if talking to her about any of my plans had been a mistake.
“Ryker, this is too much for me right now,” I heard her breaths come in, and I knew that the tears were about to come. I wanted to say something. I knew she needed to put the past behind her, but she had also asked me to find out who killed her parents. She asked me to make it right, and I promised her that I would. I swore it; I made a vow.
“Ryker—Ryker, I can’t—”
“Emma, I am sorry.” I was sorry, sorrier than I had ever been before. I leaned my head against my hands as I listened to her pleading words, her confusion spilling through her voice and through the phone speakers like some slowly trickling stream, flowing slowly over a rock.
“Why on earth would someone kill them? Tell me, Ryker. Why? Why would someone wantmyparents, and possiblyme, dead?”
“Everyone has enemies, Emma.” What was I supposed to say? Tell her that there were armies fighting against her family and her family line? Should I tell her that she was an heir, a princess of Terra? I wanted to—how desperately I wanted to tell her. I just needed a little more time.
“My parents don’t have enemies. I don’t have any enemies. I don’t understand.” She cried into the phone, and the sobswracked my body as if I were the one crying. I wanted to reach out to her, take away her pain.
“Neither do I, Emma. Don’t worry. I am going to keep you safe.” It wasn’t enough. I knew it would never be enough for her, but I would always keep her safe. I would always fight for her.
“I am scared, Ryker. I don’t want to know the truth—but then I do. Mary says I need to move on, move past all of this, but it is so hard.” Her voice was sharp and quick, and I felt anger bubbling within me each time her voice rose more in frustration than in sorrow, because I knew that in just a short amount of time, no doubt, Shad would comfort her. Shad would have his arms around her, and she would be more than happy there. The thought made me want to slam my head against the wall. Instead, I lay back on the bed and tried to swallow the vile thoughts I was having about Shad and Emma. Move on? She wanted to move on. What did that mean? Did she want to move on from me? Was she going to replace me with Shad? All of the years and all of the time spent together, would they melt away? I knew that she didn’t remember everything. It wasn’t right to hold that against her, but the anger was growing within me. I pictured her with Shad, him kissing her, holding her, and I wanted to punch him in the face.
“How are we supposed to just move on!? Oh, I get it—how you are moving on to Shad, huh!?”
“Excuse me?” she asked, completely taken aback, and I wanted to slap myself. I sat up and then stood, moving over to the wall and hitting my head against it, chastising myself for letting the anger, the frustration, flow out of me and hit her. She didn’t need that.
“Never mind. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I’m just—frustrated is all. I should’ve been there that night with you guys.” I lamely tried to explain my anger.
“Part of me wishes you had been there so that I wasn’t alone, but that’s selfish. If you’d have been there, you probably would be dead right now,” she breathed into the phone.
It felt good to be wanted, to be needed—I was grateful that she didn’t want me dead. That was something. But she didn’t know the truth, the truth that Lamont had asked me to go with them—granted he had been okay with me not going. He liked that I was fitting into this realm and being a normal teenage boy. He had wanted me with them, but he understood that I had a commitment to football. I groaned silently. Football was the biggest mistake of my life. If she knew the truth, how I could have saved them all, I doubted she would want anything to do with me.
“Your dad asked me to go, and I didn’t.”
“So?” She replied, as if it didn’t matter, as if the rightful heir of the first kingdom’s throne asking for something wasn’t important, wasn’t what I was sworn to do since birth. But, of course, that was her response. She didn’t know who I was, who her father was, or who she really and truly was.
“So—I feel like I could have prevented it.”
I heard Emma’s humorless laugh on the phone. “Seriously, Ryker? Do you have super strength?”
“Okay, maybe I could not have prevented it. I’m sorry, Emma. I miss them. I am so sorry. I should have been the one who died; it should have only been me,” I choked on the words, regret and guilt eating at me.
“Ryker, no. No, I couldn’t live without you. No one wants you dead.”
“I have to go, Emma,” I whispered.
“Just say goodbye to your sick relative and come home. You’re missing the homecoming dance, and I am so annoyed that I have to go without you.”
“Are you still going withhim?” I couldn’t help the annoyance in my tone. I was so far away, and I hated knowing he would be with her, and I wouldn’t be.
“Yes.”
I was silent, deciding not to speak, not to let my anger spill out on that occasion.
“Ryker?”
