Page 35 of The Bodyguard

Chapter Sixteen

Sophia

I’m so lost. I’m barely existing. My head feels like it’s going to explode. And then at times, I feel nothing. As if I just want to hand myself over and let someone else control me. Margo or Rachelle or anyone.

Keira calls me constantly to check up on me. I told her everything. Everything about Kayne and what he did to me and how I feel about him, and yet I was going to marry another man.

A marriage I was being blackmailed into accepting. I don’t have a choice. For me, for my father or my people. I will marry Roger and I will sit quietly next to him, not allowed to talk, to discuss state matters.

My father told me that Roger might not be a bad husband or a bad king. He seems to respect me and has high regard for me, but we both know that it isn’t going to be Roger who rules Strohamden. It’ll be the duke, his father. And if a man can blackmail his way into an imperial position, I shudder to think what else he is capable of doing.

I take some solace in the fact that my father only refused my request to be queen because he couldn’t make me queen, not with the duke pulling the strings.

I want to stay in bed all day and cry in misery. I haven’t seen Kayne at all and he’s been unreachable when I asked Igor to try and find him.

Did he just leave? With my father retiring a week after my wedding, did Kayne decide he was already done with his contract and leave?

Without coming to me?

I pace the floor of my bedroom. Unsure what I should do. What if I never see him again?

Kayne can move through the world completely undetected.

But he left me. Here. Alone.

I don’t know what comes over me. Some kind of weird intuition that grips my stomach and refuses to let go.

He’s here.

I can sense him and it’s strange and silly. But I don’t ignore it.

I race out of my room and onto the landing of the balcony. We mainly use the west wing of the palace. It’s also where my father has his office.

“Kayne,” I whisper as I see him talking to my father in the entrance hall. And as if he hears me, he turns around and looks up at me. He’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt. If he was still in my father’s employ he would be wearing a suit.

I’m trembling. Tears spring from my eyes. My whole world dies. I close my eyes.

He knows. My father would have told him I have no way out of this marriage. He maybe always knew that. But what he doesn’t know was that I was going to get out of it. I was going to force my father into making me queen, but that was before I knew what the Duke of Burkings did to us.

And now he was leaving. His contract with my father expired. He’s leaving.

The rejection slices through me like a serrated dagger.

But that doesn’t last long.

He doesn’t get to do this to me.

I charge back toward my bedroom, shut my door close then fling open my closet. I can hardly go down the way I’m currently dressed. My summer dress is too casual and I’m not wearing any shoes.

By now my sorrow had progressed to full anger. He can’t ignore me. He can’t reject me. I’m still a princess, he is still my father’s…

He can’t leave … without seeing me.

Dammit.

I want to cry but I swallow my tears.

I don’t hear my bedroom door open but I feel that odd feeling again.

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