Ch 92: Olivia’s Thoughts

Olivia felt her ears turning deep red. Her neck flushed pink as she stared at Lucien with a gaze that lingered for far too long. She wanted to die. She wanted to crawl into some hole in the ground and disappear so she could save herself from this unbearable moment.

Why did I even ask him that stupid question? She wanted to beat herself senseless and run away, because the longer her eyes stayed on Lucien the more unbearable it became. The heat rose steadily through her body while the embarrassment ate at her from the inside. Yet she tried to hold herself together, the way royalty should, squaring her shoulders and pushing her chest out with as much dignity as she could summon. But she was failing miserably, feeling time stretch indefinitely around her as she struggled to hold herself to her own standard.

Speak. Please, for the love of everything, speak! Olivia screamed inside her mind, but held a perfectly neutral expression on her face.

Time seemed to stretch even longer as Lucien continued staring back at her, his gaze unflinching, his silver pupils gleaming beautifully in the night light. His black shirt fluttered softly in the breeze and his slicked-back hair remained immaculate, just as it had been since the moment she first laid eyes on him. Despite fighting with such terrifying speed. His hair. His shirt. His trousers. His shoes. All of it remained perfectly intact without a single drop of blood on him, and his skin remained even more so, glistening in the dark with a vibrancy that radiated power so strong it was almost visible.

"Aaaahh!" Unable to endure this tug of war of patience any longer, Olivia scratched her head and stamped her foot against the ground. "Sorry for asking such a personal question," she muttered.

Lucien chuckled slightly, and the sound sent a cold shudder crawling down her spine. "I was merely thinking about why you are so interested in my love life," he murmured, pressing his fingers cleanly against his chin, tapping it lightly as he tilted his head to one side.

Olivia felt her breath hitch in her throat. Before she could decide the next course of action or find the words to salvage this situation, Lucien turned on his heel and started walking. "Follow me closely," he said, and as Olivia turned toward her twin brother, she heard Lucien add without looking back, "Make sure you keep up."

Olivia snapped her head toward the direction Lucien had already disappeared into. "Shit!" She dashed forward. "Run," she shouted, and both twins launched themselves into a stumbling sprint behind him.

***

She had thought he had ditched them. That he had simply turned and ran away, leaving them to their own fates deep inside the forest. It was the only thing she could make sense of from such a swift and sudden disappearance, and all the respect she had quietly been building for him began to crumble.

Though, somewhere in the back of her mind, she had reminded herself that he had no real reason or responsibility to guide them out of here. But she had hoped he would help regardless, and since he had given them his word, she had believed he would. So watching him vanish into the dark and then chasing after the direction he had gone, only to find no sign of him after something close to ten minutes. Only flared her worries even more.

There was a possibility that they could have wandered off in entirely the wrong direction, if not for the fact that Lucien had left large footprints pressed deeply into the ground, a clear trail for them to follow. She had been half grateful for those, because at the very least it meant he had not abandoned them completely. Perhaps he did not like babysitting two royal twins through a miasma forest and decided to leave behind a trail so that he could be absolved of any further obligation. Whether her reasoning was correct or not, it gave her a thin thread of peace to hold onto, and she was choosing to hold onto it with everything she had, because she was not confident in her and her brother's ability to navigate these treacherous woods on their own.

Olivia tightened her grip around the sword she had snatched from one of the dead assassins when she had first taken off running, and cast a quick glance toward her brother, who also clutched a blade of similarly good quality in his own hands, moving swiftly at her side.

Then, without warning, a shriek tore through the air, a grueling, bone-rattling cry that made her eardrums rattle inside her skull. She wanted to stop but her feet simply would not, carrying her forward on pure adrenaline alone, and whether it was the rush of it pumping through her veins or the burning need to know what had made such a sound, she could not say. But she reached the source quickly enough as the footprints also led to it. And only then did her feet stop, and she felt the strange pull of déjà vu settle over her, because laid out before her eyes was another littered scatter of dead bodies of miasma beasts. This time the dead bodies were of trolls. Their enormous brown and dark-gray bodies were dismantled and strewn across the ground in pieces. She nearly threw bile out from her stomach at the sight of the ugly creatures.

Lucien was leaning against a nearby trunk. He nodded his head toward her and, for only a fraction of a second, toward her brother as well, before his attention settled back on her entirely. "I thought you would take forever," he remarked in his same flat, impassive voice, giving nothing away as to whether it was mockery, a poor attempt at humour, or simply words falling out of a man powerful enough not to care either way.

But one thing was perfectly clear to her: she needed to latch onto Lucien and not let go of him. And, she was ready to give up whatever amount of dignity it required, because her life and her brother's life depended entirely on staying close to him until they were out of this forest.

"Follow me," Lucien said, and disappeared again, leaving a fresh trail behind.

She was relieved, at last, that her earlier assumption had been wrong and he had not truly abandoned them. But shouldn't he be taking the bodies with him?These monster corpses would fetch decent money, right? She looked doubtfully over the log-like cut pieces that were scattered across the ground. Then again, she supposed it would be more of a hassle to drag them out than to leave them, given the state he had left them in.

Shaking the thought from her head, she dashed forward once more, following closely behind Lucien's trail and making sure that Joseph stayed closely beside her.

***

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