Katrina’s POV
Rough hands clamped down on my arms again, slamming me back against the stone wall. The impact knocked the breath from my lungs.
The cold bit through the fabric of my dress and into my skin like ice. I twisted, kicked, fought back with everything I had left, but they didn’t even flinch.
Their grip was unrelenting, bruising, and impersonal.
One of them grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head backward with such force that a cry tore from my throat.
Pain radiated from my scalp down my neck, white-hot and blinding. My heels scraped uselessly against the ground as I writhed in their grasp, but it was like struggling against solid rock.
“Let me go!” I screamed, voice ragged and full of panic. But the alley swallowed the sound, and the drum rolls from the ceremony thundered overhead, louder and louder, like war drums beating over a battlefield.
They drowned me out completely.
Terror closed in fast, clawing its way up my chest, pressing tight against my ribs. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
The fingers on my body moved like shadows, ghosting over my arms, sliding across my waist, trailing through my hair. They weren’t hurried. They were slow. Intentional.
I screamed again, louder this time, shrill and hoarse. “Adolphus!”
It was pure desperation. A name hurled like a lifeline into the void. Maybe he’d hear me. Maybe he’d feel something shift.
Maybe he’d know I was near, in danger, calling out for him with the last thread of hope I had left.
But Nicholas laughed.
The sound cut through the noise with perfect cruelty. “Your darling Adolphus isn’t coming to save you,” he said, voice echoing in the alley like a death sentence.
My struggles stopped for a heartbeat. My body froze as my gaze snapped upward and locked with his. His face was a twisted portrait of delight, his eyes glinting with sadistic pleasure.
“He’s a little busy right now,” Nicholas went on, each word deliberate and dripping with venom. “After all, he’s currently getting mated to your best friend…” He paused, the smile widening. “Ex-best friend. The Princess.”
The words didn’t just hurt. They hit like a blow to the chest, hard, sudden, and devastating. I felt it physically.
My knees buckled slightly, the strength in my legs gone. My stomach sank so fast it felt like falling.
Everything else faded. The cold stone at my back. The hands still pinning me. The stench of rot in the air. Even the drums seemed to dull, retreating to the edges of my awareness.
Adolphus. With Cassandra.
Getting mated.
The pain that ripped through me wasn’t the kind that came from fists or slaps, it was worse. Deeper. It hollowed out my chest with terrifying precision. My heart clenched like it was being crushed in a vice.
What happened to us?
The whispered plans we made when no one was listening. The stolen glances. The quiet moments that felt like they could’ve been something real. He promised.
Maybe not with words. But in the way he touched me. In the way he looked at me like I was the only one who saw him.
And now this?
My body sagged between them, the fight slowly draining out of me like blood from an open wound. I didn’t have the strength to scream anymore.
I didn’t even have the strength to cry. The betrayal numbed everything else. It hollowed me out.
Adolphus wasn’t coming.
He had chosen her. Chosen Cassandra, while I was thrown into this alley like nothing. Like no one.
It didn’t matter how loudly I screamed. It didn’t matter what we once were. The bond between us, if it even existed, wasn’t enough to pull him to me.
A quiet sob escaped my lips, unbidden. My vision blurred with unshed tears. I clenched my jaw, digging my nails into my palms just to feel something solid. Something real.
How the fuck did I let him fool me again?