An Alpha's Forbidden Mate-Chapter 44: Starlight

Chapter Forty Four:

The grand arena was a hollow bowl of silver and shadows under the midnight sky. The air hung still, cooling the sweat on Tom’s brow as the fading hum of his silver aura settled back into his marrow. He stood at the center of the sand, his pulse still hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.

"Princess Caroline... what are you doing here?" Tom asked, his voice sounding raspy in the sudden silence.

Caroline stepped out from the darkness of the archway, her silk gown trailing softly over the grit of the arena floor. "I should be asking you that," she replied, her eyes searching his face, though the distance and the gloom masked the lingering shimmer of his veins.

Tom’s mind raced. He couldn’t tell her he was testing the limits of a power that could potentially topple her father’s throne. He forced a sheepish, tired smile, trying to appear like nothing more than a restless guest. "Oh... my room was stuffy. It felt like the walls were closing in, so I came out to feel the wind."

Caroline arched a delicate eyebrow, gesturing to the blood-stained sand and the jagged stone tiers where he had nearly lost his life during the trials. "Here? You came to feel the wind in the very place where you almost died?"

Tom rubbed the back of his neck, unable to conjure a more convincing lie on such short notice. "Yeah," he muttered, looking away. "Strange as it sounds, the air feels more honest here than in the palace."

Caroline let out a soft, melodious laugh that seemed to ripple through the cold air. "You are one weird guy, Tom. You know that?"

"So I’ve been told," he replied, finally letting his shoulders drop. "But if I may ask, what is the Princess doing in a place like this at this hour? Surely the royal gardens are more comfortable."

Caroline walked toward the center of the arena, stopping a few feet from him. She didn’t look like a royal at that moment; she looked like a girl burdened by the crown. "This is the only place I can be at peace," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "The gardens are beautiful, but they are manicured and watched. Here, the sky feels bigger. I come here to watch the stars."

She tilted her head back, her gaze drifting toward the shimmering tapestry of the cosmos. Tom followed her lead, looking up at the infinite pinpoints of light. For a long moment, they both stood in silence, two small figures in the vast, empty stadium.

"Do you always watch them from here?" Tom asked, breaking the quiet.

"Yeah," she replied, glancing at him with a playful spark in her eyes. "Any problem with that?"

"No," Tom said, mirroring her glance. "It’s just... weird. Considering the history of this place."

Caroline smiled, a genuine, soft expression that reached her eyes. "I guess we are both weird then."

They shared a quiet laugh, the tension that usually defined their interactions melting away. In the stillness of the arena, the distance between a "Pure-blood" prisoner and a Princess seemed to vanish. Tom looked at her, noticing the way the moonlight caught the edge of her hair and the softness of her features.

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t awkward anymore. It was heavy with a different kind of energy. Caroline turned her head toward him, her breath hitching slightly. Tom felt a magnetic pull, a gravity stronger than the one he had just been manipulating with his mind. He leaned in, and she didn’t pull away. When their lips met, it wasn’t the kiss of a hero and a maiden in a fairy tale; it was desperate and human—a brief, stolen moment of warmth in a world made of cold stone and iron secrets.

While the arena held its breath, the palace was a different story.

Olivia stood outside Tom’s quarters, her knuckles rapping sharply against the dark oak door. "Sir Tom? The King requests your presence in the throne room immediately."

She waited, her head tilted as she listened for the sound of shifting sheets or a groggy reply. Nothing. She knocked several times more, her patience thinning. "Sir Tom?"

When no answer came, Olivia didn’t go for a master key. Instead, she glanced down at her hands. Her long, elegant nails sharpened into obsidian points. With a professional flick of her wrist, she inserted a nail into the lock, twisting with a mechanical precision that suggested she had done this a thousand times. The lock clicked.

She pushed the door open. The room was empty. The bed was made, the window was cracked, and the "Pure-blood" was gone.

"Oh no," Olivia whispered, her eyes flashing with a predatory yellow light.

She didn’t waste time. She dashed down the hallway toward the guard station responsible for the guest wing. Four guards were stationed there, leaning against their spears and talking in low tones until they saw the King’s personal handmaid charging toward them.

"Aren’t you supposed to be calling the Pure-blood?" one of the guards asked, a tall man with a scarred lip.

"Where is he?" Olivia demanded, her voice vibrating with a low-frequency growl.

The guards exchanged confused looks. "Who?"

"The Pure-blood! Tom!" Olivia snapped.

The guards scrambled toward his room, their heavy boots thumping on the stone. When they saw the empty chamber, the color drained from their faces. Olivia stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, looking at them with pure disdain.

"How can four guards not notice where he went?" she hissed. "Idiots."

The lead guard, a man named Kaelen—known for his short temper and massive build—stepped toward her, his face reddening. "What did you just say, girl?"

"I called you idiots," Olivia repeated, her voice cold and steady. "And I was being generous."

"Don’t think because you are the King’s personal handmaid, we wouldn’t dare do anything to you," Kaelen growled, his hand tightening on the shaft of his spear. "You’re just a servant with fancy nails."

"Useless clowns," Olivia muttered. She turned to leave, her mind already calculating how to report this to the King while minimizing the fallout. "I have to report this."

"Where do you think you’re going, pretty?" Kaelen’s hand shot out, grabbing Olivia’s wrist in a crushing grip.

Olivia looked down at his hand, then back up at his face. Her expression was flat. "Let go, or you’ll lose that hand."

Kaelen laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. He looked at his three subordinates. "We can’t let the King know the Pure-blood escaped during our shift. He’ll have our heads on pikes by sunrise."

"So what do you suggest, Captain?" one of the other guards asked, his voice shaking.

Kaelen’s eyes turned murderous as he looked at Olivia. "We kill the girl. We wait for the next shift to arrive. By the time they find the room empty, we’ll claim it happened on their watch. It’s her word against ours, and dead maids don’t speak."

The other guards looked at each other, the desperation of survival outweighing their common sense. They began to close in, laughing menacingly as they drew their daggers.

In a blur of motion too fast for the human eye to track, Olivia moved. She didn’t pull away; she leaned into Kaelen’s grip. With a sickening crunch, she twisted his wrist in a direction it wasn’t meant to go. The heavy bone snapped like a dry twig, and Kaelen’s arm suddenly looked as limp and useless as a rubber band.

He let out a strangled cry of agony, but Olivia didn’t let him fall. The other three guards lunged, their spears thrusting forward. Olivia moved like water, a dark shadow weaving between the points of steel. She struck with the palm of her hand, hitting their vital pressure points with surgical precision. One, two, three—the guards collapsed, their bodies paralyzed and twitching on the floor.

Finally, she turned her full attention back to Kaelen. She seized him by the throat, her fingers sinking into his flesh as she hoisted his massive frame off the ground with a single hand.

"Have... mercy..." Kaelen wheezed, his face turning a deep, bruised purple as he struggled against her impossible strength.

"Filth," Olivia replied.

Her nails, long and sharp enough to slice through armor, pressed deep into the soft tissue of his throat. With a single, brutal squeeze, she crushed his windpipe. Kaelen’s eyes rolled back, and his body went limp. She dropped him like a sack of unwanted grain.

The remaining three guards, still paralyzed on the ground, stared up at her in absolute horror. They had seen the King’s maids as mere decorations; they had never realized they were the King’s most lethal hunters.

Olivia wiped a drop of blood from her cheek, her yellow eyes glowing in the dim light. "Don’t worry," she said, her voice dropping to a terrifying whisper. "I’m not going to kill you. But if anyone—and I mean anyone—hears a single word about what happened here tonight, I will kill every single person you love. Every friend, every sibling, every parent. This isn’t a threat. It is a promise."

"We will never speak of it! We swear!" the guards gasped in unison.

"Good. Now clean up this mess," Olivia commanded.

She turned and walked away, her nails retracting as she smoothed her apron. She needed to find Tom before the King sent for him. As she rounded the corner of the northern corridor, she froze.

At the end of the hall, she saw Tom walking back from the direction of the arena. He wasn’t alone. Princess Caroline was walking beside him, the two of them speaking in hushed, intimate tones.

Olivia looked back toward the room where Kaelen’s body still lay cooling on the floor. If he sees this... if he sees what I am... I’ll be exposed, she thought frantically. She stepped into the shadows of a recessed pillar, her heart racing as she watched the "Pure-blood" and the Princess pass by, unaware of the blood that had just been spilled in his name.