Chapter 357. Trying to Kill Her Own Demons With Splintered Timber

Now, standing in the center of that dusty circle after years spent meticulously constructing a different persona—the poised princess, the controlled noblewoman, the perfect academy graduate—the yard felt impossibly cramped.

The walls seemed to press inward, the sky felt too distant, and the equipment looked more decrepit than her childhood memories had allowed. But the hollow ache in her sternum remained unchanged.

It was a desperate, gnawing hunger to simply move. To stop being a symbol, stop being a pawn, and stop being a girl who had to ask for permission to exist.

She needed to hit something until the screaming in her head stopped.

Her hand trembled as she reached for a practice sword resting on the weapon rack along the wall. The wood was rough, unpolished, and chipped, but as her fingers curled around the grip, she felt a spark of something primal.

She began to swing.

Up in his chambers, William was still staring out at the horizon, his mind a battlefield of theories and suspicions, when a flicker of movement caught the corner of his eye.

He froze. His tactical instincts, honed by years of watching for threats in the periphery, demanded his full attention.

What he saw stopped his thoughts cold.

Below, in the walled courtyard, Kaela was not practicing. She was not training.

She was unleashing a torrent of raw, unadulterated violence upon one of the ancient wooden dummies. The sword didn’t move with the fluid grace of the academy techniques she had mastered; it moved with the jagged, desperate cruelty of a wounded animal.

Each strike landed at awkward, punishing angles. The blade bit into the wood with bone-jarring force, sending vibrations up her arms that would have made any other student recoil.

Her stance was collapsing, her breathing was becoming a series of ragged gasps, and her discipline had been burned away by something far more dangerous: rage.

’She isn’t fighting an opponent,’ William realized, his chest tightening as he watched from above. ’She’s fighting herself.’

He recognized that particular rhythm. He had seen it in the trenches, in the eyes of soldiers who had watched their comrades torn apart, who had learned that some horrors could not be processed by the mind; they could only be bled out through the muscles.

This was grief channeled into motion; this was fury seeking a physical outlet because words had failed her completely.

Crack.

A vicious overhead strike caught the dummy’s shoulder, the wooden blade splintering with a sound like a breaking bone. Small fragments of desiccated wood sprayed across the packed earth like shrapnel.

Kaela didn’t flinch. She didn’t even seem to notice.

Her face was flushed crimson, sweat streaming down her temples and stinging her eyes, but her gaze remained fixed on the target with a terrifying, unfocused intensity.

’Again.’

Another strike.

Crack.

The dummy’s torso groaned under the assault.

’Again.’

She swung with such reckless abandon that the sword skidded sideways off the wood, nearly tearing itself from her sweat-slicked grip. Her wrists burned, her shoulders screamed in protest, but she reset immediately.

Her movements were becoming wilder, more dangerous, each swing carrying the potential to break her own bones in her desperate bid to destroy something else.

’She’s going to hurt herself,’ William thought, a sudden urgency jolting through him. ’Before she breaks something she can’t fix.’

He didn’t hesitate. He shoved his boots on, fingers fumbling with the laces in his haste, and buttoned his shirt with jerky, impatient motions.

He didn’t grab a coat; he wasn’t concerned about the morning chill. He threw open his door and bolted toward the nearest exit leading to the private gardens.

The morning air was sharp and damp, dew clinging to the manicured hedges like sweat on skin. The garden path was silent, except for the distant and increasingly violent sound of wood meeting wood, echoing from the yard ahead.

William ran, his heartbeat syncing with the frantic rhythm of those strikes, his mind focused entirely on the girl below who was trying to kill her own demons with a piece of splintered timber.

William approached with deliberate care, each footfall deliberate on the packed earth. He made sure his boots crunched loudly against the stray gravel and fallen twigs, avoiding the silent approach of a predator.

He had learned long ago, in the blood-soaked camps of desperate men, that startling someone who was already teetering on the edge of a breakdown could be catastrophic. A startled soldier didn’t see a friend; they saw a threat, and they reacted with steel and reflex.

Kaela’s head snapped toward him with the mechanical jerk of someone who had forgotten how to relax. Her sword remained raised mid arc, the wooden blade quivering in her grip.

Sweat-soaked strands of hair clung to her flushed skin like spider silk, and her eyes, wide, glassy, and bloodshot from exertion, burned with something primal.

For a heartbeat, a flash of defensive hostility flickered across her features, a raw warning that said, ’Touch me, and I will break you.’

Her chest heaved in wet, ragged gasps, each breath visible in the cool morning air.

William stopped several paces away, giving her space to breathe, to exist, to simply be angry. He didn’t speak immediately. Instead, he surveyed the carnage of her outburst.

The dummy behind her was a wreck; its wooden torso was deeply gouged, split open like a fresh wound, with splinters jutting out like broken ribs.

The ground beneath her feet was torn up, deep furrows carved into the dirt where she had planted herself to drive her fury into the wood. It looked less like a training session and more like a small-scale massacre.

When he finally moved closer, he didn’t offer platitudes. He didn’t offer comfort.

With a quiet, unshakable firmness, he reached out not to touch her but to intervene. His hand closed around the grip of the practice sword, gently but decisively prying it from her white knuckled grasp.

He set the weapon down in the dirt between them, its work finished.

Kaela stared at him, her body still coiled like a spring, her pulse visible in the frantic hammering at the base of her throat.

"Instructor Wade," she rasped, her voice cracking from disuse and rage. "I don’t... I don’t want to talk about last night."

"Well... Not yet. I know you’re here to check on me, to play the concerned guardian, and I appreciate it, I truly do, but I just needed to hit something."

"I needed to feel something other than... this. Before anyone tries to fix me."

"I’m not here to talk about last night," William said.

His voice was level, cutting through her frantic energy like a blade through silk.

Kaela blinked, the defensive armor around her expression cracking to reveal sheer bewilderment. "You’re not?"

"Not unless you want to."

The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the distant song of birds that seemed cruelly oblivious to the turmoil in the yard. Kaela searched his face, looking for the pity she expected, the condescension she feared, or the sympathy she resented.

Finding none of it, she slowly let her shoulders drop, though the tension remained coiled in her thighs. Her gaze flickered to the ruined dummy, the victim of her rage, and then back to him.

"Then why are you here? It’s barely past sunrise."

"I watched you swing that sword for the last few minutes," William said, gesturing toward the battered dummy.

Its surface was a roadmap of her internal chaos, scarred with fresh, jagged wounds that looked almost obscene in the morning light. "And frankly, Kaela, I’ve been meaning to bring this up for a while now."

"Longer than you probably realize."

Kaela’s brow furrowed. The confusion was genuine now, replacing the raw fury.

"Bring what up? My mental state? My inability to sit still in a palace that feels like a cage?"

"No," William said, his eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that demanded she listen. "Your sword technique."