Chapter 460. A Demon Would Be Simpler Than This

Chapter 460: 460. A Demon Would Be Simpler Than This

Catherine studied him across the table for what felt like an eternity. Her gaze was piercing, searching the hollows beneath his eyes and the rigid set of his jaw, dissecting the raw agony he was trying so desperately to conceal.

Whatever she saw in his expression softened the sharp, accusatory edge of her own features, revealing the exhaustion of a man preparing for a suicide mission.

Without a word, she reached across the table and slid the second cup toward him. The delicate china made a soft, almost apologetic clink against his saucer.

"You’ll need this," she said, her voice losing its steel and taking on a rueful gentleness. "Conversations like that... they always go better with something warm in your stomach."

"I learned that the hard way, telling an entire hall of squires that their captain wasn’t coming home from the Blackwood campaign."

William blinked, the unexpected vulnerability in her voice catching him off guard. "You never told me that story."

"Because it’s not a good one, William... It’s a story about how small we feel when the world breaks." Catherine wrapped both hands around her own cup, seeking its heat, and turned her gaze toward the window where the morning light seemed almost too bright, too innocent. "I ate breakfast first that morning."

"I remember forcing myself to swallow bread and honey, though I couldn’t tell you I tasted a single morsel."

"But it helped more than I expected... Grief is a physical thing; it hollows you out."

"It’s easier to carry when your body isn’t also starving."

She turned back to him, her eyes locking onto his with the steadiness of a veteran who had seen too many battlefields. "Tell her tonight, William."

"Stop waiting for some divine sign or a perfect alignment of the stars."

"There is no perfect moment waiting for you down the road... There is only tonight, and then there is tomorrow night, and every night you delay makes the wound fester a little deeper before you finally open it."

William looked down at the tea. Pale wisps of steam rose from the surface, curling upward like ghosts before vanishing into the sunlight.

He thought, not for the first time, that facing a summoned demon with nothing but a five-moled sword felt like a simpler proposition than what he was facing tonight.

A demon was honest; it wanted to rend his flesh, to shatter his bones, to spill his blood across the stones. A demon had no hidden agenda beyond slaughter.

But this was worse. This was an act of necessary betrayal.

He was about to break something precious in the person he had sworn to protect, and the worst part was that he would have to be the one to swing the hammer.

’I will be the villain in her story today,’ he thought bitterly. ’I will be the one who destroys her peace, and she will hate me for it.’

’But if I don’t, the hatred will come from somewhere else, and it will be far more lethal.’

"What if she asks why I waited?" he asked after a long silence, his voice cracking slightly. "Three days might not seem like an eternity to most, but to her... she’ll see the gap."

"She’ll ask why I didn’t come to her the same night I told her father."

"She’ll ask why I let her sleep three more nights in a lie."

"Then tell her the truth," Catherine said, her voice as simple and unyielding as a blade. "Tell her exactly what you told me."

"Tell her you wanted to give her the news with something solid in your hands, including facts and evidence, rather than just a story that she would have every right to doubt."

"Tell her you were trying to shield her from the weight of it until you had something she could actually use."

"Something she could fight with."

A faint, sad smile touched Catherine’s lips. "She won’t like it, William."

"She won’t love hearing that you decided for her, even for a few days."

"She will hate that you took that choice away."

"But she will understand. Because she is who she is. She would have done the exact same thing for one of us."

William turned Catherine’s words over in his mind, turning them like stones in his palm. He weighed them against his own fear, against the instinct that screamed at him to retreat into the familiar comfort of silence.

And to his profound, aching relief, he found he believed her. Catherine possessed a rare, almost surgical clarity when it came to Kaela, a perspective unclouded by the protective desperation that often made William blind to the princess’s own iron resolve.

He was grateful, once again, for the second set of eyes at this table, for the anchor she provided when he felt himself drifting toward madness.

"Tonight," he agreed.

His voice sounded foreign to his own ears—flat, resigned, but certain.

He picked up the cup she had offered and drank. The tea was scalding, the heat searing his tongue and throat, but he welcomed the pain.

It steadied something coiled and unsteady in his chest, a frantic, bird-like hammering that had been relentless since the pillar came down. He was quietly, profoundly grateful that she had anticipated his need, pouring the tea before he had even realized his hands were shaking.

When evening descended, the world seemed to hold its breath.

The training ground sat empty and hushed when he brought Kaela out. The iron gate creaked with a long, mournful groan as she pushed it open ahead of him, the sound echoing off the stone walls like a warning.

Over the past weeks, this patch of packed earth had become theirs in every way that truly mattered; it was the only sanctuary left.

Here, in the circle of dust and sweat, a princess could shed the suffocating weight of her title and simply be a woman learning to trust the lethal potential of her own fists.

Four tall braziers burned low at each corner of the yard, their flames licking hungrily at the darkness. The firelight was small and steady against the windless night, throwing long, dancing shadows across the ground that writhed like living things every time a moth wandered too close to the heat.

Above them, the moon hung high and pale above the jagged palace roofline, a cold, watchful eye. Its light washed the center of the yard in a sickly silver glow, casting everything in a pallor that made the world look fragile as though a single wrong word might shatter the entire scene into shards of glass.

The air carried that particular, biting clarity that precedes the first true frost of autumn, a sharpness that made every inhalation feel like swallowing needles and forced a person to become acutely aware of the rhythm of their own lungs.

The usual nocturnal sounds of the palace—the distant, muffled clatter of the kitchens, the low murmur of the guard changing shift near the outer walls—had thinned to almost nothing.

It was a silence that felt deliberate. A silence that belonged to secrets.

William watched Kaela as she stepped into the silver light, her movements fluid and confident, completely unaware that she was walking into the wreckage of her own life.

He felt a surge of something dark and protective rise in his throat, a bitter anger at the universe for forcing him to be the one to destroy this moment.

’This is the last hour of her innocence,’ he thought, his hand tightening unconsciously on the hilt of his practice sword. ’After tonight, there will be no more training, no more laughter, and no more simple truths.’

’There will only be the war.’