Genesis
Present day.
The convent was normally quiet at this time, the halls and balconies awash with the silver light of moonbeams filtering through the windows. The other girls and the nuns were asleep in their beds, rosaries concealed under pillows. They were heavy sleepers; all of them. But the world outside never slept, and neither did I.
I slipped silently out of my room and into the hallways making my way down, my bare feet slapping against the cold stone floors as I made my way unseen in the dark through the chapel, through the dorms and through the staring eyes of the saints whose faces were painted on stained glass murals. I had become familiar with every creaking floorboard, every blind spot, and every hall where the guards never looked. St. Mariana's Convent was my prison, but I had perfected the art of dancing between the bars.
The wooden gate at the rear of the convent gardens groaned as I pushed it open and then I was off, leaving only the shadows to catch me.
The men I met did not usually expect a Moretti daughter to meet with them down in the ruins of old churches and abandoned backstreets. They expected crime lord daughters to obey, to submit, and to sit pretty in their silken gilded cages until their fathers bartered them off like trophies. I was not sorry to disappoint them.
I stood face to face with my target for the day, I knew he had what I was looking for. I saw it in the way he leaned in close to me, the way the darkness in his eyes deepened as moonlight touched the fine line of my throat. I let my fingers graze against his chest, let him think, for a fleeting moment, that he was the one in control. These kind of Men were more complacent that wasy. They would say what they shouldn't, words that could very much get them killed spilling off their lips.
When I dropped to my knees, one thing popped into my head.
Caspian.
I would close my eyes, and for a brief instant, I could nearly fool myself that it was him. That it was his fingers in my hair, his breath rough against my skin, his cock in my mouth and his body shuddering in my hand. And then I'd banish the picture as quickly as my mind built it. Because this wasn't about my lust. This was about the power that I so desperately wanted.
They could take only what I was willing to give. Even after all these years, my virginity intact; a final piece of myself that I wasn't willing to give. Not to them. Not to anyone. Not yet.
They spoke to me of my father's empire, of how the Moretti name grew more ferocious. But above all else, they spoke of him.
They spoke of the child who is now just a ghost from my past, now risen from the dead as something so much worse.
"They call him the British King," one of them breathed. "He's the most ruthless lord we've had in years"
He was no longer mine. He was something else now. Something to be feared, something powerful and out of my reach.
And never; not once had he ever sought me out.
No letter. No cryptic messages.
For seventeen years.
And I waited.
He said he would come back for me; but he hasn't.
I'm not even sure if our bethrothal still stands. My father never brings it up on his rare visits and the nuns are non the wiser.
I leaned my head back, looking up at the man standing over me as I struggled to swallow him; the slack-jawed shock on his face was the only signal I got before his shaking fingers constricted on my shoulder as he orgasmed and cum poured down my throat.
Rising up from my knees, I stood on my feet, smoothing the wrinkles in my cloak, and dabbing at the edge of my lip with a delicate finger before turning and vanishing into the shadows. With greater knowledge. Greater strength. And more information about the empire that would one day be mine.
My father had overlooked me.
But I will eventualy take his throne; with Caspian by my side or not.
I had always known Caspian would be something special; He had no choice except to be. There had never been any other option for him. Over the years, it's been hard coming to terms with the fact that the boy I knew had been cast in the flames of loss and expectation and molded by the hands of men who only understood his potential for violence and conquest.
But nonetheless, I'd let myself believe; to hope, that he would remember me. That I wouldn't become just a spec in the past he seemed to leave behind.
Caspian had continued living without me. He had survived. He had done something with the pain, the betrayal, the abandonment that we had experienced together and allowed it shaped him into what he is today. He's now a force to be reckoned with, a name spoken with the same threatening tones as a promise of death.
And yet, while he thrived here I sat, hemmed in by the dark gloss of the closet library, with melted wax trickling on the table beside me, I could sense the pent-up bite of bitterness seething in my chest.
He left me behind.
I had waited. Through the empty days, through the clockwork prayer I didn't believe in, through the silent games of chess that I had played with the convent gaurds. I continue to wait for a sign that he hadn't let me go. That I wasn't alone, wasn't the only one remembering what we'd both lost, what we were to be and the life that was stolen from us.
But perhaps I'm being silly. Perhaps It was silly of me to think that even all these years, all this silence, that he would be thinking of me just as I had been thinking of him.
But It didn't matter.
I don't matter to him.