The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl novel Chapter 111

Chapter 111: One Hundred & Eleven

Valka

He shut down.

Like the mechanics of a machine breaking down until it completely ceases function. It was slow, beginning from the hands that gripped my cheeks. He recoiled from me. Flinched. His violet eyes dulled and emptied out. His face smoothed to something carved out of stone. He backed away from me, chest heaving. And I saw him battle to with breathing, saw him battle with disbelief. And confusion. And denial. I saw him battle with the different stages of grief that existed. With the realization that she was here.

And then, the rage came.

It was ice. It was a storm. I thought I knew fear. But he heaved one breath, curled straight from ice, and everything in the bedroom shattered. The glass walls. The wood cracked. The marble splintered and broke. The ice was in my veins, so cold, it burned. The ceramics shattered. The glass frames around the portraits he’d drawn up for me exploded.

"You played me the fool," he said, another pained exhaling turning the air to frost, unsafe to even breathe in. But I couldn’t breathe. "You hid the truth from me. All this time..." Nostrils flare with fury so great, it crushed me in a fist. "You looked me in the eye and lied to me."

"I have never lied to you," I said, even if it hurt to speak. "It was my truth to share. And I didn’t know I could trust you with it. Or anyone. I’ve never even told my father--"

But it was like talking to a wall. The words rebounded off a wall of stone and fell to our feet in pieces. He clutched my shoulders, backing me up against the wall. And gods, I understood his rage. He had lost everything. He never told me about it, but I lived with his mate in my body. I had all of their memories together. All of that love shared, spent and lost. Her laugh, her scent, her warmth. Theirs. Ours.

Unbidden, unwanted, I shared glimpses of the despair he’d felt that drove him to several decades of madness and isolation, running through the wilds in search of something he could never find, faces he couldn’t remember. And the exact moment he had returned home, even if he was no longer himself. To shoulder the weight of a kingdom that needed him, even if he was no longer... alive. Not really.

It wasn’t just about the secrets. It was the realization that I knew everything. That I had always known, from the moment we met. That he’d been given another chance to be with the woman he would have moved and broken worlds for, and I hid that from him. I talked him through the grief. I was there for him, and I was such a horrible liar, white lies here and there when he asked questions, stripping him of his memories when he got too close to discovering the truth. I looked him in the eye and made a fool of him, like fate did. Again.

That’s not just betrayal to Lucien.

It was cosmic cruelty and I knew he would never forgive me for it.

"Is this what you wanted?" he asked, my spine hitting the wall. He forced a laugh, but it cracked halfway through. "Did you laugh at me? Mock me, perhaps?"

"That’s not--"

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