The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl novel Chapter 142

Chapter 142: One Hundred & Forty Two

*Valka*

The throne room looks worse for wear. There had been a fight in our absence and someone had broken the centre table used for the meetings in half.

A new one obviously sits in the centre but Lucien’s eyebrows arch at the fresh mahogany, as well as the smell of dried paint. Even the walls were painted anew.

When he looked to the members of the Council in question, no one would meet his gaze. It’s like that feeling I got as a child whenever my father was leaving home and I knew I could snoop and break as much furniture as I could before he returned.

The memory makes my head spin.

Before we left Silvermoor, Lucien and I had stopped at House Ironfang. There wasn’t much left of it. It was destroyed and looted, and as we stood in the yard, taking it all in while my not so subtle gossiping neighbours kept pretending they weren’t watching through their windows and whispering in hushed tones that I was married to a monster and had become one, and all about how they knew I was always a strange child, I realized the house didn’t at all feel like home.

It felt like a wreck that had been visited by death one too many times.

But I’d walked along anyway. My father’s grave was in the back of the yard. It was but a simple grey headstone with his name. Eldric Ironfang.

That was it. There were no flowers. Not even dead ones sat by it. I suppose Rhea was angrier than I thought about everything. Understandably so, I think.

And I sat by it. Felt Lucien’s hands curl on my shoulders as I stared and stared at it, wondering what I could have said to him. What I should have said before I left him. Perhaps I should’ve told him I loved him one more time. Because before anyone else, he loved me first. I should’ve told him I was sorry. Because he lived his entire life for me. He had been young when Margot left. And every year spent afterwards was looking after me, moving with me, being my sole companion on some days. And even on the days I ran off to be a scoundrel, he’d sit at the edge of that little house of wood he’d built for just us two and wait for me.

I didn’t realize how much I missed him until I ran my fingers across the headstone and said it. And let myself feel the grief that I had been holding back since that day I received the letter I wouldn’t read.

And Lucien had said nothing but sat in the sand with me, his arms wrapped around me tightly.

After which he had given me a bit of space to explore the rest of the house. For which I was grateful.

Because I found something in my father’s old bedroom. Normally, it would have gone unnoticed by Rhea because it was hidden in the planks of wood underneath the flooring. The most recent looting must have brought them up and the corners of them were mostly half chewed up by rats.

There were letters. Missives, actually.

To be honest, I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around any of it yet. I’d shoved them into my sleeve the second I heard Lucien’s footsteps. Because they were addressed not to me, but to Lucien.

That bit had been hard to glean, because there had been no name on the notes because they weren’t sent out. They were merely rough copies. But there were received notes and I recognised Lucien’s elegant writing scrawled onto some of the pages. Not to speak of the few I saw of Margot’s. All written in the Old Language. And worse yet was an old scrappy book with my ugly handwriting in its worn pages. A diary of some sorts that I’d kept before I forgot entirely about everything.

They all sit heavy in my luggage, hidden amidst my dresses, waiting to be read when I’m all alone. Because I don’t know what the hell could be in them. And I’ve had so much to think about in the last couple of days that I’d chipped it back as a less important worry.

That my husband possibly *knew* my father and failed to mention it.

"I didn’t have the faintest clue that you were all so passionate about redecorating," Lucien murmurs, lips curved in amusement as he stares pointedly at the lack of the smaller throne that should have been beside his. Mine.

Someone obviously had it moved.

The servants begin falling over themselves to fetch me a chair but I gasp as Lucien grips my hip and brings me to sit across his thighs.

My cheeks burn at the attention and the gazes of members of the royal houses present, but I sit straighter and raise my chin. Margot is beaming from ear to ear, and noticeably, she is seated in the very center where House Blackspire used to be, while the latter have been shoved to the back. I suppose things like treason does affect a House’s standing, after all.

Did I fail to mention that the minute Margot saw me at the entrance a few minutes ago, she had walked over to me, done a full scan of my face and crushed me into a hug?

I didn’t even know how to feel about it. It was both awkward and very warm. And then, she pushed me off by my shoulders, like she hadn’t been the one clinging to me fiercely and said, "You need a bath."

Lucien’s nudges me with a hand to my waist and I lift my gaze to my people and say, "Report."

What follows is the most boring and grueling recollection of events that have followed in the last couple of months since we’ve been away. Finances, Provisions, and Weaponry. More discussion on the abuse of wealth in the royal coffers and the discrepancies in the reports.

Verya did a great job at giving orders no one wanted to follow. Funny that even I would have predicted the outcome of that. Gods know what Lucien was thinking. The Houses dissolve into childish bickering in minutes, death and dismemberment is being threatened.

I didn’t think I’d ever miss any of this but it’s no longer difficult to see why Lucien’s always amused. It is very entertaining.

In a nutshell, the castle was a madhouse when Lucien was gone.

"We must discuss the consequences of House Blackspire’s treachery."

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