“What does it have to do with you?“ I still didn't understand.
“Trust me, that is something you do not want to know right now and a fairly minor detail in the overall story. After all, you wish me to tell you about Ansgar, do you not?” He stopped and pressed his back deeper into the chair, making his chin raise slightly, just enough to make us reach the same eye level. By the way I was situated, I had a perfect view of his features and those dark eyes that still hid so much from me.
“Tell me about Ansgar,” I urged, forcing myself not to blink and held his stare for as long as I could. Luckily, he interrupted the eye contact, probably more to my benefit, and continued.
“He won the fight that day. The smug bastard told the entire forest how he managed to cast me off by sheer force and assured every one of his mighty protection should I come back,” he scoffed, laughing at the expense of my boyfriend. My mate. My Ansgar.
“Do not speak ill of him again, or I will open the security door and throw you off this plane. I don't care if we all die in the process,” I bluffed. At an extremely bad timing, it seemed, just as the flight attendants arrived with the soups Rhylan had ordered. Both their smiles dropped and they stopped abruptly, unsure if the best process was to interrupt a visibly heated conversation, ignore my outburst or run and tell the pilot.
“Low blood sugar,” Rhylan turned to the girls with areassuring smile. “This one gets cranky when she’s hungry.”
They instantly relaxed and started serving the dishes, not missing the opportunity to smile or engage in some small talk with the gorgeous man that seemed to adore telling jokes or ‘accidentally’ touched them inappropriately when trying to help. Two minutes later, they were dismissed and left Rhylan in my company with sorrowful faces.
“You were saying?” I dared him to continue, careful of every word he uttered.
“I was saying thatPrince Ansgardefeated me that time, so I was forced to retreat and form a new plan. One that involved obtaining what I wanted from him, but also let me get close to you. So I decided to form part of the Forest Guard, seeing how they had free access in the territory and proved an easy and unsuspicious way of being near you.”
“How did you manage to do that?”
He huffed. “Faerie rings. Right at the entrance in the forest. I kept them blocked for a few hours and made them think they had already seen you. I took the uniform and food, came to visit and did my job,” he smiled with pride.
“What about the emails? How did you know about the door?”
“Oh sprout,” he shook his head disapprovingly. “So naive. There are ghost programs that track your every movement online. All your faerie searches? All your brother’s travels? Every single email or conversation you had was carefully stored. It’s really easy to hack into things,” he raised his shoulders like he was describing something as easy as eating chocolate.
“Why? What did you get out of it?” I asked, without giving him time to enjoy the pumpkin soup he struggled to gulp down in between my interrogation. If there was one thing on the very bottom of the list of stuff I cared about, it was Rhylan’s stomach.
He stopped and grinned. “More than you could ever imagine. I got to know you.” Once again he stopped to stare at me, looking into my eyes as though his long lashes were to turn into curtains and stage his feelings for me. He looked at me with affection. Like he cared.
“Tell me about Ansgar,” I demanded, ready to slam my fist onto the improvised table that separated us.
He drew in a breath, apparently displeased that I didn’t feel the need to dig deeper into his emotions and enquire his meaning.
“I debated my next move for a long time, ready to abandon my course and find a new plan. But your mate lost track of his royal attributions and behavior when he met you, acting like a youth living his first love. Which I am guessing, in his case, was the truth. You two were flaunting your love in the district for all to see and he made a point in telling everyone about his feelings for you. Even a blind could see that he loved you, so much that he would risk it all for you. So I decided to give you a push. It wasn’t your idea to visit the Earth Kingdom, it was mine. You were just a pawn.”
Rage flowed through me, forcing my heart to beat at a higher rate and my nostrils to flare with anger. “Why did you pretend to be my friend? Why did you push me to do it?” I barely uttered the words through my teeth, hate towards the man sitting in front of me becoming evident.
“I never pretended to be your friend, Anwen. Those visits we shared, it was real for me,” he nodded several times, reaching over the table to grab my hand but I immediately pulled it away. “You served a purpose, I will not deny that, but meeting you, becoming yourfriend,” he struggled to release the word, “was one of the most pleasurable moments of the past century for me. You were broken, Anwen. He may have been in pain and drank himself to death, but you were broken. And alone. And I couldn’t leave you like that.”
“Don't you dare tell me you did all this out of compassion!” Tears formed in my eyes and I realized there was no point keeping them at bay. “You took him from me!” I rose to my feet and launched on Rhylan, unafraid to show him all the pain and hate I had accumulated throughout the past year.
My arms instinctively found his chest and started hitting every surface they could reach. Fingers curled into fists and I found myself punching Rhylan, reaching as high as I could towards his face. He instinctively pushed back into the seat he found himself trapped in and receiving my wrath, protecting his face with a hand while the other blindly tried to reach for me and make me stop.
“Anwen, that’s enough,” I heard him struggle in between breaths but I could not stop, would not do it. He took everything from me, he interfered with my happiness and killed the man I loved. Out of a stupid game, just to satisfy whatever plan he had formed.A pawn. That’s what he’d called me. That’s what I was to him.
“Stop it!” Rhylan rose from the seat and caught both my arms and twisted them, and me along with the movement, until I found my body trapped and arms forced crossed, squeezed by his strength. Just as Ansgar had done it that first day.
I could not contain it any longer and tears streamed down my face, along with a muffled cry I had struggled to keep in. Not caring anymore, I loosened the tension in my body and allowed my knees to give, making me fall onto the ground, Rhylan’s unwelcome embrace the only thing keeping me from collapsing.
He kept a hold on me, squeezing every sigh out with unimaginable patience, waiting for me to recover from the breakdown he had caused and surveying my breathing as I did so.
“It’s only a few minutes,” I surprised myself with the announcement I involuntarily made, as if I cared about Rhylan’s fake concern for me. But seeing how I decided to give out details I didn’t plan to, it felt wrong to pause. “I can’t stop it,” I whispered, “the crying. It comes at weird times and there’s nothing I can do but wait it out. It’s only a few minutes,” I repeated the phrase I kept telling myself whenever accumulated pain or memories burst out of me and forced me to halt for a suffering session in the most inconvenient moments.
“I’m sorry,” he replied. He stood so close that his expelled air caressed my ear, and something about his voice toned down my anger. It sounded sincere. My deep breath must have encouraged him because he shifted and sat us both on the floor with a brisk turn, making sure that I laid in a comfortable position, although my arms remained crossed and wrists restrained by him.
“You will see him again, I promise.”
If his words were meant to calm me down, they caused the opposite result, forcing a wail to erupt from deep within my throat. I did not know why, but this had a summoning effect on the story and Rhylan chose this as the most opportune moment to continue. Probably because I was already on the floor crying, thus unable to hit him again.
