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Tilla was waiting for Anastasia in the bedroom. She was back with the heated soup as instructed by Anastasia earlier.

“Tilla, prepare the medicine for the Queen. And also prepare the water and towels.” Caspian instructed Tilla as soon as his eyes fell on her.

Tilla felt a chill shiver running down her spine upon seeing Anastasia closing her eyes and trembling in the King’s arms. She bowed and quickly went to open the drawer where she had arranged the Queen’s medicines.

Caspian, on the other hand, carefully put Anastasia down on the bed. He held out his hand to pull the blanket and tuck his wife.

However, he froze when he finally realized that his fingers and palms were covered in Ruby’s blood. The sleeve of his white shirt had bloodstains on them. He felt disgusted by his own hands. And he hated himself for touching his wife’s pure body with that dirty hand of his.

He turned around to look at Tilla and ordered her, “Tilla, feed the medicine to the Queen. And make sure to keep her body cool. She has an extremely high fever.”

“I will, Your Majesty,” Tilla bowed.

Caspian then turned towards the door, only to feel his wife’s burning hands grabbing him by his wrist.

.....

“Anna?” he looked at his wife’s pale face.

Anastasia gulped and tried her best to speak audibly, “Caspian, I want you to stay by my side. Don’t leave. Please.”

Caspian felt a pinch in his heart when he heard his wife’s feeble whisper. And he blamed himself for the condition that she was in now.

He gave a pitiful glance to his wife and said in a soft and loving voice, “I will be right back after washing up. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Promise me,” Anastasia asked as her eyelids got heavier and ultimately closed.

Caspian slowly pulled his dirty hand away from Anastasia’s weak grip. “I promise,” he whispered to her and immediately ran out of the room.

And while he sprinted down the gallery, he was cursing himself, ‘Now she’s hurting again because of me! I should have carried her out of the dungeon the moment I saw her there. I had one job! To keep her away from stress. And I made her feel stressed out when she hasn’t even recovered yet.’

Caspian flung open the door to his chambers and went inside.

Two of the vampire maids ran inside the room right after him and bowed.

“Prepare the bath for me,” Caspian immediately ordered and went to sit down on the sofa.

He rested his arms on his knees. And he kept on staring at his palms covered with blood.

If it was any other day then Caspian would have loved the smell of the blood that was on his hand. After all, it was the blood that was superior in smell and taste to that of humans.

But right now, the sight of that blood made his skin crawl. He couldn’t help but compare himself to a wild animal that just killed its prey.

And he wondered to himself, ‘How can Anna still want me around her? That also right after witnessing that monstrous side of me?’

—

‘Why am I being treated like a monster when I did nothing to harm them?’ Ruby thought to herself as the upper half of her body hung upside down.

One of the vampires was carrying her on his shoulder. Vincent was running in front of that vampire. And there was another one who was running at the back.

Her long light red hair that was floating freely towards the ground was preventing the vampire at the back to see if she was unconscious or fully awake. So she was turning her head to the side just enough for her to stare at the open land instead of the vampire’s back.

The things that Vincent had said to her kept on ringing in her ears. Especially the part where he had said that she would never be free in this land.

‘Am I going to rot in the prison for my whole life? What did I ever do to deserve all this?’

And then she recalled what the Queen had said. ‘Yes, I was unfortunate enough to cross paths with him.’

Ruby thought of how her life would still have been as eventless as ever if she had never gone to the woods that day.

‘I should have run back to the town to ask other people for help. I wouldn’t have been in this mess at all if I had done that.’

But then again, she couldn’t remove the glimpses of that angelic man from her head.

‘All I wanted to do was help him... He sounded like he was in a lot of pain...’ She felt dejected at the thought of Everard in anguish, more than at the fact that she was being carried to the prison at the moment.

Ruby suddenly felt this strong urge to see Everard again. ‘I wish there was someone to get me out of this misery. I want to see him again. And I want to ask him... if he is okay now...’

“How long until we reach there?” Ruby heard the vampire at the back asking the vampire who was carrying her on his shoulders.

And that vampire replied, “Ten more minutes of run?”

“Do you want me to give you a hand?” the vampire asked from behind.

And the other one answered, “No. She isn’t that heavy.”

‘Ten more minutes and I will reach the place I will be rotting for my whole life?’ That thought sent goosebumps all over her body.

She didn’t want to end up being imprisoned for her whole life. And she definitely didn’t want to go through the endless torture from that monster of a vampire who proclaimed himself as the King.

Ruby wished that someone would swoop in like a knight in shining armor and then rescue her from the claws of the vampires. A small part of her was hoping for her knight in shining armor to be that angelic man.

However, as Vincent had said, she knew that there was no point in getting her hopes high. She knew that her angel was in some foreign land.

And she acknowledged the fact that it was now her against the world.

Suddenly, another thought crossed her mind.

‘The vampires... they are doing this because they fear what I am now, right?’ What is it that they fear exactly? What can I do to save myself?’

She then pondered to herself, ‘I am definitely not as strong as them to fight them, that also three of them. And neither am I faster than them to be able to outrun them. So... what is it that they fear?’

Ruby closed her eyes and thought back to all of her torture sessions with different vampires. After thinking for about a minute or two, she saw a pattern.

‘Most of them got scared when I snarled at them... Oh!’ Ruby opened her eyes wide in realization. ‘If I turned into this thing because of a werewolf bite then... what will happen if I bite someone who is already an abomination?’

Right then, something sparked in her heart. It was courage. Courage to fight for herself.

And when she decided that she was going to be her own knight in shining armor, she let her werewolf side take over.

She closed her eyes when she saw everything going blurry. And she closed her palms into fists to hide her claws that were already out.

She thought that those were the only changes that were going to happen to her at the moment. From what she had heard from the vampires, she had learned that the likes of her would turn into a werewolf only during the full moon nights.

However, she suddenly grimaced when she felt extreme pain and itching in her gums.

‘What on earth is happening to me?’