No matter how discretely Lucy tried to exit Deidrick's smothering chamber, the noise created by their heated tumble had definitely attracted curious observers in nearby rooms—be it from working servants or lords and ladies who'd excused themselves from tonight's important processions in advance for dubious reasons like taking ill, for example. She couldn't understand why he'd drawn her to his side, employing the most innocuous, casual discourse to arrest her within a long pair of virile, toned arms.

"What might I ask are you doing?"

She had denied his advances, using a hand to block the incoming pressure of his lips. But Deidrick remained unwilling to back down, releasing one arm to (sensually) entwine with hers through many, several—wet—coercive endeavours. Lucy shivered shamefully, once the warmth of his tongue skillfully grazed a stiff, exposed knuckle. Then, just as swift as the feeling lasted, she pondered retracting her hand... but it would only appear as if she was bending to his deriding pressure despite expressing contrary sentiments—like the many submissive chits he's bedded, no doubt.

"Good God..." his voice cut off, discharging a devilish moan deep from the depths of his throat, meandering his tongue through yet another stark precipice hidden between her cold, stolid fingers. "You are my most favourite teacher. Do you know that, Miss Harthin?" he enunciated.

It felt sinister—calling her by an adversary's name, sea-green eyes suffusing carnal desire into the principled virginal territory of her habitually sagacious brain.

"I implore you to let go of me now, your highness."

His face darkened.

"This isn't right. You're drunk."

"Yet here you are."

Panic perforated her skin when he started perusing the corners of her linen black dress, feeling for any sorts of rifts that his hasty, unoccupied hand could intrude on. "Your highness! Your highness, stop!"

Unmoving and still grasping her tightly despite several heart-wrenching protests otherwise, she realized then that he was perfectly aware of everything he was doing—that she wasn't allowed to scream because it was her life on the line; that there would be no one else to blame but herself for tempting him; that she was technically palace property, and therefore his, meaning submission was her one (and only) available option.

Resignation nullified her senses, and sensing her hands awkwardly recede, revealing an unobstructed view of clenched coral-peach lips, Deidrick took them in his, making laboured, needy strokes whilst still searching for an opening that he could invade.

A row of buttons hidden beneath her firmly-put white apron caused him to slacken the pace, believing she'd fully adjusted enough for docile subservience, but it only conveniently let Lucy shove against him with over-intemperate force, allowing a swift escape as both his hands sought to snatch the ribbon behind her compressed livery.

"Strip!" he commanded, wobbling from his bed to the exit, which strayed miles from inside the generously capacious room. "Here and now, you will strip!" Deidrick too easily pinned her shaking form to a hard wall, little seconds from the door, quelling her a sudden sense of fight—sweet escape blasted abruptly away.

Shakiness doubled but refused to show in Lucy's reasonable tone—"You're doing such a capital job at it already!"—and she watched curiously, her words playing a nasty game with his muddled brain causing his grip to loosen on her midriff as he registered his semi-nakedness.

She pushed hard again—this time moving to secure a (hopefully) sufficiently heavy statuette to strike across his head before he could enthusiastically topple her all over again.

Its reverberations sounded even louder than when he'd forced her to the wall: several tiny shards of rhinestones bouncing off carpeted and uncarpeted flooring, echoing a catastrophic clinking melody. She froze, abiding silently in the shimmering chaos, waiting for his limp body to regain its strength. To make a comeback. To receive her insult negatively. But he kept still on the floor, exacerbating the heavy, mortal silence.

Sweet Merthingham... have I killed him?

"I couldn't have possibly killed him..."

Suddenly, someone knocked at the door, barging in regardless of a response to find Lucy instinctively shooting a readily disposed shard that was lying by her feet right at their faces.

The stranger, Elijah David, paused. A pair of chartreuse eyes discerning the commotion before shutting the room's tall, white double doors, locking them to Lucy's relief.

"Genevieve claimed he was alone."

"I'd found him alone," she responded, still frozen in a defensive stance—not thoroughly understanding who this Genevieve was, either. But, taking in his equally shocked yet puzzled expression, "Both of you..." she slightly softened. "You can't truly be friends. H-he's simply a-abhorable!"

"Did he tell you that?" Elijah questioned, placatingly moving past her to examine Deidrick's condition a little more closely. "Implications do not count."

"I hadn't meant to kill him."

"Clearly," he stated dryly. "His royal highness' still got a pulse."

An extraordinary quirk promptly plastered across his defined features. And although Lucy wanted to follow in such honest, innocuous, and witty charms, she contemplated lying instead, understanding the many repercussions that would consequently follow which, from among an array of advisable ways to mitigate them, running off one's mouth didn't qualify for wise reasons.

"How unfortunate," Lucy said.

"'Unfortunate'?" Elijah repeated. "I expected something more than that if the happenings I'm assuming here really transpired."

"'Really transpired'?" She caught his brows crease at her boorish and impudent honesty. "Your doubt is the only really insulting thing here, good sir."

Elijah sagely swooped from a crouched position and strutted to her side, his tall, muscular frame shrouding her body's pinched width, standing reverently before her. "Forgive me," he responded, hands cautiously finding her waist and only making contact after she'd provided permission with a convicting, simple stare.

"Word travels fast around these parts," implied: "You best leave," in his own kind beseeching manner.

"But he'll come for me," Lucy worried.

"No," his voice hardened. "He won't."

"I implored him to, so he will come."

With umpteen more of Elijah David's gentle coercion, she finally exited the second prince's chamber, dejectedly tainted with emotions swelling and bursting out of control, manifesting as dewy bubbles of water inching off the rims of her puffy red eyelids. Unwittingly, she had begun rubbing her lips—slowly at first, then with great passion—feeling deeply the sting of her perpetrator's assault and still trying to comprehend how close she had come to being violated. Almost convicted of a heinous crime that wasn't her fault.

"Had Sir. David not timely come to rescue me yet again..." Being charged with the attempted murder of a nation's prince would no doubt have her hanging from a 100 feet wall some miles away from civilization, at some privately operated, decency-absent prisoners camp.

Lucy's heart slowly began picking up a scary rhythm, a steady warning about something (or someone) dangerous. It wasn't anything in particular she hated, but rather an image that just wouldn't go away. A feeling that would end in despair: the picturesque apparition of an important figure. It always longed for him, in this life and many more yet to come.

A slight smile, the first in a long while, lifted her cheeks, but couldn't quell her pounding heart—only further exacerbating its hastened thumping when she thought of how easily he trusted her judgement, making him promise to refer to her as Lucrecia Harthin if ever she came up in conversation.

Lucy wasn't the type to envision romance in her future—she never saw anything promising in her future, actually. But this once, she allowed herself to relax into the fresh idea, taking deep breaths in and out to calm the rush and exhilaration building in her stomach.

"You'd just been assaulted," she said to herself. "You'd just been ravaged, yet here you are! Having silly reveries about a chivalrous—"

"Auclair?" An echoic voice called out to her. "You're Lucy Auclair, aren't you?"