Damp moisture clung heavily throughout the corridor. She walked through the thick, sticky air as though swimming through it, gripping the ice-cold knife tightly.
Her palm became soaked with cold sweat. Whether from tension or excitement, she could not tell.
Perhaps it was both.
Moistening her dry lips, she crept up the stairs like a stray cat.
Aila occupied a room on the highest floor. Reaching the top of the staircase, Talia pressed herself against the wall and examined the dark corridor carefully.
Fortunately, no one appeared to be guarding the door.
Letting out a small sigh of relief, Talia cautiously stepped toward the door at the end of the hall.
As she approached the wooden door reinforced with iron bands, a faint medicinal scent pricked her nose. It was the smell of incense burned to calm the nerves.
Talia twisted her lips.
So last night had not been entirely comfortable for Aila either.
Recalling the sight of Aila turning deathly pale at the sight of her, Talia let out a quiet giggle. But the scene that surfaced immediately afterward dragged her mood straight back into the abyss.
Her face twisted savagely as she shoved a hand into her pocket and gripped the knife handle.
Her entire body trembled violently.
The moment she saw Varkas carrying Aila through the pouring rain in his arms, she had felt something she had barely managed to hold together collapse completely inside her.
Talia roughly scrubbed at her blurring eyes with the sleeve of her robe.
It had been her one and only memory.
A memory she had buried deep within her heart for years, secretly taking it out to revisit over and over again.
Did they really have to turn even that memory into nothing?
Couldn’t they have left at least one thing behind as something special that belonged only to us?
Her mind boiled with rage. She knew the emotion was irrational.
Even so, she could not forgive them.
She wanted to punish Aila for stealing even the last sanctuary she possessed. She wanted to return to that man the same pain she herself had suffered.
Talia tightened her burning eyes and stared at the firmly shut door.
Once she crossed this threshold, there would be no turning back.
Perhaps history would remember her as a wicked witch who murdered an innocent imperial princess. She did not care. She was already regarded as the vilest of villainesses. If she fell even lower than this, what was there left for her to lose?
Her trembling hand slowly closed around the doorknob.