28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The bellowing afternoon sun cast its warm glow over the Blue Moon Kingdom. Knox found himself nursing a nagging headache from the night’s excessive drinking. His eyes were heavy and his mind clouded with the haunting images of his deceased wife and child. The weight of grief and guilt pressed on him, and he struggled to overcome the emotional distress that gripped his soul.

His mind was vague of anything else that had happened the morning of it; he had no recollection of his meltdown in the presence of his brother Kylian, but his oath of vengeance tarried in his mind. It was all he could think of. The festival preparations continued outside a stranger to the internal struggle that plagued the palace walls.

Knox tried to pull himself together, but his limbs were still too weak to carry him, his vision blurred, and each step he tried to take was even harder than the last. Kylian walked in with a maid carrying a tray of silverware in her hands, her head lowered as sh