Chapter Five

Dark Ages, 1457.

Three months, three months of the hardest self-control I put myself into, and I lost it, right there, as soon as I got close to her, not only because I didn’t find a fragment of fear in her eyes, but also I saw the defiance in her face. She affronted me! I went for the kill; I wanted to snap that long sinful neck like a twig under my fingers. How dared she questioned my actions and how I treated my opponents? I was a ruler; I had a country to build and enemies to banish away by any means possible, and she would have to come to terms with that.

Everything I used against them, every means of torture, every piece of strategy I learned from the best teachers, my foes! And they were no less cruel than me, and knowing your opponents well is the only chance you had to outsmart them, and I fought hard every day, so we didn’t fall under their power again. Yet, my walls crumbled to the ground, getting closer to her body, inhaling her sweet floral perfume, and unable to resist he