SWNOVELS : Chapter 58
Third person
“I have been watching something rather interesting,”
the King said. “Care to watch with me?”
Scarlet had not been surprised when she received word that her husband required her to come and speak with him urgently, knowing precisely what it was regarding. She hurried back to the palace from her office in the city and found her husband waiting
for her in their bedroom, alone, with the viral video queued up on the TV screen.
While he waited for her, the King had been watching the video over and over again, alternating between fantasizing about how he would punish his Luna for her treachery and wondering what role Alexander had played in promoting the news story about her.
“I have seen it,” Scarlet responded, quiet with fearful respect despite resenting the King’s condescension.
“Hm.” He looked over at the TV. The video was on pause, freeze-framed on an image of a crying old woman. “How about once more?”
He hit play.
Scarlet wanted to look away but did not, knowing that doing so would give her husband just the reason he
needed to throw her to the ground and begin punishing her without any further conversation. The right way to play this was just to play along while he toyed with her. And once she could think up something good enough, lie her ass off.
The video was about three minutes long. Scarlet had seldom before considered that to be a long duration of time, but as she stood there beside her husband, feeling the increasing heat radiating off his body, it felt like an eternity. The King stood perfectly still while watching the video, his facial expression neutral, with one hand tucked casually into his pants pocket. He looked very calm indeed. But he was getting angrier every second, making his wolf’s blood run warmer and warmer, and speeding his heart rate up to a hammering pace.
“I would never expect to be treated like this by anyone,” the old woman on the TV said between
sniffles. She was a commoner, with tough, tan, deeply wrinkled skin and translucent hair piled in a knot on top of her head. “By anyone. And what they did to us was very bad, but it feels even worse when you thought you could trust the person, you know? That’s why we moved there in the first place. We lived in one of her other buildings before and thought they’d treat us right. We thought the Queen would treat her people right. Yeah. That’s what we thought.”
The video switched focus to the interviewer, a young woman wearing thick black eyeliner. “And what can you do when the person who’s wronged you has so much power?” she asked the old lady.
The white-haired woman just shook her head helplessly and continued to cry.
Then the young woman addressed the camera directly. “How can we hold the Queen accountable for
what’s happened here? There’s one thing we all can do. Boycott Queen Luna’s companies! You’ll find a complete list below of all the companies she invests in. Stop giving Scarlet your money! And don’t forget to like and subscribe for more of our—”
The King hit pause.
He tossed the remote up and down in his hand a few times, then pointed it at his wife. The tone of his voice was still playful as he said, “Would you care to explain what we are looking at, my dear?” The look in his eyes, though, was stone cold.
“A viral video,” she answered quietly, “in which I’m being blamed for something terrible that I had nothing to do with.”
The King growled, his lips quivering with the first hint of a snarl. Hot hair hissed out from between his teeth
Scarlet swallowed. “I’m sure you’ve heard all about the whole story,” she said quickly. “And yes, the fire happened. But I swear to you, I was not responsible.
The way the story is being portrayed is a deliberate attempt to disgrace me – Alexander’s whore Fiona is behind it! I even heard her admit it from her own lips.
Please believe me.”
Before Scarlet brought up their names, the King had already suspected that Alexander, Fiona, or the both of them had something to do with inciting this media circus. So when his wife claimed that Fiona confessed to setting it up, he paused, considering whether it could be true.
The King was feeling quite sure, by now, that his wife was a criminal. He’d been fairly convinced of her guilt ever since the night that Alexander exposed what
appeared to be damning evidence of an active embezzlement scheme. But there was a chance, albeit a very slight one, that Scarlet was being set up.
The King did really despise and distrust Fiona.
Circumstances with his eldest son had been tense enough already, before Alexander went and impregnated a pretty young Luna from a rival pack and moved her into the palace with him.
“As if it weren’t shameful enough that your son is dragging that trash into the gene pool,” Scarlet continued, taking advantage of the King’s hesitation.
“She is treacherous, too. Don’t you see? Fiona is trying to destroy me to get to you.”
“You’re deflecting,” the King snapped. “Whether or not Fiona had anything to do with this, you do bear responsibility. And if you are lying about her, well…”
He lifted a hand to Scarlet’s face. She tried to resist it, but flinched just slightly. He smiled, buried his fingers in her thick hair, and stroked her scalp gently. Then he balled his fist, clasping a handful of hair and pulling hard, and dragged her over to the wall. Threw her up against it and shoved her face to the side. Pressed his face to her neck and throat, smelling her furiously, trying to sniff out whether she was lying.
“I will divorce you, and I will be sure you are sentenced most severely for your crimes,” the King continued, still pressing his huge, strong body hard against Scarlet’s. She struggled to keep her breathing even, revealing as little of her fear as possible. The King brought his face to hers, then, so that they were eye to eye, only an inch apart. “But first, I will punish you myself.”
“I swear to you that I am innocent.” Scarlet’s gray eyes were big and pleading. “You will see.”
“Prove it, then,” he said with finality. “And do it quickly.”
Scarlet was back in the city as fast as her driver could get her there.
At her company’s headquarters, she ascended the elevator patiently, strolled into her office, locked the door behind her, closed the drapes over the windows, and quickly set about shredding any and all paperwork she could find that could possibly be used as evidence.
This was it. She had reached the end of all the scamming and scheming. There was no way to save her work anymore, no way to keep hold of her ill-gotten earnings. All she could do now was shift gears into damage control mode.
In the morning, she would declare bankruptcy and liquidate all her assets. All of her businesses would be destroyed. But at least it would muddy the waters for investigators, making it more difficult to trace where the money for all her initial investments had come from.
Scarlet just needed to be sure that, even if some of her crimes might be proven true in court, the worst of them could still remain hidden. Because if the King ever found out her worst crime, he would not only beat, divorce, and imprison her. No, her fate would be much worse.
Trading military secrets with vampires was not an infraction that the Alpha King would pass off to the courts.
He would kill his treasonous Luna if he found out she had done that.
He’d probably even kill her in public. With his bare hands.