Chapter 312 --312
Elara’s brows knit ever so slightly, not in confusion but calculation. "If you begin from the start," she asked, "how long will it take?"
He paused, tapping a finger lightly against his arm as if sorting through memories. "Not long," he replied after a moment. "At least, not if I spare you the unnecessary details. I can give you a version... concise enough to keep your interest."
Her gaze did not soften, but there was a quiet permission in it now. A silent command.
"Then begin."
For a brief second, the air between them shifted—his smile thinning, losing its earlier ease. Whatever he was about to say, it was no longer just a story.
"The starting point isn’t much, you know," Ken began, his voice surprisingly soft, lacking the rough, hoarse edge she had heard when he begged to touch her. "Just ten, maybe twenty years ago, we started to feel discomfort. It started with a knight who fell in love with your father’s sister—your aunt."
Elara’s mind cataloged the data point. She searched the historical records she had absorbed since her awakening—the accounts of the thirteen years of the Crimson Phoenix Dynasty and the seven princesses fighting in the shadows—but she found no mention of an aunt’s romance with a beast. It was an undocumented variable, a secret buried beneath the white marble of the palace.
"She was a neat girl," Ken continued, a dangerous smile touching his lips as he watched Elara for a reaction. "He didn’t know what to name the feeling. Didn’t understand it. Not until she was married off to another kingdom. That knight felt regret. He felt heartbreak. And for the first time, the suppression started to crack."
Ken’s hand moved to the thin band of metal around his neck—the collar that Elara had first observed as a functional mark of property, a leash of magic that kept the beasts obedient.
"If you are caged for too long, you long for freedom," he said, his voice tightening. "Our beast nature could never be completely suffocated by this collar and this uniform."