Chapter 74 - 73: We have to run[GTG]
"So you’re telling me you’re a princess?" I scoffed, disbelief lacing my voice.
"I am," she asserted, puffing out her chest in a display of regal defiance. Her fiery pink hair, usually meticulously styled, was now a tangled mess, dusted with debris from the wrecked room. The remnants clung to the strands like a rebellious phase.
"...tch, alright," I muttered, trying to process this bizarre situation. "Let me get this straight. You claim your name is Emily Kingscrown, correct?"
"Hmm," she confirmed with a curt nod, her earlier confidence faltering slightly under my scrutiny.
"And you were supposedly my fiancee before I was... banished from the noble house?" I finished, the last word tasting bitter on my tongue.
"Yes," she said again, though a flicker of discomfort played at the corners of her lips, betraying the ease with which the words rolled off her tongue.
"This... this just doesn’t add up," I mumbled, sinking back onto the threadbare remains of the couch. The possibly once plush cushions were now a motley collection of exposed stuffing and torn fabric, a perfect metaphor for the state of my own mind.
We were both back in the dilapidated building, the air thick with the lingering scent of dust and decay. Emily’s bombshell revelation had left me reeling in shock, the pieces of my fractured past refusing to fit into the narrative she presented. Desperate for answers, I’d agreed to follow her back into this desolate and hollow space.
"But it does!" she insisted, her voice laced with a tremor of desperation. "You’re the reason I came to the academy in the first place. But you’ve changed so much, I barely recognized you." Her vibrant pink eyes dimmed with a flicker of sadness, a stark contrast to the fiery enthusiasm she’d displayed moments before.