Chapter forty-nine
Philips heartbeat had doubled. With one look at Earl, he realised he was not the only one hearing this for the first time. "What stopped the war then?"
"Your father and I," the Duke heard the King say, much to his shock and secret relief, "I sent him off to Scotland, alongside the last Viscount of Mareda, Elizabeth's father."
Now even his sons were listening. The air grew with tight tension as gradually, everything was turning out wrong.
"When they tried to compromise," the man's eyes were seemingly lost in a world of thoughts, piecing the memories to a whole story one by one, "we thought he listened. In basic terms, he did. But then, he found an even more valuable nuclear weapon..."
"Monica," Jason completed the man's speech as he sadly began understanding the story. It was then they realised the Scottish was no longer with them.
Philip took rounds of breathing into his lungs and ran his fingers through his hair. She was gone! If he reacted the way he was supposed to, the entire castle was going to get burnt down.
But instead, he told the last of the story himself, "You then killed her father and seized the duchy...to save England."
"But then she came back for it," Earl's voice was an unusual dark whisper. And even while he maintained a grin in the most threatening situations, this one brought a cloudy aura around his features.
The King thought he was the angriest in the room. In one go, he wiped every stationery on his table unto the floor, groaning and yelling at the mistake he could not explain how he made, "Where are my guards?"
Philip did not say a word, although he tried to. His mouth openly quivered with no readable emotion on his looks. "She used me," he whispered.
"She used us!" Peter shouted into the void of the large office, his voice a barking slash of rage. While he was fuming, the rest were still trying to swallow the realisation.
The Duke's mind had begun to work in many directions. Although he was calm, his feet manged to push him up from the seat, striding slowly towards the major window in the office. He did not know why but he looked out of it, down to the path between the gates.
And there she was!
With the seal in one desperate grip, she steered her horse with the other one around its reins, forcing it into full throttle. Moments afterwards, she was galloping through the gates.
He felt weak for some reason. While he leaned on the post for support, he turned to his friends, "She has the seal with her."
A painful feeling shot up his gut, stripping him of words there and then while the sound of the horse steps faded into silence.
She was gone...
***
The warnings of the mind may come in whatever way the conscience wished to display it. It could be phrased as a persistent feeling of guilt, or a warning to one's deeds.
Nax had been killed while trying to say something.
Back in Anfield, his mother wanted to say something.
But most especially, his heart wanted to say something.
Philip couldn't say he did not grasp the signs or feel a tug of warning somewhere. Neither could he say he never wanted to end this quest a couple of times. But why he ignored them, he didn't seem to understand.
Or maybe he did. It was her!
Whenever the tiniest ounce of doubt came by, Monica seemed to have realised. And every single time, she did something to annul it, to blind him again. The hours of horse riding, the thing she did with those green gems of her eyes and then...last night.
Philip sipped from the whiskey again as his eyes searched the sky, something he realized had become a new type of peace for him.
Did she not love him at all, or was she so blinded by the contempt and urge for revenge that she clouded every other feeling?
They warned him! And that was what hurt most.
It was not usual for him to feel this...used. He had failed his father, mother, his entire duchy...for a woman who planned to take everything away from him.
And that was when he remembered.
He'd failed Elizabeth.
He glanced down at his fingers and saw a drop of liquid tap on them. He was crying, when last did that happen.
And speaking of Elizabeth, he should have looked into it when she accused Monica of Michael's death. Now there was nothing stopping him from believing it.
Or that of her father's.
Or maybe even his own.
Monica had a hand in them all as far as he was concerned. And he felt his heart heat up for that reason.
A knock on his door snapped him out of his state of contempt. "Come in," he said sternly without turning to it.
He heard the doors screech open and footsteps approach him slowly. Not giving the intruder any bit of his interest, he felt a hand on his shoulder. At that instant, he knew who it was...or they were.
When he turned around, he met the blue eyes of Earl Robinson, cringed in a forced, assuring smile. Right behind him, the others stood at the doorway sending their glances to him in a way only true friends knew how to.
"I'm sorry," he managed to sulk even with the nagging pain arousing from his gut.
Earl returned a smile, patting his shoulders dearly, "You are a Duke Philip. Young but capable. The mistake we all made here was let our emotions outsmart our brains."
"Crying an ocean about it will not do good," Peter added, "We should look for a way forward...to prevent a war."
Philip inclined his head, finding the sense in all they'd said. But it seemed the conversation was supposed to be one-sided.
Before he could say his mind, Jason pitched in, "Let's us return to Anfield first of all, shall we. I feel your mother shares my view in that as well."
Philip pulled a quizzical look while he wiped his teary cheeks with both hands, "And what do you mean by that?"
The Earl did not reply. Instead, he slipped out a piece of paper neatly folded into a thin square, handing it out to the Duke. That latter reached out and snatched it nervously.
While they watched him hear the seal off and read through, the darkest frown they'd ever seen appeared upon his brows. It was a letter from Rebecca, seemingly briefing him of everything that had transpired in his absence.
The letter dropped from his grip while he took his gaze to the sky again, slowly shutting his eyes, "We need to return home."
Instead of the feeling of regret and self hate, it was something darker, deeper...angrier, "We will haunt her down, before she returns the favor."