Oh My, I Messed Up the Story

Franz stared at his little brother in utter shock. Usually Al was pretty passive-aggressive towards him so I could understand how that amount of straightforwardness would throw him off. Maybe I'd had more of an influence on Al's personality than I thought.

"Where on earth is this coming from? Of course we have the same parents. Who gave you the idea that the king isn't your father?"

Al glared at him and crossed his arms over his chest, looking surprisingly menacing. He was normally such a human puppy that I forgot how intense he used to be. Granted, that intenseness was more gloomy than scary but he still had the capacity for heightened negative emotions.

"I assume you know about the Kanta clan. Didn't you ever hear that they all inherit black hair and gray eyes? I'll ask again. Did your mother give birth to me?"

Mariela looked back and forth between the two men having a standoff with anxiety written all over her face. Did she think Al was going to attack her husband or something? To be perfectly honest though, he might.

"I didn't witness it personally but she was definitely pregnant. She had a difficult delivery and no one was allowed to see her but Father for about a week. That was when I finally met you."

Al and I exchanged glances. A week. The king, queen, and royal physician were likely the only ones who knew the truth but I was willing to bet that Al was not the baby the queen gave birth to.

Did she lose her own child? It would explain why she went into seclusion. Maybe she was depressed about losing her child so the king went out to find a substitute. But why grab a baby from a war-torn area you're in the middle of conquering?

I imagined that babies were lost frequently in this world because of the lack of medical technology. I read about this sort of thing happening before the year 1900 in my world. Whichever baby Al replaced couldn't be the only one the queen had ever lost. He was on the younger end of all of the royal children.

Another suspicious thing is that with all of the issues of succession already going on that they would bother bringing in another male child. If the queen wanted a baby so badly wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to bring in a female who couldn't ever take the throne?

I felt like there was a lot more to this situation than met the eye. None of this made sense.

If they were really going to adopt a child to replace the one they lost, wouldn't they show him more love? Al had been ostracized inside this castle from a young age. He had been isolated most of his life. That wasn't how adoption was supposed to work.

This might be my paranoia talking but it was almost like they wanted to keep him close to watch him and make sure he never accrued any power or support from others. That could only mean that Al was somebody important.

Franz gave his younger brother the oddest look. "Who have you been talking to from the Kanta region? That clan went extinct over twenty years ago."

"Because your father killed them," Al said with clenched fists. "And for what? Resources? They could have traded for them or come to some other agreement. Nobody had to die."

I could tell he was on the verge of duking it out with Franz—he had to take his anger at the royal family out on somebody and he happened to be closest—so I wrapped my arms around him from behind to hold him back.

"Al," I said soothingly. "We got what we needed. Let's go."

He shook me off, startling me. He had never refused my touch before. His eyes became molten steel as he stared down his opponent.

"What I gather from this conversation is that either you're more stupid than you look or you really thought it was okay to ignore your actual blood brother because everyone else was doing it. You're pathetic, Franz," he spat out angrily.

"Accepting everything at face value and never questioning anything. Someone like that doesn't deserve to be king any more than that selfish pig Sigmund. Both of you make me sick. This entire family is rotten to the core! Katie is the only family I need."

Al turned and stormed out of the room, dragging me along behind him. I shot Mariela an apologetic look as we went and she simply nodded her understanding. That ended up being far more dramatic than I anticipated.