THE Knight's Hidden Princess
Chapter 76: The Knight’s Goal

Chapter 76: The Knight’s Goal

REAGAN POV

The sun shone high in the sky, beating down my bare skinned shoulders as I leaned against the rocky wall facing the training area. I watched the guards fight using their swords below the arena as each strike produced a well-timed rhythm. The repetitive noise of steel colliding with steel carried through the air as a permanent reminder to my chosen path plus the shared our shared connections with each other.

The king had ordered for us to go into the border and round up the rebellion. He was starting to get really restless these days. His demands had become more savage, more frantic. It didn’t matter to him now who stood in his way — men, women, children. To him, lives were tools, mere afterthoughts to be crushed under the barrel of his authority.

I should know that very well because I have served under the man for twenty one years before he finally deemed me worthy of a knight title. But even with the honor and the title, I was not free like I had envisioned I would be.

I became King Sigurd’s tool. I transformed according to his needs to become a soldier and enforcer and shadow who hid in dark empty spaces of his authority. A proper knight exists to defend honor while safeguarding justice and safeguarding innocent people. That is the wisdom taught about knights. What I carried out did not maintain any honorable quality.

Through my sword I have ended the lives of so many innocent people that I cannot count and their dying cries torment my slumber. The faces of innocent people who perished from the battle have started to visit me during my nightly dreams while these victims include mothers guarding their kids and farmers attempting to fight back with pitchforks and helpless elderly who lacked the strength to run. I even reduced great kings to be nothing more than cowardly helpless mumbling fool. Dragged them in chains as I presented them to the king just so he could be happy.

It’s one of the reason no one wanted to dare to challenge us or are stupid enough to go to war with us, well me in particular. No one wanted to mess with King Sigurd’s hellhound! That was what they called me, the town’s people whispered about it in fear filled taverns, King Sigurd’s hellhound and it wasn’t only for my loyalty but because wherever I go, destruction follows.

But I didn’t care about any of that, they can call me whatever it is they wanted to call me! They could think whatever and Sigurd that evil son of a bitch can continue to use to carry out his evil whims, I do not care because every act of violence, every blood I shed, the destruction I unleashed wasn’t for him.

No, it was for me. Every drop of blood shed brought me closer to my own goal, revenge.

The king’s evil schemed had cost me everything, cost me everything I ever owned and cherished and he wasn’t even aware of it. Underneath my deceptive loyalty existed intense hatred that I had hidden from the king. I remained under his misconceptions about control because he failed to see my brewing plans I had in store for him. Biding my time.

And it wasn’t just him that I was bidding my time for, it was him and his entire family, they would feel my wrath!

My gaze roamed to where the house she was staying on the manor was. It looked just the same, silent and still as if nothing had changed at changed at all.

I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve stopped myself from going to her place. Ever since she moved away from the main house, I haven’t been the same. It took a lot of will power to be able to stop myself from going to that house where I knew she was holed up.

We would finally get some privacy, no servants or any family around us trying to overhear our conversations and somehow that seemed to be the worst idea ever.

She lied to me! Betrayed me when I was just starting to give a bit of myself over to her, she decided to screw me over! Dahlia wasn’t who I thought she was at all. Each word she had ever said to me was poison now—tainted by the secret she had kept from me.

My fists were clenched, my nails digging into my palms as I gazed out at the house in the distance. It was infuriating how badly I still wanted to go to her, to confront her, to confront her about why she had done this to me. To us.

The worst was not the lie itself. Not even the betrayal, though it seared like fire in my heart. It was that, to this day, I couldn’t get her out of my head. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to her actions than I had uncovered.

She had sounded so sincere about everything she had said back at the castle. Though I knew she was still keeping something from me but she had felt really afraid about something.

No, I wasn’t going to be falling for her lies this time around! The tears she had in her eyes, I wasn’t going to be falling for it, not now that I know her father was just hoping to use her to get me to be even more loyal to him.

It’s good thing I do not feel anything for her, nothing but hatred, just like it always meant to be.

My mother was right about her! She had warned me right in the beginning when she noticed something changed between us. She had told me Dahlia was just using me, all her act were nothing but just a plot devised by her to stir me for my main goal.

I had dismissed it then, laughed it off as a mother’s overprotectiveness. How could I not? Dahlia’s laughter was so genuine, her touch so soft, her words so sweet. She had this manner of gazing at me as if I were the only man in the entire world, the only one who mattered.

But now I knew better. That warmth had been a trap, her laughter a strategic move to disarm me. She’d been playing a game, a game I hadn’t realized I was a pawn in until it was too late.

That was all over now! I took a deep breath, and the rage bubbling inside me receded. I couldn’t lose control, not now. Too much depended on it.

From here on out, I would turn to the goal I had set for myself—the goal that had kept me going all these long years when all I wanted to do was just end it, all the blood and pain.

Revenge!