The Prince and the Punk [EDITING]

Chapter 43

Xavier

I didn't know it, but my house has a dungeon.

Most people have basements, storm cellars, maybe even a panic room or a bomb shelter, but I have a dungeon. Because I was already such a normal, well-adjusted kid.

Apparently, the blueprint for the palace was based on a number of medieval and renaissance designs, almost all of which included a dungeon. Why we went so far as to include one is beyond me. I'd say aesthetics if the place didn't include functional locks and iron bars. It's dank and smells of mold, and scattered fluorescent lights struggle to illuminate the somehow moist-looking stone walls.

It's such an archaic place that I find myself looking for some sort of medieval torture device—or at least a rat or two.

Francine Herman sits with her head on her knees in the last cell, dressed in a jumpsuit so filthy I can hardly tell it used to be white. It's frayed and blackened at the edges, and hangs loosely from her haggard frame.

My footsteps echo against the stone floor as I approach her. She hears me coming but doesn't acknowledge me until I clear my throat. She spares me a sideways glance and returns her gaze to the wall.

"Are you going to acknowledge me?" I finally ask.

"Terribly sorry, Your Highness," she hisses, her hoarse voice dripping with venom. "Would you like me to kiss your feet?"

I can't help taking a step back, a little shocked by her words. I don't know what I expected someone like her to say to me, but it wasn't that.

"I... just had a question," I say slowly.

"Well, then. Shoot." She grins when I flinch at her choice of words.

"Uh—why?" I say after a moment. The question was supposed to be much more eloquently phrased, but the single word is the only thing I'm able to articulate.

"Why did I kill the king?" She stands. "Why did I put a bullet through his scheming little heart?"

There's a long silence, during which she shuffles over to me. The chain connecting her to the wall scrapes across the stone floor as it drags behind her. She grips the bars of the cell with hands shackled together and stares me down with cold eyes.

"I'm sure you could figure that one out on your own," she says with a condescending edge to her voice.

When I don't respond, she snaps, "It's because I hate you. You don't deserve anything you have and you don't deserve to run the world and I hate you. Me and Dimitri saw through all of your bullshit, so you tried to get rid of us. You sent us to fight and hoped it would kill us. But it only worked for one of us. Only one of us didn't get to come home. And when that happened, half of me was gone. Suddenly there was nothing to live for. Nothing stopping me from doing what I've always wanted to do."

She finishes her speech with sick enthusiasm. There's something unhinged in her expression, a mad grief that appears in her watery eyes, and it gives me chills.

"Murdering my father," I guess.

"No!" she cries. "No, not murder. Revenge, maybe, but I call it vigilante justice. It was..." She trails off, drumming her fingers on the cell bars as she tries to choose an analogy. "It was a vote. People used to vote. Did you know that? They had their own little elections, and whoever was in charge was the person the most people liked. But you don't let us vote, and I got sick of it. So I voted no."

Her intensity is terrifying, but I do my best to keep my cool.

"But that wasn't it. Not all of it, at least," I say.