Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 81: Calm Before the Storm

Chapter Eighty-One: Calm Before the Storm

For a long time, Xaphile and Sinmir remained silent.

There was really nothing much to say, after all.

But then, the blonde man finally looked at him, mouth pulled into yet another frown.

"I want you to tell me the truth," he muttered. "What is your relationship with the strange fae who forced Ella to hurt you? That is the biggest question I have now."

Xaphile flinched, squeezing his eyes shut with a grimace.

"Do I have to answer?"

"No. But I would greatly appreciate it if you would confide in me."

For a few moments, there was silence.

"Fine," he eventually sighed, long ears drooping. "That man, Vordt... he's supposedly my father's brother, and they look so much alike that I actually mistook him for my dad. That would also make Zelphira, the Queen of Calcoon, my Aunt. I'm apparently directly related to royalty."

He said it in a joking manner, but Sinmir's expression darkened to the point of being frightening.

"That man is your uncle?" he lowly inquired. "Your own flesh and blood tried to kill you?"

"Yep," Xaphile weakly confirmed, then turned his head away and looked at Ella's sleeping face; she was breathing deeply and evenly, long-lashed eyes closed tight. "Then again, the kind of treatment I got from him earlier was actually more normal for me than anything else."

Sinmir's shoulders tensed.

"What?" he demanded, staring at him without blinking. "How is such horrid behavior normal for you?! And how can you be so nonchalant about a man who tried to take your life?!"

"My father back on earth was the same way. I grew up being treated like this."

The words slipped out of him before he could stop them, but apparently it had been the wrong thing to say if the expression of outraged shock that had fallen across Sinmir's expression was any clue.

For a long moment, all the prince did was stare at him with his eyes bugging out of his head, but then those eyes narrowed and his mouth grew tight, nostrils flaring.

"You grew up mistreated even by the people who should have been protecting you," he muttered, setting his gloved fists in his lap. "I think I am beginning to understand a few things about you. The reason you loved your Ella as much as you did was because she was all you had."

Those words were so painfully accurate that it made his chest ache.

"I guess, in a way, you could look at it like that," he croaked, swallowing his rising tears, "but the real reason I loved her is because she could look me in the eye and tell me that I mattered, that my life wasn't a mistake, and that my existence had meaning."

"Why would you think your life didn't matter?" Sinmir angrily inquired. "How could you?"

Xaphile snapped his mouth shut and turned his head back towards Ella.