The Noble Desire (Peterick)

.•°Nineteen.•°

The country was absent of their prince for three weeks, but its people also believed that he had been away to do good. Meagan was the only one who had suspected otherwise. She wasn't the idiot Pete supposed she was. To let him run away for an entire month and sit around waiting for his return had turned out to be tortuous. The princess would have had to have been out of her mind to do nothing about it, so she cashed in on her personal magnetism after her husband-to-be's departure in order to sort out the case.

Frank was willing to dish on their flight location in a moment flat, informing her that they hadn't taken off to an orphanage in Cape Town as the prince had told everyone but rather Rio De Janeiro. It was a revelation that only confirmed her growing cynicism. She didn't hate his bodyguard, but she had remembered spotting him in the woods those several weeks ago and was certain he'd been spying on her activity. The fact that he spent far more time with her fiance didn't help her perspective of him much recently. She'd believed herself to be paranoid at one time simply because Patrick's duties were to protect her betrothed, which entailed that he was to be within his vicinity at most times of the day, but the second she heard that they had decided to stay together in a tourist city she had the intuition to discern that this was business of a pleasurable sense.

It didn't hurt her as one would expect the prospective spouse to have been if she'd discovered her intended husband to be cheating, but she was calm about the whole ordeal. Her heart did feel a twinge, but it wasn't one that had been caused from any sort of love. Meagan sat and thought for most of the day after hearing the news and came to one conclusion on her feeling of the subject matter. The distrust and betrayal that had been subjected to their friendship was what caused the small ounce of ache in her, but that was that, and she was relieved that she had not allowed her attachment to have ventured any deeper.

To have even cared for Pete combated her soul purpose of her being there, and had it been made known to those she was in league with that she wished no harm to him she would have kissed her life goodbye to a guillotine. She'd bought the royal family time by proposing that she be married to him in order to have access to their estate to fork over to the others in small increments as to not raise alarm to the crown. It was after they would receive her share of the income that they expected her to carry out their original scheme. She was hesitant on performing the second half. It'd been her intention upon stepping foot inside the palace to complete the task assigned to her at birth, but she was weak and unwilling to honor those who made it their life's work to aid in her training.

Pete may have appeared to be the immature, womanizing, irresponsible egomaniac she had been taught about, but having gotten to know him she had known it now to have simply been the surface of his image. He'd been wrongly demonized, and his qualities were negatively dramatized to her in order to corroborate the hatred her trainers felt for the royals. The king and queen weren't the best parental figures- she came to see- but they didn't deserve to be offed either. Meagan had been groomed to maintain a detachment from her targets, to think of them as meeting their destiny, and she was merely the conduit. This wasn't a career she had chosen but a way of life.

She'd been raised in it, around it- an orphan from her first seconds of breath taken in by a group whose only mission was to rid the world of the most famous royals. They needed someone like her, someone to be as agile as an Olympic gymnast, to look through a narrow barrel with the eyes of a hunter framed in the passionless face of an executioner. Meagan wanted to be as heartless as they had disciplined her to be, but when she met Pete something awakened within her. Compassion.

He had indirectly prevented his own assassination for thus long by befriending her and revealing a separate perspective not dressed in hostility but beauty and merriment, and Meagan didn't dare desire to put a bullet in his head even if he had double-crossed her himself. She could forgive him for that. An arranged marriage to a stranger hadn't given him any choice but to deceive her in order to find his true love. Besides, she'd been misleading him anyway.