• How can I possibly be calm about this? She’s a dangerous criminal that needs to be thrown in a jail cell for the rest of her life. She knows something, but I can’t pin point what. This girl is out for my life, and if she gets the chance, I’m not going to get out of the scrape alive.

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    Prologue


    The darkness filled the room. Slowly, oh so very slowly it covered the walls as it approached the ever moving underground, the people who were hiding from the oppressive hand of the Lords that ruled this land. Most of these people aren't supposed to exist; the minorities that were supposed to have been eliminated when the Lords first took over. Some had just slipped back into the population; others just lived in the underground.

    The other's that existed in the underground were the criminal's. Yes, criminals. They weren't supposed to exist either, this empire was supposed to be perfect, a utopia. Now, these criminals weren't the one's who had committed the crimes of insanity. They were the one's who had murdered nobles who had committed a crime against them. The other criminals were of a more… mundane nature. They were the thieves, or the one's that had been wrongly convicted and had escaped the prison that they were being held in. Either way, they weren't supposed to exist.

    The underground is a place for the refugees of battles; it was a place for people to hide when they needed to and then return to the rest of the world when they had been forgotten about. It was a sanctuary that wasn't supposed to be real, hidden expertly in a city that was said to be in ruin. The Lords knew that it existed, they just ignored it, using it for their own purposes. It's a paradise for some, but a hell for others.

    There are a few other kinds of people in the underground. There was the nobility who had been thrown out of their homes when they were unable to pay taxes. The merchants; though not truly part of the, they do pass through buying, trading, and selling wares before they move onto the better part of the empire. Then, there are the assassins.

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    Silence, it’s like a bad movie. Silence and bad movies always leave you wanting more, even before they’re over. That was the only thing in the room as the two stared at each other, both too shocked to speak. They were alone, but that didn’t stop it from being shocking. The two of them had just done something highly illegal and something that could get them killed, and they were fairly proud of it. The girl crossed the room, staring blankly out the window at the gardens that stretched out to the vast forest, the edge of the land that the two lived on.

    "This can never happen again." She whispered, pushing herself away from the window, walking toward the door that would take her out of his quarters. He let the girl leave, moving across the room to step onto the balcony that over looked the gardens. Nothing of what happened was going to leave this room, or ever happen again. Sure it had been great, but the two of them were… no, it was just wrong. She was an outlaw for crying out loud; an outlaw who had just corrupted the future king. He had to forget about her for the good of his kingdom.

    A knock at the door made him jump. He didn’t know who would want to talk to him this early in the morning. He grabbed some clothes, pulled them on, and opened his door, trying to seem like he had just woken up. The prince was staring at the frame of his best friend, who probably wasn’t in a very good shape thanks to all of the stairs that led to the tower.

    "Kael. What’s with the rude awakening?" He asked, watching his best friend walked into the room and started thoroughly searching for something, Kael wouldn’t tell him what.

    "That girl." He said, finishing his search through of the room. "Elliot, I know who she is." Elliot looked at his friend, completely confused. He was the only one who truly knew who that criminal was, right? He just stood there, dumbfounded, waiting for Kael to continue on the story. Elliot saw him roll his eyes. "That new maid El. She’s that thief that’s after your father’s life." He was the one to roll his eyes this time. Elliot didn’t believe him. Why should he? Sure he knew that the girl was an outlaw, but the thief after his father was a myth, nothing more. The servant ran into the room, not bothering with privacy right then.

    "My lord, you must come quickly." Kael looked over at his friend in an ‘I told you so’ way, before they both ran off toward the throne room.

    The heir stood dumbfounded once more at the sight in the throne room. It was not very pretty. Blood caked the walls, slowly drying. It smelt of death and alcohol, his father had been drinking again. There she was, standing over his father’s corpse, twin black daggers held in a tight grip, the tips facing behind her, her head facing the ceiling.

    "Dani…" He whispered, stepping up to her. He couldn’t bring himself to be mad at her. Hell, now he believed Kael. She didn’t look at him, sheathing both of the daggers as she ran out the window, breaking through. Elliot just stared at the place where Dani had once been standing. "s**t." He whispered, watching her disappear into the forest. He turned toward the inside of the room. That one girl had left him such a big mess to clean up.

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    Silence. That was all that there was to it. She stood in the silence as she waited for the boy to appear and get the stupid story back. Why she had agreed to read it was beyond her, but she had read it, liked it and hated it. The girl was on the last page of the story, ready to rip the retarded thing into shreds before the author’s eyes. Great, now that she was thinking about it, she had to finish it before he got there. The booklet slipped out of her pocket and she opened to the last page, ready to read again.

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    "You lied to me." Elliot said, walking toward his father’s killer. They had found her breaking back into the castle, and now the two of them were alone in the throne room, which had been cleaned after their last encounter. She had thrown her weapons down to his feet, obviously prepared to be arrested for crimes against the crown.

    "I had to, besides, it wasn’t really a lie. As the rightful heir I had to kill the man who took my throne and killed my father. What were you going to do if I had told you?" She didn’t give him time to respond. "You would have thrown me in a jail cell to rot. I told you that I was an outlaw; I just never stated what kind." She kept her eyes directly on him, watching as he walked toward her.

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    She turned the page, staring at its blank back. He had given her another unfinished story. This was why she hated reading them so much, and yet she couldn’t seem to stop. He had never finished a story, ever.

    "Dani." A flamboyant voice shouted to her. Danielle turned, only to be clobbered by a mass of Hot Pink hair. "I was worried that you would leave before I got here." He easily pulled the mass of bound pages out of her hand, smiling at her as he saw that she had finished, assuming that was why she didn’t have a bookmark in. "I see that you’ve finished my story. Would you like to tell me why you’re scowling?" Her face flushed, as she looked away. Danielle kept forgetting that he could read emotions without them being visible.

    "You've based yet another character off of me." She sighed. The two of them were guests in this place, supposedly ambassadors from the neighboring kingdom. No one really knew who, or what they were.

    "Mistress Danielle…" A servant, no older then Danielle herself, said, speaking in a hushed quiet tone. "… My Lord wishes for your presence." The servant looked up at the boy and her face blushed. "Master Matthieu. Mistress." She waved the flustered girl away and her hand magically collided with the back of Matthieu's head. There was obvious disdain in her voice when she spoke to him.

    "Pervert." Danielle left Matthieu alone in the hallway to seek out all the girls that he wanted to. She walked toward the Lord’s chambers, her heart beating faster with every passing step. This was what she was here for, what she had been waiting to do for months. The door was already open for her and the Lord’s voice boomed, telling her that she may enter. The sheer ecstasy of the whole moment was just overwhelming, her feelings bottled up inside that shell.

    "Are you ready for this?" He asked, already sitting on his bed. He was watching her, obviously waiting for something that she knew would never come. The tiny smirk on her face was pretty much invisible as she walked toward him, moving behind him to give him a massage.

    "Yes. I've been ready for a long time." She whispered in his ear, feeling the shiver that ran up his spine from it. "A very long time." Danielle ran a hand across his throat. The Lord seemed shocked, but that was the usual expression of someone that had just been killed. She stood up, and wiped her daggers off on the man’s bed. Sheathing her daggers, she ran and jumped out the window, landing lightly on the ground. The lord was dead. The job was over. Now Danielle had to get out and disappear.