Chapter 172: Chapter 172

DAHLIA:

My heart began to palpitate wildly. Why do I always find myself on the verge of getting caught by Tristan?

I sighed. I didn’t come this far to be caught. I have to continue to deceive him until the end.

“Look, does that even matter? You knew I stole the red ruby from her, so of course I’d get her powers!”

I didn’t know why I was shouting. I was so frustrated with Samalah, I wanted to shout at her too.

However, she wasn’t here, and it was only I who would be blamed for her endless scheming and plotting.

“What else have you got in your sleeves, huh? You were working with that bastard count all along! Tell me, did you also give your body to him? Did you offer yourself to curry his favor like all those whores he kept around, or are you going to tell me he made you do it,” he accused me as he seized me by the wrist. “Tell me, did Count Jeteris father your bastard child?”

Hearing him curse the child I was bearing in my womb made me lose it completely. Before I knew it, my hand had already flown to his face so hard that Tristan staggered.

“You… You’re too much,” I said, my whole body trembling with rage. “How can you call my baby such filthy names? How can you accuse me of being an improper woman?”

Even if Samalah was a scheming person, it was unfair to call her like that based on the hardships she had to endure. How can Tristan, his supposed friend from her younger years, accuse her of such?

Moreover, how can he call our very own child a bastard?!

“You have no right to call my baby a-a bastard with your filthy mouth!”

“And why not? You’ve deceived me over and over again! You played me like a fool more than once, and you even brought countless misfortunes to Dahlia. I won’t be surprised if you had but used your body to throw yourself at the feet of our enemy! So tell me, did you also use your womb as a means to rise to the throne you so loved? Did you, huh?”

I gave him another hard slap. I wanted to slap him some more, but I see my nails have already made a cut at his lips.

“Tristan Abell, how could you say that to your own child?” I gasped. What did I blunder out just now?

“You lying, little thing! Now you even dare tell me that child is mine!”

I had lost all sense of reason at that point. “Then who else would this child’s father be? Do you think I could grow a child by magic?”

“That’s enough! You dare to hide the fact that you’ve schemed and used me by accusing me to be your child’s father? You’re insane!”

He was right. I was insane. I don’t even know why I was getting angry at him for not realizing who I really was, but I was done pretending. I was done trying to understand him.

“Who are you to speak ill of my child? You speak so highly of love as if you know what it really wa when you obviously don’t! You can’t even recognize your own child, and you dare accuse me of being mad!”

In a way, he was insane too. We both were.

We continued with our journey thereon. I refused to hop on his back thereafter, and he refused to talk to me. We stopped speaking all together, full of spite with one another.

The worst part of our journey was that the road we thought would be safe was far more dangerous than the main road. It was filled with hunters and rogues that Samalah herself seemed to have set…

For the next few hours, I heard several compliments about my ‘plan’ that I wanted to scream and pull all my hair out.

“Lady, you’re right when you said the Shadow wolf will pass by here…”

“Lady Samalah, had you knocked him down yet as you said you would?”

“Lady, we did as you’ve told us and set the trap… Did we do well?”

It seemed like Samalah was confident that Tristan would take this road. How else could she predict that we’d be journeying here?

This also goes to show that Samalah was someone hard to trust. It seemed that either her greed for power or her thirst for revenge was so strong that she was willing to risk injuring Tristan just to make sure she succeeded in dragging me down.

Because of all the traps Samalah had laid down in advance, Tristan’s abuses became even more and more unbearable too.

“So you call this non-scheming? How many more rogues have you put in our track, huh?”

“I don’t know,” I yelled at him in frustration. I gave up putting the pretense that I was Samalah a long time ago. Even I would have wanted to wring her neck for causing us this entire ruckus!

We started the journey early in the morning, and now it was afternoon already. We still hadn’t covered much of our intended track.

Just now, a group of knights under Count Jeteris’ orders, the Falcon Wings, were hot on our trail.

“How much longer are they going to run after us,” I remarked in utter annoyance and astonishment as I clutch tufts of hair at the back of Tristan’s wolf.

“I don’t know! You tell me since you sent them!”

Tristan had a point. Samalah had sent them, so I must be the one to stop them.

I glanced at our pursuers from Tristan’s back. I raised my arm and blasted them with a fire bolt.

Not all of them had been hit, but it had caused enough chaos for us to escape.

Tristan continued to run faster. I held tightly onto his back, praying that I don’t birth my baby right there and then from the rush!

“You see that big stone? We have to make it past that while I use my powers so that we can teleport!”

“T-Teleport?”

“Yes! This is an entrance only a Shadow Rune wolf can use. The magical barrier will recognize the spirit stone and let us land straight in the heart of Laudicia.”

How convenient, except that it was also extremely scary.

“Hang on!”

As he spoke those final words, Tristan jumped straight into the boulder before us, which will either send us into the Laudician plains or send us to our deaths if the barrier does not recognize us as we crash straight into a solid piece of stone.