I heard everything.

Now, my blood is boiling.

I’m wrong for sticking around, for keeping the door slightly ajar and not minding my own business, but I don’t regret one fucking second of eavesdropping on my princess and her sister, Crown Princess Helena, the future Queen of Gideanor. I’m a hell of a rulebreaker, and I might be low on the totem pole of Gideanor’s citizens, but my loyalty is without question. No one fucks with my country and its rulers.

No one fucks with my princess.

While Princess Charlotte listened to her sister relate the threatening phone call, my mind is reeling. I know the crown faces its fair share of risks and threats from crazies, foreign and domestic, but to bypass the current King and Queen and target a defenseless young heiress to the throne, it’s revolting. I want to find this person and pound them into the ground for being the skeeviest douchebag around. I want to face them in their own backyard and use every inch of my six-foot-four height to intimidate the fuck out of them. I want to force them to back down, then shake them from their scrawny, coward as fuck pencil neck until they apologize for the shit they pulled.

I want to choke the chickenshit to an inch of his life, then, when he begs for mercy, I finish him off.

Murder.

If that’s what it takes to stop him, I’ll sign the fuck up.

No one has ever lost their life by my hands, but I came close a few times. That was a lifetime ago, back when I was an angry, bad-tempered young adult who only settled conflict with my clenched fists. And they were trivial, unimportant fights, to be honest. I calmed my shit down over time, with the help of an old man who dragged my then perpetually-drunk, beat-up ass out of the gutter one day and gave me a chance to make something of my life. Saul. To this day, I owe him everything. He’s the one who showed me I could create good things with my hands instead of breaking shit. He put a hammer and a drill in front of me, pointed at a table in his workshop that was covered in odds and ends and planks of wood, and told me to make something. That was where I turned my shit around. I stopped picking fights just for the fuck of it, and slowly put my attention and energy into learning the trade of woodworking. I owe Saul everything for that.

He took a man destined for a future in jail or dead before the age of thirty, and he made me into a productive member of society. Saul has been dead for a few years now, but to this day, I still visit his and his wife’s graves every first Sunday of the month, just as he used to do for his late wife while he was still alive.

From then to now, I never believed I could fight and brawl the way I used to. Never thought I’d ever physically do severe damage to another person during a fight.

Not until now.

Now, I want to do much worse to this sick fuck who threatened the future Queen.

I pace around the marble bathroom floors like a caged animal long after Crown Princess Helena leaves the room, long after Princess Charlotte dozes off. My mind is working overtime, playing and replaying the sisters’ conversation. Everything about this person terrorizing them is off. Bits and pieces of the threatening words that Crown Princess Helena relayed back to her sister keep flooding my thoughts. The adrenaline pumping through my blood is off the charts, causing the veins in my neck to pulse and jump. There’s something not right about it. Something strangely familiar. It takes me a while, but I do my best to return to the detailing work that remains in the bathroom. Even with the unsettled cloud hanging over my head, I manage to get most of my day’s work done, and with as little noise as possible. Some of the crew aren’t done by our clock out time, so they stay back to finish. We’re on strict orders to work around the clock to be finished within a week, less if possible. I leave the sleeping princess’s chambers with a handful of the men in my crew, promising myself that I’ll figure something out, that I’ll find some way to help fix everything.

The terrorist’s threats are still on my mind as I make it to the large concrete apartment building where I live just as the sun begins to lower on the distant horizon. Then, as I climb the five floors to my tiny bachelor apartment on the sixth floor and walk down the hallway to my front door, it hits me like a ton of bricks. It hits me so hard that I stop short in the middle of the hall, my hand lifting to my pounding skull.

No wonder my brain wouldn’t let it go.

I know something.

Crucial information.

I have to do something.

And I will.

Right fucking now.

But I have to do something first.

I know I’ve only touched her once, and barely, but I don’t care. She’s mine.

I have to see my princess one more time.

Then, I’ll have no regret putting my life on the line to confront the most influential person I know, the person who can wipe me off the face of the earth before I’m close enough to do any damage to him.