CHAPTER 356: EYE FOR AN EYE-II

Atlas lowed the dagger and turned to Alice whose smile had dropped upon seeing how he had paused his hands from digging out the left eye that Alice had wanted. He smiled at her, not out of fear or brazen confidence but rather a look of distrust.

"I realized that you had only promised verbally and words can always be betrayed. What if I have pulled out one of my eye only for you to kill the others around here?" Atlas looked at her and at the people around him and he noticed now that it wasn’t only that the people were too swept up by the air that they hadn’t noticed how he was caught by a witch.

It was a magic, a certain type of magic that Atlas couldn’t figure out but it seem to have drown out all the noises, making it impossible for anyone to know what had happened to him.

"Right. Right. You are still a King after all, you are really clever. I was not going to back out from my words but I agree with the idea of making a promise that would surely not broken," Alice snapped her finger and drawn a feather quill from the thin air.

Her fingers moved the tip of the pen toward her arms and quickly she wrote in her arms, digging the quill to her skin, carving it to her own wrist until it reached her elbow.

"I promise," she spoke as she wrote the words, "Not a soul in this place would be harmed if the man named Atlas gives me one of his blue eyes."

It was an oath that had no gaps for Atlas to sneak a way to escape his part of the promise or hers.

She said not a single soul which included Arabella and Cassius which was enough for Atlas to nod and move his hands again, ready to carve out his own eyes for certain this time.

Alice who saw this stared at the process with glimmering eyes, as if she had just asked for someone to pull the stars from the sky to her hand and was watching the process.

She didn’t care how bloody it would be. The only thing Alice longed for was the triumph—the look of sheer horror on Circe’s face if she ever laid eyes on Atlas again... with one of his own missing.

That damned woman had always been unbearably possessive of him. Without Atlas’s knowledge, Circe had gone to extreme lengths to make sure not a single piece of his body ever left his person.

Other witches had tried, once. Out of spite for Circe, they sought to curse Atlas—to make him suffer for her sins. But no spell could take root without blood, or a strand of hair, or skin, or nail. And none of those could ever be obtained.

Because Circe had made sure of it.

Every fragment of him was guarded, hoarded, hidden away. Not for his safety, Alice believed, but for her own obsession. Circe was simply too possessive, too unwilling to let anyone else lay claim to any part of her precious Atlas.

Even in her mansion, she kept every scrap she collected from him in one place, like relics of a god.

So what kind of devastation would ripple through her if Alice tore that protection away? If she took Atlas’s eye for herself?

Circe would be enraged. She would break. She would scream, cry, maybe even fall apart entirely. And for the first time, Alice thought with a cold thrill, she might truly feel that she had won against Circe.

Atlas dug the dagger to his eyelids while Arabella was offered the crown in the velvet pillow.

She took it with a wide smile and turned toward Cassius who then knelt his right knee to the ground, bending his head forward for her to reach out her hand and place the crown to the top of his head.

The crown settled on his hair as if it belonged there, glimmering under the sky and at once when he stood up, everyone began to scatter applause like rain.

She turned to him, delighted to see that he had reached the position he had always wanted to be.

"You’re the King now."

"All thanks to you," he whispered, leaning forward for a kiss when suddenly Arabella felt her entire body being pulled forward.

Her eyes widened, her heart raced at first thinking that he had hugged her only to hear the thunderous blast that had suddenly filled the throne room and how shoutings now rang from one end to another.

Her head quickly pulled away to see that Cassius had shielded her as he had felt a dangerous presence.

Sure enough, what they saw was Alice on the floor, sprawled with blood all over her hands.

The woman was beautiful, extremely so to the point that she seemed like a snake goddess. But her expression. Her expression wasn’t so gentle, it wasn’t so loving or seductive, it was filled with such deep rage that it morphed her face into such an ugly expression.

She stood up, gritting her teeth as she stared at Atlas who was as startled as her as he looked at his eyes that were bleeding.

The ice on his feet had suddenly melted as well, allowing him to stand but he wasn’t the one who had caused Alice to be thrown across the ground the way she was now.

Arabella herself wanted to rush forward but the guards had immediately jumped in front of her and Cassius, preventing death again.

"A- ATLAS!" She yelled for him to hear and in response he turned around and looked at her, shaking his head.

He was going to mouth that the woman that had now been thrown to the ground is none other than Alice, their number one enemy as the moment when suddenly the entire room turn pitch black.

Pitch black.

It was the kind of black as if everyone’s eyes had turned blind in a blink.

Someone shouted, "Light up the candles! Light it back up!"

But something didn’t make sense to others who heard his words.

It wasn’t that the candles had been blown up... it was afternoon after all. The curtains had all been drawn and tied, allowing for sunshine to settle in and this darkness... it was as if the sun had been swallowed whole, causing the entire world to lose their immediate source of light.