Sometimes you don't have to be an adult to grow up. Sometimes you don't have to try to visit the worse part of life. You just have to be born into it. Or lose someone who wanted to pull you out of that hole.

Royal life has never been sitting on a throne with a mass of servants who are at your every beck and call. It's not just signing laws that affect your subjects or the entire kingdom and relations with other countries.

This life can also be a struggle with yourself when you stand in front of the mirror and don't know if you see a monster or someone you were a few years ago.

It's not like your whole life has been difficult. You were indeed born into a difficult family when the queen and king were still your parents at the time, but you never felt the cruelty of this world. At least not in a physical way. Your parents died on the ocean during a journey to another kingdom, leaving you completely alone with no family to take care of you. You were only ten years old.

It may seem extreme, but because your parents had no other descendants, at such a young age you had to take the throne. A little girl had to give orders to her subjects no matter how hard it was.

But your blood and soul were too strong to give in. You had to learn how to be an assertive queen, whom everyone was supposed to fear from a young age.

And so it was.

Until you met your husband, a brave knight who managed to melt your icy heart at least a little.

A heart that after breaking into a million pieces became a hard shell of ice again when the king's brother, Khari Osborne, kneeling before your throne informed you of the death of your love.

What could be worse than losing your beloved? Everything, really. You don't remember what you felt then. You didn't cry. You didn't scream. As if it washed over you. Because in reality it did. You didn't miss him. It was only after his death that you understood that what you felt for him wasn't love at all, but rather a desperate desire to be accepted for who you really were.

Since then, you and Khari have become closer to each other, or rather, he wanted to get closer to you. Wherever you were, he was there. He was like an explosion of optimism that you had been missing your whole life. You saw him all the time, he became your private knight, who was truly at your every beck and call. Even the stupidest ones.

Day by day it was getting more and more not so much uncomfortable, unusual. Your relationship didn't look like it should be because you were the queen and he was just a knight. You were a bit like best friends, well at least he thought so, and your conversations, where he did the talking for the two of you, were already becoming a routine.

A routine that you would feel bad without. You needed it.

"Why are you doing this?" You asked one evening, lying in your quite large, dark room on your four-poster bed.

It had been dark outside for a long time. Neither of you knew what time it was. Khari stayed in your room longer and longer every night, and you found that it didn't bother you at all.

"I told you." He looked away from the view outside the window. Still sitting calmly in the armchair, he glanced at your figure. "My brother asked me to take care of you."

He always says the same thing. He always mentions his brother, your dead husband. But that's not true. You spent too much time with him. You were sure that what Khari did for you went beyond a simple request from a family member a long time ago.

And that, in some messed up way, didn't bother you either.