The Tyrant's Pet

Ever since the beginning, Abel never sought love from her. All he kept saying was \'choose me,\' not \'love me\'. Choose him. Just him. And hearing those words from her was good enough for him. Actually, it was way better than those words: I love you.

Perhaps it was because he never heard those three words \'I love you\' from her that he couldn\'t compare. But what he was certain of was that his happiness and contentment were enough to put his heart at rest.

"Every day…" he whispered, rocking in the chair, cradling her in his embrace. His eyes fell on the window, staring at the vast green expanse.

"So this is what you\'ve been staring at all day long…?" he muttered with a faint exhale. "From this room, sitting on this rocking chair, waiting until night falls where he would come and drag you to a nightmare?"

Abel didn\'t get angry when she was telling him the story of her life in this room. She focused on the good things and remembered her child with love in her eyes. So, how could he get angry or at least, show that he was miffed? But now that she was fast asleep in his embrace and he could imagine what she had felt that time, it felt like a stake went straight to his chest.

It hurts.

He looked around at the almost empty room. There was nothing in there aside from this rocking chair they were sitting on, the armchair in front of them, the bottles of wine and cups on the floor, the few stands, and then the bed. The room was too spacious because of the lack of furniture.

Abel narrowed his keen eyes, noticing some scratches on the floor near the bed and more scratches on the bed frame. The tiny gaps on the floor revealed dried blood that seeped into them. As he noticed all these little details, his mind could not help but create these scenes in his head of how there were such things in this place.

From his seat, he could see Aries crawling with blood all over her, only to get dragged by the hair which left those scratches on the floor. When he blinked, more and more images came to his head: different days and nights, different scenes, and different states she was in.

Sometimes, he would see an illusion of her curled like a ball on the floor, sometimes, sitting just in front of the hearth, then laying motionless on the bed. There were Aries whose face was bruised. Sometimes she appeared to have more injuries, other times they were only scars only to gain another batch of injuries.

Aries was all over this room — this cage. And she had lived a cycle of hell. Yet, she couldn\'t bear to destroy this cage because it remembered her secret. Her son… or daughter. Even though the sheer thought of this room make her sick to the stomach, she still came because this was the only place she could talk about that child.

His jaw fastened and his expression was hard. When he blinked once again, all the Aries in the room disappeared. He gazed down; the only one who was left was the woman sleeping soundlessly in his embrace.

A quiet sigh slipped past his lips. "You called it Bean because you hadn\'t thought of a name, huh?" he muttered, remembering her story as a mother and how she fought for her child with everything she could.

"You were amazing, darling," he crooned, casually caressing her arms. "I\'m certain your child let you go because he doesn\'t want you to live a miserable life for him." — this might be an excuse to make her feel better because what happened wasn\'t an accident. However, the child held onto her even when she tried to hurt it.

Either way, he wasn\'t the person to talk about it. Abel was no God and he could never know. But he strongly believed there was a reason for everything.

"I\'ll remember her," he said under his breath, still rocking the chair leisurely. "I\'ll remember that woman who endured everything to protect her child… and I will remember that child she loved with all her heart. Bean and Aries… I will never forget them even after death."

The rocking chair slowly came to a halt and Abel slipped his hand inside his suit. When he took out his hand, a match and a cigar were within his grasp. Keeping the cigar in between his teeth, he lit up the match and guided the flame to the end of the cigar.

Abel shook his hand until the flame died, tossing the stick match on the floor. He dragged deeply and puffed the smoke which ascended, filling the room with the pungent scent of sulfur from the match and wood. Aries moved slightly as her brows furrowed at the strong scent, but Abel dragged and puffed the thick smoke once more.

He then kept the cigar in between his teeth, carrying her in his arms when he stood up. His eyes fell on the bottle of wine near the armchair. Seeing it was half-empty, he advanced towards it. He stepped on the bottleneck and it flipped up, hooking it on the back of his foot, only to kick it in the rocking chair\'s direction.

The bottle instantly shattered at the foot of the rocking chair. The wine flooded underneath it.

"Morro," Abel called, and that second, Morro appeared outside the windowsill like a frog while balancing himself from falling. It was safe to say Morro forgot he was still in his human form and not a bird, and squatting outside the windowsill wasn\'t enough for a grown man like him.

But Abel kept his eyes on the wine traveling under the rocking chair. "This room must cease to exist," ordered Abel, blowing the cigar straight into the rocking chair and it fell on the flammable alcohol, sparking an instant small fire that crawled from the foot of the chair.

"This room…" he turned on his heel and sauntered off. "… had no more bargaining chip to hurt her. Raze it to the ground."

"Yes, Your Majesty."