ALPHA TOPH

The dungeon boy’s words fizzed like static in my brain before I felt my heart slam solidly against the iron of my ribs.

“What did you just say?” I murmured, feeling the waft of something cold brush over the shell of my ear as the ginger-haired guard trembled before me, falling on his knees and face and stretching out his hands on the bright red carpet that snaked through the far double doors to the throne dias. 

“W-we found him face down in a pool of his own vomit your highness, he-he seemed to have choked on it, and the nursemaids are tending to the body in the...