ALPHA QUEEN RANIA

In the right wing of the Palace. Queen Rania squeezed her whole body down on a sofa. The quietest place to exist for her was now buzzing with activity as the news of the king's death spread like wildfire.

Her call for an emergency to help her husband had sent shockwaves throughout the kingdom of Khasian. Now, a team of detectives and forensic experts had arrived.

Not to help her husband as she requested, but to lie to her face that her husband was dead. And take away his dead body for more investigation.

She refused to believe he was dead. So, she sat on the sofa all alone, her eyes wandering outside through the windows and her heart keeping her mind blank.

Investigators who were moving around her nonstop were almost driving her crazy. They moved around the whole wing of the palace, turning her house up and down.

There was nowhere in her house where she would hide from all this. Everywhere she went, she found a person collecting fingerprints, taking photographs, interrogating someone, or dusting for traces of DNA.

They blabbed something about someone killing her husband and she wasn't interested in hearing their crazy theories.

It was just thirty minutes ago when Rania had walked to the bedroom, leaving her husband singing a lullaby to their daughter Sierra in the sitting room.

She walked back from the bathroom to find his body resting peacefully on a chair just the way she left him and still holding their ten-year-old daughter, Sierra, who was sound asleep.

When she walked closer to take Sierra out of her husband's embrace to tuck her into her bedroom, her husband was pale, cold, and unresponsive.

She called for an ambulance and after they arrived, the emergency doctors announced he was no longer alive.

They asked her if she knew if someone had injected him with something. They think whatever he was injected with might have caused his death. A fresh visible mark on his neck told them there was foul play.

And they believed it wasn't a natural death.

They said someone had killed him.

That is why she sat on the sofa alone, shutting all of them and every one of her mind. It wasn't true. Her husband would never die and leave her alone. He was alive.

From where she sat, she had a clear view of what was happening outside. Ambulance sirens, police, the media, noise, a lot of noise were everywhere.

It wasn't the first time she had seen her people gathered like this. In contrast, this was her life. They always did. But she noticed more people gathered outside the palace gate today.

Her people were eager, as always, to glimpse what really was going on. The police had cordoned off the whole Palace. Which gave her hope that nothing had changed.

Reina was shaking and quivering nonstop, so scared. She pushed to keep her mind and attention outside. Because in the sitting room, the same room she was in, just a foot behind her.

The body of her now late husband was being carried by a team of paramedics carefully onto a stretcher. It was surreal for her to think it was happening. Reina opted to think it wasn't happening.

When she heard the stretcher move, sliding outside the room, they tempted her to turn her back and watch her husband's body, but no.

It is all a dream. She kept reminding herself of that. She would choose what to do in this dream. She hated a burning question that kept knocking on her head. What if the dream turns into reality?

What if she turned back and saw a dead person instead of her husband on that stretcher?

She wanted it to stay a dream. It was all a dream. She was going to wake up soon from this terrible nightmare.

Every person's face she saw in this dream was contorted in grief and disbelief, as they strained to hide tears or cried out loud in pain.

It was all a dream. She hated the nightmare. It had stretched longer, and she wanted to wake up. She kept on hoping.

She was going to wake up in her bed beside her sleeping husband soon now.

Rania watched the blue and red flashing lights from the cars casting a lot of glows from outside her window.

A body was carefully being loaded into the back of a waiting ambulance. Police surrounded every corner of the ambulance, and she watched in silence as the ambulance slowly pulled away.

Its siren wailed mournfully, with the King's royal car following as it made its way through the crowded people.

Then the door of the elevator opened with a heavy thud. She turned around to see who had joined her in the sitting room.

Douglas… Her stepson and the crown prince walked in a hurry and squeezed her into a huge hug. Tears streamed down his face. “I am so sorry Rani.... I am terribly sorry... Where is Cicci? Is she alright?” Douglas enquired, and Rania nodded with no word spoken.

Studying Douglas' face as she held onto his cheeks, the tears felt real in her hands. She had never seen Douglas cry in all the life she had known him.

This dream was weird. She laughed hysterically. “Are you okay, Rani?” Douglas inquired with a worried face.

“AAAAAHRRRR…!” Noise… Scared cries came from the dining room. Not the mourning noise she had been used to, the different kind. The ones that one makes when they have accidentally bumped into a dead body.

Fina had made the noise heard from the dining room. And Rania jumped off the sofa in a hurry, with Douglas following right behind her. Rania walked to her friend-turned-sister Fina.

“Fina, what is going on?… OOH, MY GOD.” Both Rania and Douglas’s eyes went wide open.

Sierra, Rania's daughter, lay unconscious on the ground, her body limp and unresponsive. Just the same way Rania had found her husband earlier, with the same mark on her neck.

Which brought Rania back from her dream. What Rania thought she was running away from hit her harder.

It wasn't a dream.

It was all true.

Her husband, King Alexander, who was smiling at her thirty minutes ago, was dead. The father of her only daughter, Sierra, was no more.

She almost dropped to the ground with the loss of energy on her knees, and Douglas held onto her, helping her to stand still.

Her only savior was gone, and nothing would ever be the same again.

Her mind wandered everywhere. As she channeled all her energy into her legs to run to her daughter. Someone had killed the King and now was trying to kill the princess. What the hell was going on?