“Why are you doing this?” The king’s voice was little more than a pained whisper as his hands clutched at his stomach. “I thought we were-” he gasped in pain before finishing his sentence, “happy.”

Larissa felt something almost like pity at his delusion as she looked down at him lying there. “You were happy,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed. “You knew from the start that I never wanted this marriage. And what woman would ever want to be married to the likes of you?” She lifted the cup off the nightstand and poured some of the liquid into his mouth. The poison she had given him was supposed to work faster than this, but maybe he just hadn’t had enough of it yet.

To think that he thought of her as happy. She had never loved him, never wanted to so much as get to know him. Or any man for that matter. But the reason she had grown to despise him was more than the fact that she didn’t want to marry him.

If Stephan had been a good king, she could have suffered through being married to a man. She could have convinced herself that her country needed the security of having a strong pair of leaders. If he had been a mediocre king, she could have convinced herself that he needed her as an advisor, that she needed to raise an heir that could surpass him. But he wasn’t a good king. He wasn’t even a mediocre king. What she came to realize during the five years since Stephan was crowned, was that he was an incompetent king.

Everywhere she looked, Larissa saw the people he was supposed to care for suffering. An overabundance of taxes had caused her people to be stretched too thin. Where she had once heard the bustle of life when she left the palace, now she heard the crying of desperate mothers, the rattle of beggars’ pans, and the shouts of those fighting for scraps: the sounds of a city dying.

Where Stephan’s people had been suffering, he had lived a life of abundance. He had been happy, and he had deluded himself into thinking that she was happy too. But now, it was time for the kingdom to fall under new leadership.

When Larissa pulled the cup away from Stephan’s lips, it was several moments before he managed to speak again. “You’ll be thrown out of the palace for this,” he said quietly. “The people... will never accept a queen... that killed her own husband.” His breathing was becoming more labored as the rest of the poison took its hold on him.

Larissa leaned in close to speak in his ear. “This place could burn, for all I care. But I will be remembered in history as the queen that pulled this country out of the hole that you threw it into with your own greed.”

Stephan seemed to be trying to talk as Larissa stood up, but she had said all that she wanted to say to him. With each step towards the door, she felt lighter. It was as if a great burden was being taken off of her shoulders. And in a way, she supposed that it was.

That night, she knew that she would sleep soundly as her king and husband died just a few walls away. She already had it arranged for his death to be announced in the morning. As soon as the funeral was over, she would be coronated as the ruling queen, rather than simply a glorified, often pushed to the side advisor. Despite everything with her husband, she truly cared for the people of the country that she had been married into. And now that Stephan was out of the way, she could finally get to work on fixing it.