Episode 3

Chapter 3

After that tragic night, Iris isolated herself from everyone. She didn't go out anymore, didn't receive visitors, and refused to see the king ever again. She took possession of a small palace far enough away from David and moved out of the royal palace that she was supposed to share with her husband. This was the first time an imperial couple had not lived in the same palace, so it was the gossip among the servants, which quickly spread among the nobles, causing a real endless amount of speculation.

The poor woman could not understand that although the king had raped her, he had not done it consciously, that everything had been a twisted trap created by her own family. Furthermore, she never let her husband explain what had happened that night. She just shut herself off from him and the world. He was the only guilty one in her mind. She never found out that her parents were the ones truly responsible for the tragic wedding night she had had.

After three months, in which Iris was secluded and isolated from everyone in her palace, where she did not eat well and every day her maids, who tried to take care of her as best as possible, saw her worse, resulting in one day she fainted. When she woke up, she was surrounded by maids and the royal physician, learning then that she was pregnant.

That news was the worst they could have given her, after what had happened to her a few months ago. She was completely distraught, since for her, finding out about the pregnancy was simply reliving what had happened to her, so she had only wanted to end that baby's life. She even tried to kill herself to kill it too, she took a knife and cut her wrists, but one of the maids found her just in time and saved her life, then the doctor treated her to heal her wounds.

The king, upon learning of this, ordered that she be cared for day and night without leaving her alone for a moment so that she would not commit another madness. Although he hated himself for taking her that way on their wedding night, he didn't want his son, and the son of the woman he loved, to die, so he made that decision.

With no other choice, Iris, since she was being watched all day and all night, had the baby. However, from the moment he was born, she could only reject him. From the depths of her being, those feelings of love for that child that any mother could have did not come out, she only felt disgust when she looked at him, since he was the fruit of what they had done to her. He was a child born of rape.

She was aware that she hated an innocent baby, but her grudges were stronger than being a mother to that child. So, a week after he was born, after being forced to feed him and seeing that her contempt for him grew more and more and excessively because she was forced to see and touch him, she told one of the servants to tell the emperor to go to her room to see her.

When David arrived, thinking that perhaps she had forgiven him and wanted to work things out between them, he was disappointed to see the look on her face.

"I know the baby is innocent, but my hatred for him is stronger. If you don't take him away right now, I swear I'm capable of hurting him. I don't want to do it, but I will. After what you did to me, there is no motherly love that I can give him, just take him away and save him. Save him from me."

David's words tore at his soul, but he understood that she, in her own way, was trying to help and protect her son that way. So he took him away and told her that when she wanted to, she could see him. Sadly, for that child, a mother's love was not born in her and she never wanted to know about him again. Even when he looked for her in his childhood, she did not see him. She just sent him away from her palace.

She and King David died alone, as neither could rebuild their lives. She could not erase from her soul the memory of her wedding night and he could not get out of his heart the love he had for her, even after all the damage that her contempt had caused him.

Marcos, their son, seeing what his father suffered because of his mother, and the contempt that she had for them, was never able to trust love and only married to have heirs, but was not able to know love before he died.

His wife, the daughter of a high-ranking nobleman, came to hate him for not being able to love her, even though she did at first, but after so many years of abandonment by him, it caused a change in her feelings.