Battlefields to Ball-gowns (A Bridgerton Fanfiction)

Chapter 10

The night was quiet, Artemis had just begun to fall asleep when a knock sounded at her bedroom door. 

"Come in." She groaned, highly annoyed at whoever was disterbing her most coveted time of rest. 

"Forgive me for disturbing you, your majesty. But a caller demands to be seen." One of the English maids tells her. 

Artemis' brain was almost too riddled with sleep to properly asertain what she was saying but responded regardless, "A caller? At this hour? Whom might this unexpected caller be?" 

"A Lord Bridgerton, ma'am."

With a grumble Artemis fasened her robe tighter around herself as she made her way down the stairs to the drawing room where she found Anthony Bridgerton pacing. 

"I do hope waking me up at this ungodly hour is due to some tragic even. Or perhaps you need assistance burying bumbling berbrooke's body. Which is it?" The princess slumped into the chair across from the pacing Viscount in a rather unladylike fashion. 

Anthony took in her disheveled appearance. Her dark chocolate hair fell like silk in waves, not yet tosseled by a night of sleep. Her cheeks were flushed with her unexpected awakening. He would have felt tremendously guilty for waking her if she didn't look so completely eatheral in her lavender silk night gowns.

He looked at her bruised knuckles, seeing them uncovered by gloves for the first time. Undoubtedly bruised from the facer she planted on Lord Berbrooke a few nights prior. Scars littered her delicate yet calloused fingers, one major scar sat just above her wrist and climber up to her knuckles he found himself studying further as he continued to pace.

"I'm afraid my mind would not stop replaying the events of this evening and I-I could...I could not sleep without first talking to you." Anthony spoke desperately, the frustration clear in his flustered state. 

"Sit down Anthony. We can't very well talk rationally with you marching about like a mad man." Artemis spoke, half teasing and half annoyed. 

He did, though he sat stiffly at the end of the cushion as if he would have to hop onto his feet at a moments notice. "You warned me. You told me that Berbrooke was a fowl beast and I disregarded your council. Not only that, I hurt my sister and lost her trust in the process." He admitted looking at her with those piercing puppy dog eyes. 

"Why are you hear, Anthony?" Artemis asked softly, intimately. 

"To relieve myself of guilt? To ask for your council once more? To see with my own eyes that you were not in fact hurt by Berbrooke? I-I don't know... I just... I needed to see you. To apologize to you... I should have heeded your warning and I am sorry that because of my choices you were put in a position to not only be potentially compromised, but have to protect my sister where I could not." Anthony looked so tired. 

She had seen such eyes on many during the war. The eyes of men who never got to be children. The eyes that every child soldier had, the eyes that she saw every day when she looked in the mirror. Eyes that showed flickers of a tired soul. 

Artemis didn't speak, giving Anthony the floor to continue airing out his frustration, "She didn't tell me, Artemis."

"No she did not."

"She asked for the help of a stranger, before her own brother. Am I so detestable that she presumed I would not believe her?" Anthony sank his face into his hands. 

"Would you have?" 

"What?"

"Would you have believed her if she had told you, Berbrooke attempted to force himself on her?" Artemis held no judgment in her voice. She held no discernable emotion at all in her voice really but Anthony's pride did not allow him to recognize that.