Silence. That was all Shuhua could hear. It was so different from the loud streets she uses to live on with her best friend, Yuqi. Where was she? It was far too quiet to be in the city, yet too dark to be in the sunny countryside. The only other option was underground. Yes, that made more sense.

The young girl thought back to when she was taken there, over three months ago. They had knocked her out with such force that when she woke up her already dirty rags were stained with blood and she had a lump the size of a ball on her head.

Footsteps, the one thing that Shuhua had grown to fear, echoed from somewhere in the dark dungeon. She recognized one voice, but there seemed to be more, at least two other people.

Three people stopped in front of her cage. She could see them properly now. The first was, as expected, her torturer, a rather small woman with short blonde hair and a piercing stare that intimidated everyone she came across. She was wearing a white and blue fur coat and a glittering dress underneath.

The next was a taller woman with full lips, seductive eyes and curly raven hair that fell down her back in waves. Shuhua nearly gulped when their eyes met. She was terrifying.

However, it was the third woman that caught Shuhua’s attention the most. In her opinion, she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Brown hair framed her small face, and her skin seemed so soft that she wanted to touch it.

“Listen to me when I'm speaking to you, slave!” Her torturer snapped with a hiss, bringing her back to reality. While she was admiring the woman’s beauty, the blonde and the scary woman had entered the cage and was standing above her thin form on the ground.

For the first time since she arrived, Shuhua spoke. “I’m not a slave.”

“So you do speak Korean.” She smirked. “Then why don’t you obey me?”

“You cannot control me.”

A chuckle escaped the other woman’s mouth. “You really have a wild one here, Soyeon. Just like she said in her little speech in the streets, she really is a lion.”

“Don’t be silly. This girl? A queen? She's barely a cub.”

Sharp eyes looked up at the blonde woman, fingers curled up on the floor in a claw shape. The bars of the cage forced her to right underneath her sneering captor, but she wasn't scared. “The true lioness will take the throne. You're just too stubborn to believe it.”

Slap.

Shuhua held her cheek in pain, knocked off her knees.

“How dare you speak to me that way. You will pay once our guests are gone.”

So, as the young girl blinked her tears away, the three women stalked away.

She never noticed the last princess give her a worried look...