The hold he has against my hip loosens little by little. Seconds slip by. My heart counts each and every moment that it continues to give me life.
“My Prince,” Zilo says from somewhere behind Ravar.
I don’t dare look away. If I glance away for a single second, it could cost me my life.
“My Prince, the gift you ordered has just arrived,” Zilo’s words are pointed and, if I’m not mistaken, a little worrisome.
Worried indeed. I too feel that fear cracking open inside myself.
My beast rumbles to life, but I swallow that reckless feeling right back down.
Everything is fine.
Everything is fine.
Everything—
“Cersia?” A delicate, familiar voice says.
Her tone washes over my name like a river that’s worn down a stone for years. In this moment, she’s a gentle current of water caught up in a brooding deadly storm.
Because my sister is the kind one.
And she shouldn’t be here in the kingdom of hell.
“Nyra.” I turn in his arms until her heart-shaped face fills my vision. She’s there just behind the small table, and she’s looking at me with so much distress in her pretty brown eyes. She looks small here. Fragile. Breakable. “Why are you here?” I turn to the man I was so afraid of just seconds ago. “Why is she here?” I growl out.
“She is your gift, my lovely,” he says with a stabbing hint of viciousness. “Do you want to keep your gift?”
Oh no. No. No. No.
“Of course,” I whisper on the stiffest of words.
I have to kill this man. Right now.
I stagger out of his arms, and I’m practically stumbling to embrace my sweet sister—to shield her from the sights of the devilish man behind me. I pull her in hard against me until the golden curls of her hair tickle my nose, and still I hold her tight.
“Why are you here?” I breathe those words out on a breath of anxious terror.
“Please take a seat.” Prince Ravar is by her side in a flash of blurring dark colors. Then he pulls out the chair to the right.
And like an obedience-trained puppy, she takes a seat.
Right in front of the glass of poison.
The drilling of my heart is so apparent that a sheen of sweat sticks my hair to the edges of my face.
“What’s wrong?” the Prince asks as he holds my chair out for me as well.
Does he know?
It isn’t even a question. The question is, how much does he know?
“Nothing.” The smile plastered against my face isn’t charming at all. It’s tense and vomit-containing. It holds back all the sickly feelings turning in my stomach.
“Then sit down.” His smile is no longer carving. It’s gone entirely. Vicious rage is in his eyes, his posture, in the very stance he holds.
A blade not at all worthy of a dinner party lines the table on my left-hand side. It’s ornate with glittering black gemstones, and it curves up in a hard ark that’s intended to maim.
