A slow, all-encompassing sort of anger began to warm her cold heart. “You’ll ship me off so you don’t have to worry aboutmy blood being on your hands, is that it?” She kicked her stool to the side and leaned against the bar. “How sweet. Howromantic.”
Each word that fell from her snarled lips was a poison dagger. “What happened towe could be a team, Elysia? We could work together?This is exactly why I didn’t tell you anything. You used to be sodifferent. Was I so busy hiding myself that I couldn’t see you? You’re just another domineering asshole who thinks he knows best, and I’ve had about enough of that for one lifetime.” Elysia stared at him, both furious and bewildered.
Her jaw set firmly. “Get fucked, Blatz, because I’m not going anywhere.”
Jessa moved from behind the bar, coming beside Elysia. One armed wrapped around Elysia’s shoulders, and the other gripped her trusty nail studded plank. “I think it’s time for you to go, Prince.”
Hands clenched, the crown prince bit back the anger holding his body prisoner. He turned to leave, but not without one more parting shot.
His full lips twisted with disgust. Spreading his arms out wide, he sounded as if he thought he were magnanimous. “Pathetic. You were willing to doanythingto hide behindmycrown. I understood that you just wanted safety. I wasn’t going to stand in your way. But this is unacceptable. This is childish and petty. You’re risking our kingdom’s future because I hurt your feelings?”
He encroached on her space, his vitriol increasing by the second.
“Get over it and grow up. You don’t matter. I don’t matter.” He straightened. “Nothing matters except fixing this.”
The Crown Prince of Kava left without another word. The bar door slammed shut, rattling all the foundational beams andswinging lanterns like it always did, but Elysia was in a daze. She slowly slid her gaze over to Jessa, her voice barely her own.
“Is he right? Should I just tell him what we know?”
Jessa looked at her like she was insane before quieting her face into a more even-keeled expression. She steered Elysia back onto her barstool and took a seat beside her. She shook her head before resting her chin in her hand.
“That piece of shit was just playing you, Elysia. Ten steps down the road he’s going to regret those words, but he’ll never have the emotional maturity to admit it.”
Elysia stared at her, unsure of what to think. “You were right about him being cursed.”
“Should have put money on it.” Jessa groused as she stood to go back behind the bar.
Back where she was comfortable, Jessa set down her plank and kept talking. “Telling him won’t do any good—he’s completely run by his emotions right now. He’d probably do something stupid, and it’s not like he can get to the realm of the dead to make a deal, anyway.”
“People do somehow—sounds like it could have been his father.”
Jessa crossed arms, considering this. “Suppose you’re right, but I don’t think Daddy is going to hand that secret over to him anytime soon.”
“True.” Elysia pushed her glass away from her, not wanting to drink anymore. She looked at the woman who had, against all odds, become something of a friend. “I hate that this is what’s become of us. He’s going to get himself killed.”
Jessa poured out a drink for a burly dock worker before answering. “You’ve gotta let it go. He’s a grown man, and we have our own mess to manage. You need to stay off the king’s shit list—especially if what the prince said is true. The king is even more dangerous than we already knew.”
Elysia nodded wordlessly. Jessa was right. She knew Jessa was right. Standing, she rapped lightly on the bar to snag her attention.
“I’m going to step outside.”
Outside, she watched the people of Spirit Street, not really seeing them, but just needing to let the biting wind sting her face. The sharp cold matched the pain cutting through her chest, and she found she didn’t mind it at all.
She should be at the House. Listening in and drawing out words from painted lips. But she’d walked out of Jessa’s bar with her insides torn up and trying not to cry. Try as she might, she couldn’t shake the image of the prince from her mind.
Looming over her, condescension and contempt ruining his beautiful face.
She had read stories of forest gods that lived for chaos and tricks while researching the god of the dead. Sometimes they were depicted with two faces. One light and one shadowed. She wondered if she was seeing his shadowed face now. Because she had fallen in love with a man so filled with kindness and curiosity it drove him to care for broken animals. A man built like a warrior but who preferred the contemplation it took to sit in silence with trees, who had a laugh so booming you could hear it from one end of the forest to the other. The person who stood in front of her today was still him, but a version she no longer recognized. As if the old him could only peek through the new him in moments and glances before it was overpowered.
The wind flung dirt and soot until Elysia was wiping her face. She wished she would have noticed he was fading. Or that he would have told her about his sister. He never did speak about her, always kept his grief and his love tight to his chest.
She swallowed hard, not allowing her tears to form. What she really wished was that either of them could have just been honest sooner. They were so similar—cursed to hide whilebowing and pretending. Stuck navigating families held together with threats and false affection, both terrified of trusting anyone besides themselves. And look where that had gotten them.
It could have been so different.But a second thought, a whisper-quiet thought, questioned this. Because maybe, no matter what she had done, he would have left her behind. Maybe the only person who really mattered to him died a long time ago, and he had simply become the world’s best pretender, fooling even himself into believing his lies.
It was too late for honesty to fix this. It had been too late since he left her to die on a beach.
But he was right about one thing. Kava deserved better.
