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, barely choking the words out.
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 protector 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. I press her so hard against me I feel as though I could just absorb her in and shield her away from every terrible part of this realm.
“Why are you here?” I breathe those words out on a breath of anxious terror.
“He killed them. He killed mother,” she sobs and my heart shatters in my chest.
“Please take a seat.” Prince Ravar is by her side in a flash of blurring dark colors. With wide, glassy eyes I watch as he pulls out the chair from our table for two.
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.
“I brought you a gift from your disgusting Upper Realm. 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.
He knows.
He knows everything.
In the midst of my panic, Nyra lifts her glass to her pink lips with trembling hands.
My heart stops.
