A pit opened in my stomach.
“I’m just as cursed as you,” Edric said.
All of us stared at the king. None of this made sense. He hadn’t been sealed in a tower or bound by centuries of forgotten sleep. He hadn’t woken choking on loneliness in a cold, endless dark. He’d been here—alive and aware—walking these polished halls, eating banquets, erecting statues of himself while she suffered alone.
“You’ve been able to actually live this whole time,” I stated. “That’s not the same.”
The room stilled.
Edric’s jaw flexed. He ran his tongue slowly over his front teeth, scraping away the taste of being challenged. “Yes, I’ve lived. But not freely. My lifespan is unnaturally prolonged. I’ve watched everyone I love vanish. I’ve endured decades of solitude.”
I wanted to laugh. Or break something. Maybe both.
But Quinn spoke first. “You believe our experiences align?”
“No,” he said, his voice forcibly gentle. “But it was meant to be. We were meant to reunite. To resolve it together.”
Resolve it together?
I didn’t like the sound of this one bit.
I wanted to resolve his face with my fists. He looked at her as if she were nothing more than a cog in the machine of his ego.
Edric continued, voice steeped in a sorrow too refined to be real, “My mother ensured we were frozen…waiting. Neither of us could be free until?—”
He reached for her hand.
I nearly upended the table.
“The only way to end it,” he said, thumb brushing along the back of her fingers, “to break both of our curses, is to fulfill the spell’s original intention.” His smile deepened—desperately rehearsed. “To marry.”
My vision tunneled.
I was going to vomit.
Quinn stiffened, but she didn’t pull her hand away from him.
No. No, no, no.
“It will free you,” he went on. “And it will allow me to continue my bloodline. Together, we end the cycle. We forge the futures we have been denied for lifetimes.”
The king stood from his chair.
He dropped to one knee.
From inside his coat, he withdrew an obscenely large ring. A diamond the size of a quail egg flanked by two luminous opals. A bribe in the rough shape of a proposal.
He held it aloft. “Quinnie…”
I nearly snapped the leg off my chair.
“…make me the happiest man alive. We can end our suffering and start anew. I’ve waited centuries for this moment. Be my queen.”
Suppressing an audible scoff was difficult.
She wouldn’t.
She couldn’t.
