“I have to do it now?”
His only answer was a pointed look.
Shoulders slumped, she dragged her feet down the hall in the direction of the queen’s chambers. Linette had separate quarters from the king. Cora was rehearsing a stiff apology when her feet stopped moving of their own accord. A dark and hollow feeling formed in the pit of her stomach. She took another few steps but the sense of wrongness increased, prickling the hair on her arms—
“Your Highness.”
She startled at the voice and found the queen’s youngest maid brushing by, arms laden with a serving tray bearing tea and cookies. The girl was about Cora’s age. “Where are you taking that?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer.
The maid paused and blushed, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Queen Linette, Your Highness.”
Cora walked up to her and extended her hands toward the tray. “I’ll take it.”
“But…but it’s what I’m supposed to do.” The maid stepped back, expression struck with something between terror and indignation. “A princess cannot carry a tray.”
Cora cut the girl a glare, but she only blinked back at her. With a grumbling sigh, Cora unclasped a bracelet—one of many cumbersome, shiny baubles she was forced to wear—from around her wrist and held it out to the girl. “Payment.”
“I…I can’t take that.”
“You can and you will. That’s an order. Now take it and go. I need toapologize to the queen.” She said the last part with a hefty dose of mockery.
The maid seemed too stunned to do anything but obey, her hands trembling as she passed the tray to Cora and accepted the bracelet in return. A flash of greed lit the girl’s eyes once her fingers curled fully around the item. Then, with a vibrant smile, she curtsied and darted down the opposite end of the hall.
With a proper offer of apology in hand, Cora continued to the queen’s rooms. Only then did she recall the eerie feeling that had first halted her progress. It crept into her bones once more, echoed through her blood. Shadows darkened the glow of lamplight lining the corridor. Sound became hollow as the halls emptied, dimmed, and closed in tight around her.
Cora remembered she was dreaming. With that realization came a reminder of everything she knew was coming. She struggled against her dream-self, tried to force her feet to stop. But the small version of her continued on, step after step, even as her terror grew.
Her next step brought her to the door.
The bedroom.
The blood.
Duke Morkai whirled to face her. With a devious grin, he lifted the queen’s blood from the sheets. It rose to meet his palm in thin red ribbons that he played like the strings of a lute.
Cora dropped the tray.
Her scream jolted her awake.
* * *
She blinked into dim light,found something soft against her cheek. The next thing she noticed was a rocking motion. She lifted her head, saw a shaft of pale sunlight peeking between a velvet curtain and a small window. Was it already sunrise? Another turn of her head revealed a door, leather-covered walls, and a seat beneath her draped with furs. She was in a coach. That explained the constant rocking. Perhaps that had been what had woken her. Not her scream but the jostling of the carriage.
She pushed herself to sit upright, surprised to find her hands unbound. Someone sat across from her, their upper body cast in shadow, but Cora didn’t bother waiting for her eyes to adjust. Instead, she lunged for the door—
The bottom of a black cane smacked into the door, an inch from where her hand had been. She reeled back as the figure leaned forward. She wasn’t surprised when Morkai’s face was illuminated beneath the shaft of sunlight. He watched her with his silver-blue eyes, his lips lifted in an arrogant smile. “You’ll find every exit locked, Aveline. Or should I call you Cora? It seems that’s the name you gave the prince.”
Cora’s blood boiled at his mention of Teryn. It didn’t matter that he’d seemed shocked when Morkai had mentioned her true name, nor did she care about the regret that had clouded his energy when their eyes met. What mattered was that he’d betrayed her. That he did nothing when Morkai’s guards surrounded her. One of them had pressed a cloth to her mouth, filling her nose with an acrid scent. It was the last thing she recalled.
Her head spun. She resisted the urge to press a palm to her forehead and instead burned Morkai with a glare. “You made a mistake in locking yourself in here with me unbound.”
He scoffed, eyes falling to the ink marking her forearms. “You’re no threat to me. That’s why you’re unbound.”
She assessed his relaxed posture, the way he sat with one leg crossed over the other, his crystal-topped cane resting in his lap. One hand stroked one of the crystal’s facets while his other arm was draped over the back of his seat. He was the epitome of overconfidence. Everything about him was exactly as she remembered. His voice, his smug grin, the color of his eyes, his…face.
That was when she realized he hadn’t aged a day. She remembered him looking ancient in her eyes six years ago, the same way all adults looked old to a child, but that didn’t explain why he looked barely five years her senior now.
“How have you not aged?”
