“What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?”
Grump didn’t answer. He strode toward us, each step heavy with barely contained rage. His fists were clenched so tight his knuckles had gone white. The veins in his neck pulsed. And his eyes?—
His eyes looked like he wanted to tear me apart.
“That,” he said, his voice low and shaking, “is my father’s.”
The words landed like an accusation. Like a death sentence.
And then, from somewhere behind me—soft, ancient, unmistakable—the bow sang.
I’m yours.
Grump heard it too. I saw it in the way his face shattered—just for a moment—before fury stitched it back together.
“What magic did you use on that, witch?”
There it was. Witch. Not Fate. Not even Alice. Just the thing he didn’t trust. A mistake waiting to happen.
This was just as bad as the coven.
But I was so tired of shrinking.
I gritted my teeth and lifted my chin. “I didn’t use any magic. It called to me. That’s what Darius said the weapon was supposed to do.”
“No one has been able to lift that bow alone,” Grump said. “It took three of us to move it into the armory. Pick it up.”
Part of me wanted to refuse. To walk away and let him have his precious weapon.
But something pulled at me. The bow wanted me.
I clasped the handle and lifted it off the ground. Light as a feather.
“Happy?”
He snagged the bow out of my hand before I could react.
For a split second, triumph flashed across his face.See? It’s mine. It was always meant to be mine.
Then the bow betrayed him.
It wrenched him backward with brutal force. His feet left the ground, and he slammed onto his back, the bow pinning his arm to the stone floor like it wanted to crush him. A strangled sound escaped his throat—rage and disbelief and something rawer underneath.
Pain. The kind that had nothing to do with his body.
Darius locked his eyes with Grump. “It picked her. You can argue until the harpies become our friends, but your father’s bow picked her.”
Grump lay there, chest heaving, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. For a moment, he looked less like a hardened rebel leader and more like a son who’d just been rejected by his own father’s ghost.
Then his face twisted.
“That’s not possible.” He wrenched his arm free and staggered to his feet, snarling. “It should have picked me. I’m the firstborn. I’m the heir to the throne.”
Jealousy?
That was a new one. No one had ever been jealous of me. I was the unstable witch. The liability. The one Tinker Bell had to make excuses for. And now Grump—the firstborn prince, the man who bent for no one—was looking at me like I’d stolen something precious from him.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or run.
