I met his gaze.
“No matter how this ends, you’ll always be my Princess.”
Tears filled my eyes, and he swallowed deeply before nodding toward the rope.
I hated accepting our fate, but my heart broke over the anguish in his expression. And I had to trust him.
“Go on. It’s time for you to finish this.”
Lifting my chin, I swiped my cheeks and faced the obstacle in front of me as he stepped toward the other girls. Remembering what he’d said about using each rope, one of my cyphers had to be somewhere within the trees.
As Angela and Vivian reached Max, I grabbed the first rope and started climbing.
And I didn’t look back.
Every ounce of my attention was on getting through the course. I’d find the cyphers, solve my clues, and end this.
For him.
For us.
For good.
Max Dread
How I got stuck walking back with His Royal Highness, I had no idea.
He stayed silent mostly, though.
But eventually, he ran his mouth. “You never really understood what it meant, did you?”
I side-eyed him. “What what meant?”
“How many times you said no to my father that day.”
My body tensed at the reminder.
A memory I wanted to forget. I gritted my teeth, remembering how it felt to pick up the knife. Everything inside me screamed to say no, but I couldn’t.
It was my mother.
If Kingston didn’t get that, that was his problem. Not sure why he brought it up now, when it didn’t matter anyway. It hadn’t meant anything for either of us.
“Yeah, well, I still did what I did in the end.” I kicked the ground as we walked out of the trees. Sunlight glared off the eleventh obstacle, and I couldn’t see Quinn from here. “Fat load of good it did me anyway. Same as everything here. We’reall just puppets led by our strings, thinking we might just get somewhere, and ending up with nothing at all.”
“Nothing?”
His quizzical gaze annoyed me. “Not from where I’m sitting. Last at the table, remember?”
Kingston chuckled softly.
“What’s so funny about that?” I growled, my ears burning as my anger grew. “You made your point.”
When his eyebrows rose, I got the feeling I’d missed something.I hated that. Hated how he never just spit it out.
We walked in silence a few paces before he did.
“I’ve always known that as a D’Arthur, I would be King my senior year and oversee The Quest, which meant I would have to choose twelve Knights. And though they wouldn’t be ranked, I would assign each of them a seat.”
