I amnotall right. I feel like I’ve been bested on the battlefield of magic, forced to surrender something vital. What the bloody underworld is wrong with me? I barely know the shifter princess. Sure, I hate losing—who in their right mind enjoys it?—but Isla isn’t vital to meormy kingdom.
Except the Cauldron sent her here, so sheisimportant.
To my kingdom…not to me.
I’m torn from my whirring thoughts by the sight of Lev Zaslofsky fording through the crowd toward the Crow royals. The boy I impersonated yesterday gives Lorcan a deferential bow before taking Isla’s hand and carrying it up to his mouth.
“Want me to intervene?” Ilya asks.
I force my knuckles to unbend. I want to bark out ayes. But instead, I speak a low, “No.”
“Was it immediate?” Ilya asks.
“Was what immediate?”
“The mind link.”
At last, Isla’s violet stare finds mine across the sea of faces. Though my blood stirs, it isn’t with desire this time, it’s with dread, because her expression brims with…with reticence and regret.
I try to sense the mark of my bargain, but my heart’s thunder eclipses every other sensation. So I hunt her sheer sleeve for the gold band, blinking when I spot its faint glimmer. She hasn’t reneged our betrothal bargain.
Yet.
She hasn’t renegedyet.
When Lorcan untangles his arm from his daughter’s and starts in my direction, I send Ilya to assist her, preferring she walk on my brother’s arm than on Lev’s.
The instant he reaches me, Lorcan says, “I like you, Korol, and I trust you, which is why I’ll allow this?—”
My lungs snag on my ribs.Allow this. He’s allowing this.
“—but understand that if you anger my daughter, or worse, bring even a single tear to her eye, I will obliterate more than your reign.”
Isla is staying.
“Am I understood?”
I clear my throat, then test that a breath can squeeze through before attempting to pump words out. “Fallon stated her terms yesterday before departing.”
It had been so long since anyone had claimed a bargain that, when the mark appeared over my heart and released its venomous magic to seal her demands, it had momentarily put my lungs in a vise.
“I realize what an error that was.” At my frown, Lorcan adds, “Had we not said anything, you wouldn’t have tricked our daughter.”
“Technically, she?—”
“I was speaking of your little outing in Voshna, not of the—” He mutters the wordrusein Crow, enhancing it with a few colorful descriptors.
“I’d already planned on having your daughter followed. Fallon only sparked my curiosity.”
His eyebrows jolt beneath his black locks. “Why would you have my daughter?—”
“Because of the company she planned on keeping.” I don’t utter the boy’s name, merely stare Lev’s way, carrying Lorcan’s gaze to where the heir to the second largest fortune in Glace stands, staring at my future bride with such envy that my molars grind.
I’m suddenly raring to slide my ring on Isla’s finger, if only to sideline Lev and any other prospective admirers, of which she has too many. Glacin Faeries may still be chary of Crows, but Isla’s nature doesn’t seem to impede males and females alike from gazing upon her with far too much interest.
“I realize you appreciate his family, Ríhbiadh?—”
“Some members,” Lorcan cuts in, under his breath. His attention flocks off me to set on another male—Bohdan Zaslofsky. I take it he does not appreciate Lev’s father.
