I thank him, and we walk up to the front door together. Before we even get the chance to knock on the door, Willa throws it open.
“Who is this?” she asks, looking at Marik. There’s a smile on her face, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
Shit. Maybe this was a bad idea. I glance at Marik, shooting him an apologetic look, but he’s not looking at me. He’s staring at Willa, his eyes wide, panicked.
Yes, this was a bad idea.
I gather all the bravado I have and say, “Willa! This is my boyfriend, Marik!”
“Prince Marik?” she says, her eyes wide.
“Well…Yes,” I say, once again reflecting on all the poor choices I’ve made in the course of my lifetime and realizing this was definitely one of them.
He holds out his hand and says, “It’s so nice to meet you. Mae’s told me so much about you.”
She raises an eyebrow, looking at him, but takes his hand. “I take it you had no idea you were meeting me today, either.”
He laughs and says, “No, you could say I’m just as surprised as you are.”
They both look at me, and I force a big smile on my face. “Surprise,” I say, elongating the word and holding up my hands to wiggle my fingers.
We make our way into the kitchen, Willa sitting us both down at the kitchen table set for three. The smell of freshly baked bread fills the kitchen, and my mouth salivates as I sit at the table, my back to the bay window overlooking the backyard.
“Well, Prince Marik, in my own home,” Willa says as she pulls the bread from the oven.
I grimace and say, “Yeah, I thought this would be a better idea.”
She hushes me, saying, “No, no. I’m thrilled. Just surprised. Does this mean you have something to tell me?” She looks down at my hand excitedly.
What is with everyone expecting me to get engaged so quickly? “No, not yet,” I say, but I smile to soften the news.
Her face falls at my answer anyways.
“My same reaction,” Marik says as he pulls me in for a side hug. I lean into it and return his smile.
After transferring the bread to a serving plate and three steaming scoops of baked chicken onto individual plates, Willa floats each plate to the table, which shocks me a bit. Growing up, she didn’t use her magic like that. I wonder at the power that lurks inside of her that she must have worked to hide from me as a child.
“So, Prince Marik, tell me about the Serpent House,” Willa says, sipping from her glass of wine.
“Marik is fine, please. There’s not much to know. It’s hot there,” he says with a shrug.
She nods slowly as if she’s thinking about what other boring, get-to-know-you questions she should ask next.
This is going to be great, I try to convince myself.
“So, you’re telling me that Mae punched him?” Marik asks, his jaw dropping as Willa tells him her favorite, albeit embarrassing, story of me punching one of my human neighbors when I was four years old.
“He threw up on me!” I exclaim. “It was my first reaction.”
“He didn’t mean to,” Willa says as she laughs.
“His mom never invited me back,” I mumble to Marik.
Willa dives into another story about how I tried to keep a rabbit as a pet when I was six, and I drift off, retreating into my thoughts.
Throughout dinner, all I could think about was how happy I was. I know that learning of my true lineage and right to the High Throne were shocking and have been a period of adjustment for me. But it’s starting to feel more comfortable and right.
Even though I feel this way, something else has been niggling at me throughout the night. Willa. I can’t stop thinking about her lineage and title. She’s technically a High Fae Princess and has a right to her court’s throne, yet that was all stolen from her. What would it feel like to grow up knowing I was in line to be High Queen one day and have it all ripped away to instead livethislife?
