“Better?” I asked, my voice a gravelly approximation of my human tone.
Laurent nodded, sweat soaking the fur around his face from the effort of transformation and the continuing pain of his injuries. “I’ll manage,” he growled.
Standing upright gave us a new perspective on our surroundings. The path ahead wound through a field of what looked like obsidian spears erupting from the ground, their tips disappearing into the low-hanging clouds above. Between them wandered figures. Souls, perhaps, or lesser demons. Their forms indistinct in the hazy red light.
“We find the lost souls,” I said, our plan solidifying in my mind. “Someone here must know of a way out. If not directly to the surface, then to where the Dark Lord keeps his prisoners. Mother and Father might be among them.”
“And if we find them?” Bastien asked, his transformed voice rougher and deeper than it had been in human form.
“Then we learn what they know about breaking curses,” I replied. “About the witch who did this to us. About why Isabeau’s blood is special enough to be the key to our imprisonment here.”
We stood in silence for a moment, three cursed princes in a hell of someone else’s making. My thoughts turned to Isabeau again, to the fading pulse of her life force along our bond. She was holding on, but barely. Whatever the Dark Lord and his witch had done to her was slowly killing her, using her life to sustain our immortal suffering.
“We should have told her sooner,” Laurent said quietly, giving voice to the guilt we all shared. “About there being three of us. She deserved to know whom she was loving.”
“She knows now,” Bastien replied, a bitter edge to his words. “For all the good it does any of us.”
“We couldn’t be in the castle together,” I reminded him of our stipulations. “One in the forest, one in the grove, and one in the castle. This is the most I’ve seen of you both in years.”
I closed my eyes briefly, remembering the look of realization on Isabeau’s face just before the ground opened beneath us. The shock, the hurt, the sudden understanding as she saw all three of us together for the first time. She hadn’t had a chance to process it, to decide if she could love three princes instead of the one beast she thought she’d given her heart to.
“When we return to her,” I said, putting all my conviction into the words, “we will have no more secrets. No more deception, even by omission or missing voices. She will know us, all of us, exactly as we are.”
“If we return,” Laurent corrected, ever the realist.
“When,” I insisted, unwilling to accept any other outcome. “We are sons of Charlotte and Henri, princes of the magical realm that bleed into the human one, and we will not die in this pit of despair while our mate suffers above. We will find a way out, we will break this curse, and we will reclaim what is ours.”
My brothers straightened at my words, something like hope flickering in their amber eyes for the first time since our arrival in this dimension. We were broken, battered, and trapped in a hell designed specifically for our torment, but we were still alive. Still together. And somewhere above us, Isabeau still drew breath, still carried our mark on her shoulder.
That would have to be enough. Enough to fuel our search, to drive us forward through whatever trials the Dark Lord placed in our path.
“For Isabeau,” Bastien growled, raising a clawed hand as if making a toast.
“For Isabeau,” Laurent and I echoed, the name itself a promise and a prayer.
With renewed purpose, if not renewed strength, we began our journey toward the field of obsidian spears and the souls that wandered among them. One step at a time, each bringing us closer to escape, closer to answers, closer to the woman who had unknowingly claimed three cursed princes as her own.
thirty-one
Isabeau
Cold. That’s what I became intimate with during my imprisonment. Not the casual chill that once made me pull a shawl tighter around my shoulders in the village, but a bone-deep, pervasive cold that became my constant companion in this stone coffin they called a dungeon. I watched my breath cloud before my cracked lips, proof I was still alive when everything else suggested otherwise.
How long had I been here? Days? Weeks? The changing seasons outside barely registered through the narrow slit that passed for a window, too high for me to reach, too small to offer escape. Just enough to taunt me with the knowledge that the world continued while I remained trapped, sustaining three cursed princes with my life force while I slowly withered away.
My eyes fluttered open to find darkness. I’d been unconscious. Again. My body’s way of preserving what little strength remained, I supposed. The damp stone beneath my cheek felt almost warm compared to the air around me. Winter had come in full force, turning the dungeon into an ice box that should have killed me weeks ago. Would have killed me, if death were still an option.
“Immortal,” I whispered, the word emerging as a rasp from my parched throat. “What a fucking joke.”
Immortality didn’t mean I couldn’t suffer. I felt every pang of hunger clawing at my hollow stomach. Every icy breath that filled my lungs with pain. Every muscle cramp from lying too long on unyielding stone. I just couldn’t escape through death’s merciful door.
I forced myself to sit up, ignoring the vertigo that made the cell swim around me and the weight of my wrist chains. My once-beautiful gown—the yellow and black dress I’d found in Queen Charlotte’s wardrobe—hung in tatters from my skeletal frame. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. The Dark Lord’s minions had brought food at first. Moldy bread, watery soup. Just enough to keep me conscious, aware of my suffering. Then they’d stopped coming altogether.
The hunger had been unbearable for what felt like weeks, until suddenly it wasn’t. My body had reached some impossible state where starvation became my baseline, my new normal. I still felt the gnawing emptiness, but distantly, like someone else’s pain described to me.
Light flickered through the window slit. The fading afternoon or early morning, I couldn’t tell anymore. Just enough illumination to see the frost crystals forming delicate patterns on the stone walls, beautiful in their cruelty. I watched my breath form clouds that drifted upward, dissipating before they reached the low ceiling of my cell.
In the early days—was it days or weeks or months ago?—I’d fought like a wildcat. Thrown myself against the iron bars until my shoulders bruised black and purple. Screamed until my throat bled and my voice gave out. Clawed at the mortar between stones until my fingernails broke and my fingertips wept red tears onto the floor.
