Corvin looks at me, unblinking. “Kael was certain. He had spent years unrolling scrolls, finding hidden translations to unravel the roots of this curse.”
I grip the rough wood of a bench just to stay upright, breathing through the sudden wave of nausea that threatens to purge my meager breakfast. “This is too much. It’s too?—”
Corvin’s gaze snaps past me to the glass panes above, to the drifting gray light, to the condensation shivering, as if the greenhouse itself has begun to listen.
“He desires you. That’s leverage. Use it,” he says. “I have to go.”
“What?” My grip tightens on the bench until my knuckles blanch. “You can’t just drop a theology of impossible tasks at my feet and leave!”
“There’s too much information to be tortured out of me, and the less we appear to know, the less threatened he’ll feel,” he throws over his shoulder, boots whispering over damp soil before he shoves past a trellis. “There’s no more I can do here.”
“He already knows what Kael tried to do, or he wouldn’t have gotten rid of the girl!” I hurry after him, half stumbling, skirts catching on a thorny branch. “How am I supposed to achieve any of this?”
“In the same manner you managed to seduce Death.” He reaches a portion of wall swallowed by ivy so thick it looks like a rotting curtain, digs his fingers in, and wrenches it aside. Behind it, a narrow door reveals itself, iron-banded and old. “Consult the scriptures if you must.”
“He was furious at my coronation.” My breath comes too fast, dragging dense warmth into my already exhausted lungs. “He was in my face last night, shouting and snarling, so it’s safe to say he hates me!”
“His hate is not your greatest hurdle,” he throws over his shoulder, voice rough with urgency as he fumbles a key ring from his belt. “Yours is.”
Those last words land in my stomach before I can even process them, my mind still stuck on wed, bed, crown, slit—on the absurd choreography of it. “My hate?”
He stutters a key into the old lock, letting the door grind open on age-old rust. “Love. You have to love him.”
Another sharp laugh scrapes out of me, more breath than sound. “Impossible.”
He squeezes himself through the gap. “Good luck, My Queen.”
“Corvin—”
The door howls shut.
The plant curtain draws.
I don’t move for a long moment. I simply stare at the trembling ivy, dumbfounded, the greenhouse humming with damp life struggling to survive. Water drips from a leaf. A thorn clings to my skirts. Somewhere above, a cloud darkens the already gray sky.
Something shifts at my core.
So this is what it takes…
Love aside, if I approach this sequence backward, it appears doable. I look down at my hands, calloused from shovel handles and grave dirt. Fuck, I’d love to drag a blade over Vale’s throat. Put this crown on his head? Be my guest. And bed him? I’ve done it once. Twice. Kind of. I can do it again. But how does one convince Death to become your husband?
My lips twitch into a smile.
No, not convince.
Demand.
Chapter
Five
Elara
Fog clings to the lower graveyard like a shroud, blanketing the servants’ grounds, so thick it beads on my lashes and turns the world into smudged silhouettes: crooked stones, stunted yews, a slanted fence. And the two men lifting out a grave in the distance.
It’s the hour between worlds—the gray, damp seam in time right after dawn breaks—where the silence is so heavy it feels like pressure against the eardrums. Any stiller, and I might as well be dead…
Sitting on the frost-damp grass, I watch the spades cut into the earth with practiced rhythm, dark soil piling into a mound. One man puffs white breath into the sky. The other wipes his brow, casting a pitying glance back at me, at the queen in the dirty dress who’s been sitting here a long while. How much stillness does that bastard need to finally show himself?
