A red line slips down her throat, but the blade stills as Jace waits for me to respond.
“Who told you?” I demand. Arienna squeezes my fingers, trying to pull me back, but I resist.
“Lower the knife and –” Deirdre cuts off as the blade cuts in.
“You have one minute.” A gracious offer.
“If you kill me, my mother will –”
“If you wish to waste that minute, then by all means continue. But there is nothing you can tell me that will spare your life. Give me a name and I’ll make it quick.”
“Richard!” Arienna tries to push forwards, but I hold her back. “He doesn’t mean that,” she says from behind me. “Just promise you won’t tell anyone Fa–”
“Stop talking,” I snap, steel in my voice. Deirdre flinches, cowering against the wall, rising up on her toes as she tries to get away. But her hands stay frozen and raised.
“Evangeline Sinclair,” she blurts. “She doesn’t know for certain, just suspects. The toothbrush is how she would have done it given you have a tester and any shampoo would’ve been too hard to quantify. She suspects it was Fabia.”
“Itwasn’tFabia,” Arienna says, and I can hear the panic in her voice.
I start to spin around, my heart racing.
“It was me!”
I press my hand to her mouth. The handle of my knife pushes against her lips. I hate the sight of the blade so close to her face, but I hate what she said more. If Evangeline has a scry in here, she just got the information she needed to force me to torture my queen. “Don’t say another word,” I beg her.
Her eyes widen as she nods. Kissing her on the forehead, I turn back to face Deirdre. “What exactly does Evangeline know?”
“Nothing. For certain, anyways,” she says, still up on her toes. “She wanted me to see what I could find out. But –” She swallows. “Neither of us have any plans to use this against you. We were all friends once,” she says, her words fractured with old pain.
A low tactic, trying to bring that up. “That was a long time ago,” I say, my anger for her growing. That friendship died as soon as Aurelia did. Deirdre had been betrothed to my sister at the time. Yet, instead of mourning her loss, she shrugged and carried on as ifnothinghad happened. I will never forgive her for that.
“We just wanted to know if you’ve finally regained your humanity,” Deirdre says.
I scoff.My humanity?
“Aurelia asked us to watch out for you.” Her voice softens, smothering my lungs under a pile of unwavering truth. “Roughly a week and a half before she died… from cancer, she told us to make sure you didn’t lose yourself like Seqora had.”
Pain hits me hard. My sister worried I would follow in the footsteps of madness? After thrusting everything on me, she didn’tbelievein me?
Arienna’s hand tightens on mine.
“You might not believe me, and frankly, Richard” –not ‘Your Majesty’, not what she’s been calling me these last twenty-odd years– “I don’t blame you. I was never a woman Aurelia could be proud of, and the gods knew we had our differences, but I swear to you, I loved her once. Not like you or Jace or Evangeline, but I loved her as much as I knew how.”
As much as this fucked up world allows.
Jace’s wings flicker, the tension in his shoulders radiating out.
“I kept that promise – the last one I ever made. Forher, Richard. You changed after she died, becoming more and more like Seqora –” She sucks in a breath as Jace presses the knife in closer.
His wings still. “He isnothinglike Seqora.”
She killed thousands of Vylian children in her madness. Then tens of thousands of our own people after creating explosive bees, claiming they were ‘necessary casualties’. She would’ve set the entire forest on fire if I hadn’t killed her first.
Deirdre swallows as she looks at Jace. “To you, maybe,” she says nervously. “But to us? To everyone else? He is the heartless king without mercy. The Demon of Raza.”
Arienna tries to push past me again. “You’re wrong,” she says, and my chest tightens over her unwarranted, ignorant support.“He’s not a monster.”
Aren’t I?
