“Tatiana was a clever queen.” Amarantha’s nails scratch Davis’s scalp, he leans into it like a dog. “Too clever, perhaps. She hid things from the court. Things I’m only now discovering.”
My heart hammers against my ribs. I keep my face blank.
Tiana. She’s talking about Tiana.
“I want you to uncover them all.” She rises, crosses back to me, leans down until her lips brush my ear. Her breath is warm. Sweet. It makes my stomach clench.
“And kill them all.”
Her tongue traces the shell of my ear.
I don’t react. Don’t shudder. Don’t let my skin do what it wants to do, which is crawl off my bones and find somewhere else to be.
I’ve endured this before. Her hands on me. Her mouth on me. Her voice telling me I should be grateful while every cell in my body screamswrong-wrong-wrong.
I breathe. I count. I wait for it to be over.
It’s always over eventually.
“That implies the secrets breathe,” I say carefully.
“Some.” She doesn’t pull away. Instead, her teeth graze the shell of my ear, and I have to lock every muscle in my body to keep from recoiling. “Some secrets are documents. Alliances. Hidden treasures. But some secrets, cousin, are people. People Tatiana protected. People she hid from me.”
“You want the Summer Sword to eliminate the secrets of the Seelie Court?”
I word it carefully. So carefully. Every syllable precise.
“Yes.” She bites my ear hard enough to bruise, and I feel blood well up. “Why won’t you love me?”
The question slips out of her like she didn’t mean to ask it. Her voice cracks on the last word, actually cracks. Like she has emotions.
And that’s the thing about Amarantha. That’s always been the thing.
She’s not manipulating. She’s not playing games. She genuinely, honestly, sincerely does not understand why I haven’t learned to love her yet. She killed my parents, claimed me as property, spent thirty years touching me without permission, and she thinks that she’s been kind. That she saved me. That I should be grateful.
She’s not a villain who knows she’s evil.
She’s a villain who thinks she’s the hero of a love story.
That’s so much worse.
I say nothing.
Not because she doesn’t want an answer. She does. Desperately. She’s been waiting years for me to finally see what she sees, a queen who rescued a broken boy and gave him purpose.
But the truth would get me killed. And a lie would get me killed slower.
So I give her silence, and I watch her interpret it as cruelty, and I let her believe I’m the monster.
It’s safer that way.
“Kill all the secrets,” she says, stepping back. Her eyes have gone glassy. Distant. The crack in her armor sealing over like it was never there.
And that’s when I feel it.
The command settling into the binding. Taking root in my chest. Becoming law.
Kill all the secrets.
