The faerie steps closer. “Not that it’s a concern of yours anymore.” She leans over Beatrix and snatches her wrist. “Look.”
Her guts twist with fear. She can’t.
“Look.” A dangerous glint flares in the faerie’s eyes. Her grip tightens to the edge of pain.
Beatrix lowers her gaze to her wounded hand. Her heart lurches in her chest. The bleeding has stopped. The gash across her palm is gone, the only evidence it ever existed the sticky blood left behind, already drying. “But… how?”
“?‘And then you will keep on living,’?” the faerie says.
Beatrix wrenches her hand away. Her eyes well with tears she doesn’t want but can’t keep at bay. “Why are you doing this to me?”
The faerie shrugs. “I gave you a choice. This is what you chose.”
“You took everything from me!” Beatrix cries, all rage and desperation.
The faerie gives her a quizzical look. “Did I?”
The question is a slap in the face. William kept her daughter from her. William didn’t believe her. William threw her out.
He is just like the rest of Lancaut.
“I gave you what you asked for, Beatrix.” She sighs, heavy and dramatic. “But if you find you’ve changed your mind…”
Beatrix looks up sharply, her breath caught in her throat, hope caught in her heart. She could undo it, make it like it never happened.
The faerie flashes her a wicked grin. “Give me your soul, and I will let you die.”
All it would take is a single word. Her word. The only power Beatrix has over the faerie. A power she refuses to give up. She pulls herself to her feet and looks the faerie in the eye. “Never.”
“Haven’t you heard the saying, dear?” the faerie asks. “?‘Never say never.’?”
An urge deeper—darker—than mere stubbornness grips her. She hasn’t lost everything only to let the faerie win.
Maybe there is no winning. Maybe she is too headstrong for her own good, just like her mother said. But this is the only move Beatrix has in the faerie’s game. “I will never let you take anything else from me. I will never change my mind,” Beatrix says. “And you will never win.”
The faerie’s gaze hardens. “I suppose we’ll find out.”
She’s gone. Beatrix slumps to the ground, her courage vanished with the faerie, her heart thumping wildly in her chest, mocking her with its racing rhythm. Not the same as it was. Something else. Something different.
Beatrix doesn’t know how long she lies on the forest floor. The damp of fallen leaves seeps through her dress, and the cold of the night creeps into her limbs. She stares up at the star-scattered sky and vaguely wonders if she should pray to sleep or pray to wake. She doesn’t pray at all.
The words the faerie uttered to her, before she woke in her funeral clothes, in her funeral bed, whisper through her mind.You will live to regret this moment.
Beatrix thinks she understands. Thinks the heavy ache in her chest—to hold her daughter, to cradle her precious squirming form in her arms, to smell her sweet scent with every soft kiss she lays on her head—is regret. Thinks the longing in her bones—to undo the faerie’s promise, to choose her words more carefully, to make William understand—is regret. Thinks the urge to remake every decision in her life that has brought her to this moment is regret.
But it is only the beginning.
And then you will keep on living.
February 24, 1711Venice, Italy
Beatrix takes a shaky breath and blinks away her tears. She can’t read Oliver’s careful expression. He may as well be back behind his mask.
“I know how it sounds,” she says, a bitter edge to her voice. She knew better than to expect him to understand. And yet, foolishly, she had. Because he said he would believe her, and she trusted his word. Trusted him. A mistake she hasn’t made in centuries.
She should have kept the pain of that night buried. Should have insisted she wasn’t who Oliver thought she was. Should have left him standing bewildered on the bridge the moment he spoke her name. That, at least, she can still do. She pushes off the white stone railing and turns toward the manor.
Oliver’s voice cuts through the night. “When I met you in London, you had been there for a hundred years?”
