Page 45 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

“Go to your chambers,” he murmurs. “If I see you again tonight…” His warning trails off, leaving me with the sinister gleam amid his eyes. “Go.”

He leaves me then.

Against the wall. Half-collapsed. The silk of my gown wrecked, the laces still tight, my wrist throbbing, the wet of him on my hip and my body still pulsating, ruined.

I don’t know how long I stand here.

It might be minutes. It might be an hour. The corridor is empty. The torch nearest me has guttered. Somewhere, distantly, a crow caws in the night as if nothing has happened, as if a king has not just unmade his bride against a corridor wall.

I slide down the stone slowly until I’m sitting on the floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, my face pressed into my forearm.

I refuse to shed even one tear.

The blade does not weep.

Oh.

Oh, goddess.

I remember with a start that Ren is still waiting for me. In the library, where he doesn’t know why I’ve been detained. I press my forehead harder against my forearm.

I can’t lie to him—but I can’t tell himeither. Not when I saw how close he came to putting glass through Aldric tonight. I circle a trembling hand around my wrist, already blooming with purple fingerprints. Then I touch my neck, panic rising that there are others I won’t be able to hide.

Somehow, I rise and square my shoulders, pulling the laces of my composure just as tight as my bodice. Walking in the opposite direction of Ren and the library.

Come morning, all the debris of the feast will be cleared away as if it never happened—and I can make it so, too. Let this piece of me die with the night of folly, be anew come first light, leaving my secrets to fade with the dark.

Chapter 14

Renick

It’s been four days since the feast, and I’ve seen Seravyn exactly twice. Both times in passing—once being led down a corridor by a cluster of seamstresses, once across the great hall flanked by courtiers, her face painted into that porcelain stillness she wears like armor. Both times she didn’t even look at me. Both times I told myself it was because she couldn’t, not because she wouldn’t.

I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

I’ve relived our kiss so many times, pulling at the delicate seams of it, trying to find a thread I missed. It was passionate and fervent and perfect—leaving me wanting more, needingallof her—but maybe I misread something.

She told me she’d come to me.

I’ll come to you, she said, her mouth still warm from mine in that alcove. She said it like a vow.Then the feast ended and the hours bled into dawn, and I sat in that dusty library until the candle guttered out.

And she never came.

I waited until the cold crept in through the high window and the dark turned gray. I told myself a hundred reasons she didn’t come. She got caught. She couldn’t get around Isolde.

But underneath all of them, a darker thought has been brewing. That she simply changed her mind. She came to her senses. She remembered what she is and what I am—a princess and a fool, a bride and a jest—and she decided the kiss was a mistake.

But here’s the thing: I’ve been a fool my whole life. I know how to live with it. What I don’t know how to live with is the not-knowing. This ache that’s curdled into something close to anger, this fear that I imagined what’s between us.

Now it’s three days until the wedding.

Three days until I stand in a crowd and watch Sera marry the vile man I came here to kill.

Anxiety is a dark pit in my chest. I have to see her. I don’t care what it costs me. I have to see her before they put a gold crown on her head and a ring on her finger and seal her into that monster’s bed forever.

So I go looking for the one person who might help me.

I find Isolde in the servants’ corridor behind the princess’s chambers, a basket of folded linens balanced on her hip. She sees me coming, and her whole body goestight, her eyes cutting down the hall in both directions before she grabs my sleeve and hauls me around a corner.