Page 70 of The Poison Princess and the Lord of Misrule

“How long—” I can barely speak the words. “How long have you felt unwell?”

His beautiful features close off. He doesn’t answer, yet his silence says enough.

“Tell me,” I demand.

I watch him decide whether to lie to me. His hand comes up to cover mine where it rests over his stuttering heart, and his pale and dark eyes go soft and sorrowful and unbearably gentle when he says, “Since you started administering the poison.”

I shake my head, slowly, refusing to believe it.

He presses my hand harder to his chest, so I can feel it skip again. “I hoped I was wrong,” he says. “I hoped it was in my head.”

And the floor drops out from under the whole of my world.

I think back, noticing how Ren has been tired, how Ibelieved it was the strain we were both under. Yet I see it now, there’s a grayness to him, a thinning. His hands shake. And there’s a cough now—dry, small, tucked into his shoulder.

And I understand now. All of it. The poison that wouldn’t take root in Aldric. The wrongness stirring in the walls that I felt and couldn’t name.

The curse didn’t fail.

I bound it to my hatred, wove my loathing of the king into the wolfsbane and set it loose in his blood to unmake him.

But magick is fickle. It reads the truth of us, what’s buried in our hearts, the whole dark tangle.

And I realize now, I fear too late, that the curse I cast on Aldric has bound my hatred and my love together. As the king withers, so does Ren. My heart holds them both in some twisted form of love, and the magick has fused them.

This is the cost.Mycost.

“Oh, Ren. I’m so sorry.” I frame his face with my hands, and he lets me.

Something vast and terrible and just as consuming opens up between us.

At the root, in the deep soil where the Thorn Court’s magick draws from, they grow from the same stem. Love and hatred. The two great appetites. And I have poured both of them, in full, into these two men.

I have fused them. Me. I have bound the man I swore to kill to the man I’d die for, twined their fatestogether like two vines on the same trellis, so that the poison meant for one feeds on the other.

As I murder my enemy, I murder my love.

Every drop I’ve slipped into Aldric’s cup, every patient measure of death, I’ve been giving to Ren, too. With my own hands.

I have been killing him.

The realization comes up my throat like acid, and I press my forehead to his chest, listen to his faint heartbeat. Ren holds me close on legs that aren’t steady, and he lowers us to the floor, wrapping his arms around me.

“You understand what’s happening to me,” he finally says, voice low.

I can’t look at him. “It’s the curse,” I say honestly. “You're bound to him. As he dies, you—" The word won't come.

There’s a pause, then he questions, “Yet Aldric no longer withers?—”

His words break off, as if he realizes the truth the moment he speaks it.

I turn my head up to look at him then, furious with grief. “I don’t understand it wholly, but it’s as though…somehow, his lifeforce is syphoning off yours. I’m not sure if this means he’ll perish or not, but…”

Ren nods gently. “I will, regardless.”

As long as I keep feeding him the cursed poison.

Maybe even if I stop.