One word, one ring, one kiss, and then the coronation would commence.
The corners of Amarande’s lips quirked up. She imagined that from the audience it looked very much like the demure grin of a certain kind of princess.
But she was notthatprincess—the kind who would smile publicly and suffer privately, like the Dowager Queen, and likely her very own mother. No, that wasn’t who she was. She wouldn’t sit still, nor would she run away.
She was the princess who could do it, after all.
“I would rather die.”
As the words left her mouth, Amarande tossed the bouquet at the line of royal guards standing nearest the dais and the ringat the priest. The distraction gave her just enough time to draw the knife from her bodice. Renard’s features flashed in recognition and horror, but he was unarmed, too stunned to move, and had never been properly trained.
In the space of a breath, her blade sliced through the air, plunging into the soft spot under his ribs.
His heart and lungs, punctured in one fell swoop.
CHAPTER
52
RENARD’Seyes widened as Amarande withdrew the knife. He stuttered forward a step, hands blindly reaching out in shock before his knees gave out.
Though the lifeblood was red and raw and immediate, the truth of it took a full second to register.
Then chaos.
Royal guards rushed forth as the prince fell to the dais.
The Dowager Queen’s shrill voice smacked the rafters with all the right words: “Kill her! Kill her! My son!”
Amarande was immediately on the move, lunging after Taillefer, who’d spun for the crowd. She dove for his knees, tumbling off the raised dais and onto the fur-lined chapel floor, in the space between the platform and the first row of pews, where Inés and her men had been seconds before. The princess landed on top of Taillefer and tried to pin his arms, but they ran roughshod around his face and neck, doing all they could to avoid an assassin’s smile.
Though he’d left his chest exposed.
Two hands wrapped around her knife hilt, Amarande plunged the blade straight into the meat of his chest, eager to mark Taillefer with the same sort of evil slash he’d given Luca before he’d died.
But as the tip made contact, instead of cleaving his flesh, her blade hit something solid with a massive clang.
Steel.
A chest plate. Beneath his suit coat and tunic, Taillefer had been prepared.
The failed blow jerked the weapon from her grip, the knife slipping from her hands and clattering under the first pew.
Taillefer simply smiled at her. “I knew you could do it,” was all he said, and then he shoved her hard.
He rolled to freedom as she tried to right herself, at arm’s length from her knife, her fingertips swiping blindly for it. And just as she touched the familiar curve of steel, a massive hand hauled her back.
The guards of Pyrenee.
It was over. This was it. At least she would die as if she were in battle. The Warrior King’s daughter, ended in a way befitting her title.
That hand lifted her up, grasping the back of her bodice as if the guard were about to hang her on the wall. The stress of it all tightened the thing, and it became harder to breathe. She hastily swung bloodstained fingers over her shoulders and back, clawing at air, trying to make contact with the grip holding her. But the angle was all wrong.
The world turned before her, the torchlight bleeding into a halo. As she gulped in her final breaths, Amarande saw that the room had mostly emptied, the well-appointed crowd flooding through the exits. Behind her, motion, as men collected Renard.
“Kill her!” the Dowager Queen screeched as her guards pulled her through the foyer and into the safety of the night and her castle at large.
Amarande’s vision was failing as she struggled to breathe, the periphery falling into blackness. Someone bent beneath the bench, collecting her knife for his own. To sell it, surely. These people were all about gold, and the knife that murdered Renard at his own wedding would fetch a tidy profit.
