Page 78 of Split or Swallow

Everyone watched as she opened the letter. There were just three lines of thin black text, which she read out loud:

Temperance Verus,

The prince requests your presence at the castle this evening for a formal group dinner.

Kindly be ready at 8:00 p.m.

“What’s that?” Gabriel pointed at the back of the letter.

Tem turned the letter over. There, scrawled in messy red ink, were two additional words:

Torture me.

Leo’s voice ran immediately through her mind: Apparently I’m partial to torture.

Apparently Tem was too.

Gabriel plucked the letter from her fingers.

“Torture me?” he asked.

Tem sighed.

“Leo,” she said simply.

She wondered if the other girls had gotten a personalized addition to their letters. Somehow, she doubted it.

The last twenty four hours had been such a blur that Tem hadn’t had a chance to think about what she’d overheard in the foyer at the end of her date with the prince. But it all came back to her now. She remembered how Leo had argued with Maximus—how his father had chastised him for making the same mistakes of his past. Was Evelyn the mistake he was referring to? Tem knew nothing about her, but she knew she meant something to Leo. Could Evelyn be the cause of the rift between father and son?

Tem remembered something else from their conversation—something that made her blood run cold with resentment:

You are only doing this because you know it will anger me.

Maybe that’s part of the fun.

If Leo was only pursuing Tem to make his father angry, then he had no respect for her as a person. That was unacceptable to Tem. She was not a strategy; she would not allow herself to be used to further the prince’s agenda. It didn’t matter that it gave her an advantage in the competition. It also reduced her to a prop in Leo’s game. And Tem was far more than that. She was a catch, and she refused to be seen as anything but.

“So?” Gabriel was saying.

Tem blinked. “So what?”

“How are you going to torture him?”

“I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

“Tem,” her mother scolded. “You should be trying to impress him.”

“Torturing him is how I impress him, mother. You wouldn’t understand.”

Her mother shook her head. Gabriel, on the other hand, smiled wider.

“You know, if he’s into pain, you might consider—”

“Out!” her mother cried.

With one last rueful grin, Gabriel left.

Tem performed her chores on autopilot, thinking about the invitation. She wasn’t surprised there would be a group dinner tonight. There were nine girls left, which meant that they were in the second stage of the elimination process. The events would become more intimate from this point forward, to ensure each girl had as much time as possible with the prince. Tem wasn’t sure how she felt about having more time with Leo. Attending an event at the castle meant she wouldn’t be able to go to the caves tonight. The thought disappointed her; she wanted nothing more than to see Caspen.