Page 21 of Wicked Endeavors

“I would never hurt him,” Bas snarled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Marisol considered her options. She could kill him, here and now. It would be untidy and unsatisfying, but it would preserve her relationship with Gaspar. Then again, the prince would notice his absence. She’d have to kill him, too, and the entire plan would fall apart even faster.

An idea sparked to life. “Does he know what I’m talking about?”

“Leya…”

She pushed herself off the door, swaying closer to him. She didn’t need to reach for her daggers when her mind was the sharpest thing she owned. His lack of denial confirmed everything he hadn’t said, and she had to press her advantage before he snatched the upper hand.

“Did you tell your new best friend that the last royal family to take you in were murdered by their enemies in the night? That you’re the one who let them inside? That you sold out an entire country to the witches that Domingo so abhors?” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Does the prince know that this plan, the rise of the Trident, his assassination attempts, are all happening because of you?”

Bas grabbed her wrist. Her hand was inches from his dagger’s holster, and he’d moved so quickly that she hadn’t expected it. She flinched, but he wasn’t holding her tightly enough to hurt. She’d just underestimated his reflexes.

That would never happen again.

“What,” he growled, “do you want?”

Marisol tugged herself free, smiling sunnily up at him. “I’ll keep your secrets if you keep mine. You don’t know me.” She touched her forehead and brought her hand down, replacing her face with that of Lady Marisol Vinyet. The gesture was unnecessary for the magic to take hold, but she could never resist a bit of drama. “That shouldn’t be too hard for you, should it? At this point, it’s the truth.”

His dark eyes bored into hers, even as her body began to shift and fill out her dress. “What happened to you, Leya?”

The question made fury threaten to swallow her again, but she smothered it. Her voice, when it came, was steady. It was that of Marisol Vinyet. It was the beginning of his undoing, and he didn’t even know it yet.

She turned her back on him with a mirthless laugh. “I wonder the same thing about you. I’ll walk you back downstairs.”

Marisol remained pleasant until she and Gaspar waved goodbye to the boys from the front step with a promise to meet at the opening ball in Coventry. She considered telling her guardian the truth, but this close to the start of everything, she couldn’t imagine how he would react. Better to let him smile down at her with pride, to think she had passed the most important test before the Coronet began. Better to handle Bas on her own, until she could silence him permanently.

Still, she practiced with her daggers until her body was heavy with exhaustion, then took a long bath and fell into a dreamless sleep.

MARISOL ARRIVED IN ROJANEA THREE DAYS LATER TO find that rumors about her had already spread. People whispered about her relationship with the prince as though they were characters in a play. The servants who returned home from the dawn market carried unfiltered gossip into Wildridge Hall, the manor she had rented for the social season. Though she had a house here, it was in her name—her old name—and nowhere near as lavish as the places the other nobles were renting. Wildridge was another piece of her reputation, shielding her true home and Ofelia from the light.

At Marisol’s instruction, the servants who went out for lunch disseminated curated reports about her across the city. Whispers were useful. Whispers had legs. She wove the best ones into armor, and let people see what she wanted them to see in the Vinyet heir.

The Coronet began the evening of her arrival with an opening ball at the botanical gardens in the city center, and Marisol dressed to enhance the narrative. Over her chemise, she wore a deep plum brocade dress with a black lace collar. Silver embroidery crafted a delicate pattern that decorated her skirts and her puffed sleeves, which also ended in black lace. She’d rubbed plum lip stain onto her mouth and highlighted her cheeks with a crushed-berry blush.

With her tight curls tumbling down her back, she looked like nobility. A harmless porcelain doll.

“Well,” Teo said when he picked her up in the royal carriage, a gaudy, round thing with too much gold filigree. “Don’t you look dangerous?”

Marisol glanced down at herself before accepting the footman’s help inside. “Dangerous isn’t quite what I was going for.”

“Dangerous to me,” the prince clarified. “How am I supposed to keep my hands off you?”

Marisol giggled, a sound that she cut short seconds after the doors closed. Teo settled back into the cushioned seat across from her, a book in his hand and his thigh pressed against Bas’s. The latter nodded a silent greeting and then went back to staring through the narrow part in the curtain, as though the rays of the dying sun might rise to attack his precious prince.

Even now, she could feel it, this devastating draw toward Bas that could unmake all her plans. She had turned it over in her mind on the trip from Domingo to Coventry, how the heat that suffused her body when she saw him was not entirely hatred. There was a world where he might have been the natural path, the natural choice. Where he had never betrayed her, and they had both grown tall in Seaward Palace, their bodies changing and filling out, their eyes lingering on each other too long to be platonic.

There was a world where he was her first kiss, a simple yet world-shaking crush of lips in one of the castle’s hidden corners. Where Yoselin caught them holding hands in the courtyard, her eyebrows lifting as she crowed, “Well, finally!” Maybe they wouldn’t have fizzled out in a shower of dead sparks and youthful hormones. Maybe they would have been together even now, taking their first steps into adulthood with their hearts in each other’s hands.

Her body longed for a world that had never existed, in more ways than one.

That was all it was.

That was all it could be.

She turned to her own window before she spent the entire carriage ride staring at him. There would be time to search for weaknesses when he couldn’t see her. At least he was keeping her secret… for now.

The carriage rolled over a bridge and down an asphalt road that led to the massive iron gates of the Jardín Botánico, which were propped open to reveal multicolored garden paths, twinkling lights, and babbling fountains. By the time the carriage made it to the courtyard, Marisol was both awed and infuriated that such luxury could exist mere miles from where welks were begging for food on the streets. She couldn’t even hear the sounds of the city in this oasis, only faint music and the soft whisper of the nearby river.