Page 74 of Devoured

I clear my throat awkwardly. “It was Sin, actually. He removed the silver himself.”

“Lucky you.” Evie flicks the petal from her finger and watches it drift to the floor. Her voice hardens. “Speaking of your darling prince, did he mention that he promised me to a mindless brute, or was he too busy rescuing you?”

I wince. “Evie—”

“Look at this shit.” She reaches deep inside the pocket of her gray sweatpants and pulls out a wad of crumpled paper. Several wads of crumpled paper. I catch a glimpse of a crudely drawn heart encircling Evie’s name. “My future mate, Kaax, fancies himself a bard. A war-general poet. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That he’s very… in touch with his feelings?” Portia crosses her legs and sits up straighter, craning her neck to sneak a better peek at the pile. Evie unleashes a claw, however, slashing through the mess before we can read them.

“Evie, Evie, he wrote, made for me-me. Pretty Evie. Polite Evie. Perfect, perfect Evelyn Lee. You were made for me.” She gags audibly. “And that’s not even the worst of it. In this letter”—she impales a shredded blue-stained parchment on her claw—“he told me he had been dreaming for years of my clavicle. My goddamned clavicle. He even spelled it wrong, before comparing it to the sun. If I hadn’t already puked on the plane, I’d probably puke now.”

Portia shakes with silent laughter, and I try desperately to repress my own. “He sounds gentle?”

“No, no.” She carves through the letter, ripping it into tiny pieces. “In four of his letters, Kaax let me know that he would behead any man, woman, or child to keep me safe. He wrote, and I quote, It will not stain my conscience to spill their blood, for their carnage would paint the loveliest portrait of you, my future mate. In death only shall we part. Most of those words were spelled wrong too.”

“He’s Balam’s least favorite grandchild for a reason.” Portia stifles a rising giggle. “A very poor representative of the Guatemalan dukedom.”

“Well, now he’s in charge, and he’s supposed to mate me as soon as this one”—Evie points to me with a menacing claw—“is mated to Sin. Sealing all our terrible fates in one miserable fucking coffin.” As if unable to help herself, she lunges to her feet before tearing a handful of flowers from the wall nearest her. Portia grows five new buds the instant Evie hurls them to the floor. “Besides Kaax’s poetic bloodlust, he is also a man. They can’t keep promising me to men. Sin was an accident. I was always going to marry the firstborn child of Sybil no matter the gender or age or timing. But Kaax? Sin knows that I would rather have sex with a fork than a man.”

“I don’t know that I’d advise that,” Portia murmurs.

But Evie’s chest rises and falls in swift waves of uninhibited rage. I haven’t seen her this animated before. This flushed and restless.

And, of course, it’s Sin’s fault.

This is the truth of the world, of my world: Sin won’t stop breaking everything. Forcing Evie to wed a man against her will, even at his mother’s behest, is cruel.

Villainous.

I swallow hard, trying to find my voice when Evie stills. She runs a hand through her hair, inhales, then exhales slowly. When the breath ends, she resembles herself again. Stoic, cold, and unnervingly calm.

“It’s fine,” she monotones. “We just need to take care of Cora, her army, and her son before spring. We can’t allow the Mating Rites to happen, or we’ll be stuck here forever.” Evie turns toward me, and her red eyes darken.

I know what she’s going to say before it leaves her lips. I’ve always known, haven’t I? Sin can never atone for what he did. Our possibilities have never been limitless, and those moments in his bedroom—we were borrowing time, prolonging the inevitable.

Those moments were lies.

“We have to kill them,” Evie says emphatically. “All of them.” She stares at me, waiting for my small nod—my mouth is still too thick to speak—before glancing over her shoulder at Portia. “Are you with us, Montgomery?”

“Yes,” Portia says without hesitation. “I’m with you.”

According to Portia, Cora is hosting several different ambassadors this week, and she’s too busy playing hostess to care much about where Evie is—after all, Evie’s fate has already been sealed. To Cora, the threats within her court have been eliminated. The only thing left to do is strengthen her allegiances outside of it.

At least she hasn’t called on me again, and she won’t until Sin is gone.

I’m not a fool. I know Cora won’t ever be finished with me. She’s just going to be smarter about when and where she uses me.

“Why did she throw you in the dungeon?” Several hours later, Evie sits on the vanity chair, her ankles crossed and her spine ramrod straight. I never noticed before how little Evie moves. Only her eyes flit about the room, looking this way and that, tracking each and every movement like the perfectly trained werewolf she is. “Did she figure out you and I—”

“No. She thinks I was involved, but she doesn’t have proof.” Otherwise she would’ve done something worse. She would have killed someone I love. “She was just punishing me for disobeying her.”

Portia frowns. She sets the crown of ivy she’d been weaving only seconds ago on the floor. “That’s not what the court is saying. They’re saying you tried to attack Valja—that’s why Cora moved her to a safe location. We haven’t seen the princess since you were locked up.”

“What?” I grip the edge of the bed, able to finally grasp the blanket without excruciating pain. “No. Cora had me… She told me to…” I don’t know how to say it, or if I even want to. Neither of them witnessed what happened with the bishop. I don’t want them to look at me differently. But maybe I can tell them without saying too much. “Cora wanted me to torture Valja, but I refused.”

Evie tilts her head. “Why would she want you to do that?”

I shrug.