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1
This has been the longest week I’ve served at the castle. Too much on my mind weighing me down. No matter how much I mull it all over, I can’t make sense of any of it—I can’t put them in order of how important or dangerous each of my troubles are.
The swell of my belly is caused by much more than overeating
The prince doesn’t know I’m pregnant
Prince Daein might kill me to destroy the child inside of me
Elden is working with the iilra to remove me from these lands—and Daein
If I’m taken away from Daein, my sickness will return and I might die before I can birth this halfling child
And I’m beginning to suspect that I might never make it home.Ever.
The mess brings a dull ache to my temples, so the prince has stolen me away to his washtub. I lean back against his chest, his chin resting on the crown of my head.
Bringing my fingers to my temples, I rub in small circles and let my eyelashes flutter shut. “It’s not working,” I groan, leaning back against the prince’s marble-hard chest. “You said the water would help.”
He is silent for a heartbeat that I feel against my spine.
Water is disturbed at my sides as the prince lifts his hands to mine. He guides my hands away before he presses his fingers to my temples. The pressure is firm and wet.
“Let it work,” he tells me, his voice low and tired—relaxed.
It chills me that he sounds so at peace with me in this quiet moment we share, thisintimatebubble he has built all around us this Warmth, and goosebumps erupt all over my flesh.
But the prince is right, and soon, the ache in my temples is soothed by the warmth of the soapy water pressed against them.
I loosen a tranquil sigh and slump against his chest. “It’s working,” I murmur.
He starts to massage my temples. “When will you learn that I am never wrong?” he replies coolly, though there’s a dark smirk to his tone that I pick up on.
My voice is soft as I run my fingertips over the popping bubbles that shield our bodies; “Never?”
He echoes gently, “Never.”
His fingers drift away from my temples, down the curve of my jawline to meet in the middle at my mouth. Gently, he drags down my lower lip before he lets his hands leave my face, sink underwater and wrap around me. He holds me to him, disturbing the soapy water.
“I think you are wrong,” I confess, my voice a whisper. “Sometimes.”
He reaches up for my chin and lifts it, forcing my head back to align our faces. His glass blue eyes consider me, no malice buried behind them, only curiosity.
“What is it you want?” He reads me too well.
My mouth flattens into a grim line.
In answer, he ghosts a chaste kiss over my damp forehead.
I cut to the chase. “I want you to free Terry.”
The prince’s grip on my chin tightens. His lashes lower over his hard eyes.
“You want to give me fabrics and soaps and perfumes, keep me fed and have me all the time, even when our bargain was only for the Quiet,” I tell him, and it’s the first time I’ve complained about that or mentioned it at all—that he has me outside of the Quiet now and more often than he gives me the white powder. “But you don’t ask me whatIwant.”
“I just did.”
“Not really,” I say with a grim smile aimed up at him. “You mean little gifts or maybe another dress or even a trip out of the castle. You don’t mean what I truly want.”
