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The liquid filled my stomach with warmth. I pulled my arcana inside me and felt it stir like a garden in the wind. The antidote spread through my body. It chased away the weakness that’d been overtaking me. Now that I could draw a proper breath again, I realized just how close I’d cut it.
The man looked down at me with raised brows and creases at the corners of his eyes. His long hair hung around us like a curtain, making the space between us small and intimate. My breath hitched when he pulled his bottom lip between his teeth.
“Princess?”
Yeah, he had to go and ruin it.
I straightened and pulled myself out of his embrace. He quickly snatched my arm to keep me from getting away. I glared at his touch, but he tilted his head, his gaze flicking to the bolt still in my chest.
Sucking in a deep breath, I grimaced. He reached behind me and gripped the bolt from the back. I grabbed at the front of his leather vest to tell him he couldn’t yank it out the way it went in. Before I could say anything, he snapped the bolt in half.
The recoil swept through my body like a wildfire across my nerves. I hissed, but it wasn’t the worst pain I’d endured before. Alvin’s hands had been far worse. This was nothing—and I hated that it was true.
The man gently pinched the pointed tip of the bolt between two fingers and slid it free of my body. That didn’t quite hurt as much. Now that it was no longer in my chest, I should have set about cleaning it up.
I couldn’t be bothered. My muscles had nothing left. My feet were heavy, and my eyelids sank, threatening to stay closed for the next eight hours.
My knees were still a little wobbly, but they managed to get me from the kitchen to my bedroom—fuck the couch, it was still laced with glass from the first time the window was shattered. I threw myself down onto the bed, yanked my quilt over myself and fell into a deep sleep.
3
RHOAN
Icouldn’t believe I was standing over the lost princess. I’d barely met the girl before the court fell. My memories of her were faded and faulty. Our paths never really crossed, so I had almost nothing to compare this woman to. She looked vaguely like the girl I remembered, but my memories were old and vague.
This was a woman, there was no mistaking that. There was no softness in her aside from her body—and most of that softness could be found in her chest. I wondered what had taken the softness from her. She seemed made of steel. Only someone with a tempered core could feasibly make their own poison antidote while actively dying.
It’d been impressive, but foolish. I took a seat in the corner of her bedroom and watched over her while she recovered.
This wasn’t at all how I expected any of this to go.
I’d imagined this moment for years. In my mind, a soft little blonde would show up on my doorstep with big, pleading eyes and a tremble in her lip. She would softly ask for my assistance, and I would get down on one knee to pledge my allegiance to her. I would follow the gentle little fae woman to hell and back to save our court.
This woman…wasn’t anything like I’d imagined. What happened to make her like this? She should have lived an easy life in the arms of a supernatural family. I knew that the queen, her mother, had her placed in another family’s crib like a changeling child, replacing the daughter that belonged to the family.
It was an old practice, not one traditionally observed anymore. However, the king and queen needed to protect their only heir. They gave her up so she would be safe and have a chance at a peaceful childhood.
Wherever they’d placed Cerridwen, it hadn’t been peaceful.
Even from here, I could see the scars on her fair skin. The ones that crossed her throat started a fire in my chest. Rage seethed inside me and turned my veins red-hot. I clenched and unclenched my fists to see if I couldn’t shake out some of this anger, but it lingered, growing hotter and hotter by the moment.
The ferret scrambled into the room, stopped, and rose onto his hind legs to peer up at the sleeping Cerridwen. The princess’s face twisted in disgust, even in her sleep. It almost made me laugh. If she only knew how much I deserved that look.
“Where was she?” I asked the ferret, clearly a guide sent to help her realize her destiny.
The ferret spread his paws wide in a gesture to indicate that he knew about as much as I did. I sighed and ran a hand over my face.
“I guess that tracks. For her to stay hidden, no one could know where she was. Still, I wish I could have found her long before this.” My anger still hadn’t banked, but I was good at hiding it from my voice.
“Whatever she endured, it will undoubtedly make her a good queen. No leader should be naïve to the ways of war. It seems that the home she was placed in helped her learn a number of harsh realities. It was for the best.” The ferret nodded.
I stood, snatched the little weasel up from the floor, and marched over to the nearby bedroom window. “That’s enough from you.”
After opening the window, I set the ferret down onto the narrow ledge outside and slammed the window shut in his face. No one needed to be treated so roughly that there were visible scars leftover—certainly not scars like the one on her throat. Someone had touched her with the intention to kill.
The ferret slammed his furry little fists against the outside of the glass. I flipped him the middle finger and went back to my post in the corner of the room. My mouth was dry, and I yearned for a glass of something hard, but I couldn’t leave yet. Not until she was awake.
At my post, I thought of Cerridwen’s friend, Vi. That woman hadn’t been normal. That aura could have made a midnight sky look like day. She was a powerhouse, for sure, and one of Cerridwen’s friends. Did Cerridwen have other friends with just as much power? We would need all the help we could get if we were going to overthrow Beryl once and for all.
