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“Honestly, do you really think I would—”
He raised a pointed eyebrow at me. I slumped.
“Yes, well, I suppose you know me better than that, don’t you?” I replied.
“You’re not so hard to figure out, Esmeralda. For better or worse, you simply follow the path that you think leads to a happy ending. Unfortunately, the world is too dark for that.”
His words shook my heart, breaking it a little more.
My back started to ache once again.
The doors of the throne room opened, and Luc stepped outside.
“Luc!” Jacques commanded, harsher than I had ever heard him speak before.
Luc froze, meeting his gaze. Jacques wagged two fingers to call him over. Luc hesitated until he saw me, concern matting his eyebrows across his face. He jogged over to me.
“Esmeralda,” Luc huffed out. “How did you—”
“She was your responsibility, Luc,” Jacques said, cutting him off. “I gave you a direct order. Because of your reckless behavior, she jumped from your room.”
“Fell,” I corrected.
“If I hadn’t been there, she could be dead,” Jacques continued. “Do you understand the weight of your actions?”
Luc took in the words for a moment, and all I could do was shamefully bite my lip. Before I could read the expression forming in Luc’s face, Jacques stepped between us.
“She’ll stay in my room from now on,” Jacques continued. “I can’t trust her to you any longer.”
I stood to touch Jacques’s arm. “That’s not—”
He turned to me and silenced me with a single glare.
“I will make sure you are protected properly until I can return you to your father,” he said. “My job is to keep both sides balanced.”
I tugged on his shirt. “I never agreed to this.”
“I never gave you the option to agree. I’m not leaving you with an unstable siren or a smitten pirate. You’re staying with me. End of discussion.”
He opened his mouth to continue, but the king’s voice echoed into the hallway.
“Jacques, I’d like to speak with you.”
Jacques looked between us and the door to the throne room, unable to decide who to answer. He shook a finger at me instead, pointing to the ground in order to tell me to stay put. He turned and went into the throne room before I could object.
“Is what he said true?” Luc asked, suddenly angry. “Did you actually jump? You could have died! If something happened to you, I would have never seen you again!”
“I was terrified of the same thing!”
His shoulders dropped, his wings seeming to flutter sadly. He dropped his eyes.
“You’re the only one who likes me without some bloody curse,” I continued. “You’re the one I trust the most out of everyone. What was I supposed to do if you were cursed again, hmm?”
His eyes met mine, the gaze in them full of grief and regret. “I didn’t think I was so important to you.”
I tried to form my words.
“You know,” I started, “I spent my entire life around businessmen who wanted a piece of my father’s fortune, and women who wanted to find a fault in our family to gossip about. Everything to those types of people becomes a power game. So I hid myself in my family and rarely made friends outside of them in fear that they would try to find fault in my family.”
