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It was just as I suspected—a bunch of shelves had fallen to the floor, tossing the fabrics they held in every which way, but the dressmaker was nowhere to be seen. I heard a jangle of golden bracelets slapping against one another before the tip of something sharp bit into my back.
“Don’t even think about trying anything, you filthy Cursed bitch,” the dressmaker hissed from behind me. “Or I will plunge this dagger straight into you.”
I felt my Water Curse bubble to the surface, ready at any moment to defend its keeper, but I wasn’t sure it would be necessary.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice steady, calm. I was not fearful of the dressmaker for a variety of reasons. The main one being that the dagger she held against my back was shaking so badly, I doubted she had the lady balls to go through with it. If she had chosen one of her pins to attack me with? That might have been a different story.
“You are tainting him!” she screamed at me, her voice frantic.
“What are you talking about? Tainting who?” I replied, keeping my voice controlled and steady like a stream of trickling water. The last thing I needed was to further escalate the situation.
“You are trying to spread your disease to the Golden Prince!” The dagger wobbled even more. At this rate, I wondered if it would fall out of her hands.
I knew people were passionate in their hatred for the Cursed. The message that we were diseased was rigorously pounded into their heads from the time of their birth to the time of their death. In their minds, we were no better than rats, and because of that misguided belief, I was not surprised that someone would take up arms against me. But something in my gut told me that this wasmorethan that.
And so the question stood, what was it? What else would drive the dressmaker to lure me into a trap and prick a blade into my back?
“I am not trying to do anything,” I offered softly. “Why don’t you put the dagger down and we can talk about this so that I can understand?”
“Yes, you are!” she yelled at me. “And you don’t need to understand anything.”
Perhaps I needed to try another route to reason with her. To her, I was just a Cursed mortal. Could I use that to my advantage to reason with her? I decided to try.
“I don’t think you’ve thought this through. If you kill me, how are you going to hide the evidence of what you’ve done? My housemaid knows I am with you. When I go missing, they will suspect it was you. There’s a good chance you will be implicated for my murder. Is killing me really worth rotting in a cell?”
I waited to see if she would take the bait—because of my divinity, she wouldn’t be able to kill me, but she didn’t need to know that.
She choked out a bitter laugh. “You are Cursed. You really believe they would tossmein a cell for killingyou?”
She had a point. But I wasn’t just Cursed though.
I was the woman the Golden Prince chose to spend his time with, and clearly, she had a problem with that, otherwise she wouldn’t be standing behind me with a blade in my back. Were her actions due to her devotion to the crown, or did they run deeper than that? Something was telling me it was the latter.
“I want you to walk towards the door over there,” she instructed venomously.
I glanced at the door on the far end of the room, unsure of what awaited us on the other side, and decided I’d prefer not to, which left me limited time to figure out how I was going to handle this.
The king and queen turned a blind eye to the fact that I was Cursed, something I had no doubt Aurelius had a hand in. But Aurelius wasn’t here right now, and I didn’t know how far his protection extended over me—especially considering what he wrote in his letter. If I were to do something, like defend myself with my Curse, that could have a very poor outcome for me, which meant I needed to be very careful about how I handled this.
“Move!” she yelled as she pressed the blade in, the tip chewing painfully into my flesh, gold bangles chattering.
I winced, but my mind remained transfixed on the sound of those tellinggoldbangles.
Gold.
Aurelius’s signature color.
Something he gifted to people who were important to him.
He had gifted the livery collar to Arkyn, the hair pin to me, and the bracelets . . .
I gasped. “He was your lover, wasn’t he?”
“He was,” she snarled, the sound guttural, pained. “Until you showed up. And now he has all but washed his hands of me.”
Well, that certainly explained a lot, especially her sour mood towards me. Why Aurelius thought it was a good idea to get his past lover to make his new lover’s dresses was beyond me. Clearly, it was a poor idea on his behalf. Did his immortality remove him so far from the humans that he did not realize they had feelings too? A large, unknown part of me said yes.
“Look, I’m sorry things went south between you two.” I really wasn’t. “Aurelius and I, there is a lot of history between us and—”
