“You aren’t making it harder on me,” he says.
I rock forward. “Ha. Sure. I threw you from a sleigh. I almost let my brother see us… close. And now! All I wanted was to talk to you, andlook where I had us go.” I point at the starlit sky and the rolling hills of ivory and the cozy bookshelves and the pulsing light of a crackling fire like all of it is solely responsible for being so picturesque that we might as well be standing in a romance novel.
One edge of Hex’s lips lifts. Is he smiling?
I will not survive you smiling, so help me—
“Your palace lends itself to a certain atmosphere,” he says. “That’s hardly your fault.”
I point at him. “No. No. Don’t make light of this—you should be mad at me.”
“I should?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Why?”
He frowns. “That tonewillserve to get me angry with you. I’m not an idiot. Don’t speak to me as such.”
And he talks like a poet, a cadence in his words that’s half song.
It cracks my chest apart. Decides something for me that I hadn’t known was an option.
“It’s a lie,” I say.
Hex’s frown deepens. “That I’m not an idiot? Excuse me?”
“No! No.” I step closer. Too close for how I know I have to cap myself, but my hands are shaking and if I don’t say this now, I’ll combust. “Your presence here, this competition over Iris. It’s a lie. I’m set up to marry her regardless of what happens, which is a whole other story because neither of us wants it atall—that doesn’t matter, what matters is we’re moving forward with that alliance. You’re just here to appease Halloween—”
“I know.”
I go stiff. Bend towards him. “You… know? Know what, exactly?”
Hex steps around me, moving to the window, as far from the fire and other guests as he can get. He stops at the cold glass and folds his arms, gazing out at the tundra.
He looks back at me.
I stumble after him and steady against the window, facing him, but he stares out at the ice and snow and stars.
“I know this competition is fake,” he says to the glass. It fogs with his breath. “I am, as I said, not an idiot.”
“How—how? When?”
“All my life. My parents knew from an early age that I wouldn’t be an idiot—”
“Not that.” My voice drops. Normally, I would be losing my mind that he’s teasing me—but I need him to explain, now, I’m on the edge of one of those hills out there, seconds away from toppling end over end into a dark, icy expanse.
Hex’s jaw swells below his ear, and I’m caught on the knot of tension as he stays pointedly looking outside.
“After the Halloween envoys returned,” he says.
“That long?You’ve known for that long, and you still came here? Why?”
“A few hours after the conversation they had with your father, another message was sent over—astronger ultimatum,your father called it. He would push through the marriage between his son and the Easter Princess”—he doesn’t look at me, every word laid out carefully, every movement composed—“and Halloween would bekept in linewhile it happens.”
“What?” An electric current of shock zaps through me. “He—he threatened you?”
