“What’s that?” Amryssa said.
I swiveled to look at her. “A warning.”
“A warning?” She frowned. “Against what?”
“Against letting you marry that...thingdownstairs.”
She chewed at her bottom lip. Her aura had dulled even further in the last few minutes, as if the prince had tarnished her merely by existing. “I don’t see that I have much choice.”
“No. To hell with that. I won’t let it happen. I won’t let him touch you.”
“But...I thought he seemed kind enough. Didn’t he?” Her eyes glazed over, as if only half of her occupied this room withme. “I’ll just...lie back and close my eyes. Ask him to be gentle. I can endure gentle, I think.”
My heart burst apart like a dropped globe of glass. Here she was, barely able to face this sanitized ideal she’d dreamed up, when meanwhile, the truth would destroy her.
“Kyven’s not...what he seems.” After a moment’s hesitation, I offered Amryssa the letter. I hated to ambush her like this, but she needed to know the truth. “The prince isn’t what he pretends to be.”
She took the parchment, her gaze sharpening as she read. One snowy hand rose to circle her throat. “Oh my. This... No. This can’t be right.”
“It can. Eliana sent that letter. And you know she wouldn’t lie.”
Eliana—the articulate, well-bred woman who’d once served as Amryssa’s tutor, then as her stand-in mother, after Amryssa’s had died—had fled to the capital months ago to live with her sister. Before she’d gone, I’d begged her to unearth what she could about the prince, and so she had. She’d sent all the sordid details I could ever want, plus plenty more I didn’t.
“We should show this to my father.” Amryssa’s voice wobbled. “He can’t... He has to know about this.”
I bowed my head, wishing the letter had the power to make the seneschal relent, but I might as well have tried to hope the nightmares out of existence. “Am, he won’t listen. He agreed to this wedding months ago, for reasons that probably have nothing to do with you, and you know how he gets when he makes up his mind. What happens next is up to us.”
The letter trembled in her grip. “What’re you proposing, exactly?”
“A switch.” My answer came out strong. Unhesitating. “Just now, at breakfast, Kyven mistook me for you. All I have to donow is put on your wedding dress and marry him myself. After that, he’ll have no claim to you.”
She recoiled. “But marrying Kyven ismyduty. My fate.”
“It doesn’t have to be.” I stood and went to her. The ruddy sunbeams streaming through the windows seemed to check themselves before reaching her. She looked oddly lifeless, all shades of white and boiled-down gray.
Her brow creased. “But my father would stop you. At the wedding. He’d object.”
“Not if he isn’t there. You could ask for a private ceremony. Make it a condition of your cooperation.”
She paused. “He’d be furious, afterward.”
“Let me deal with that.”
“But you’d have ahusband.” Her words were a gossamer thread spun by pale lips, ready to snap. “You’d be tied to a brute.”
My smile hardened to stone.It’s nothing a good stabbing can’t cure. “Until one of us dies, yes.”
“No,” Amryssa breathed, but there was no force in it. Only misery and an awful, bare-faced longing.
My throat constricted. My poor, sweet friend—so soft, so very gentle. How I wished that, just once, she would rail against the injustices that colored her existence. I wanted her to scream. Hurl something fragile against the wallpaper just to watch it explode. I wanted her to march downstairs, shake her finger in Olivian’s face, and tell him she wouldn’t marry filth like Kyven if her life depended on it.
But she wouldn’t, of course. So I would do it for her.
“This is madness.” Her voice quavered. “Iknowmy father would see reason.”
For all of two seconds, I wavered, but despite Olivian’s tenuous grip on reality, he mostly behaved like an oak tree rooted in the earth. Once he made a decision, he pursued it, untilhe either bullied the world into changing shape or wore himself down to a nub. Usually the latter.
That was why we were still here, after all, in a dying territory that had lost its patron goddess years ago. Zephyrine had fallen asleep. Abandoned Oceansgate to rot and ruin and nightmares. Yet still we clung to this failing fiefdom, to this shell of a house, for one simple reason.
