“I don’t know. The wraith king said Malechus had something that belonged to him,” I say instead.
Technically… true. My father does believe the horn is his for the taking.
And Soraya’s been here for nearly three weeks, ingratiating herself within the court as per protocol. The wedding was announced far and wide, and two days later she was working her way inside the court.
“If you want to steal something, you send a thief.” Keir stretches his arm along the back of the chair, but he doesn’t force the magic. “Your sister is not a thief. You are. So why did he send her and not you?”
The thought occurred to me too.
“Maybe because he was too busy drowning me for my failure in cutting your heart from your chest” dies on the tip of my tongue.
I don’t share such secrets.
But it also doesn’t feel like the truth.
“Cauldron’s piss,” I whisper. He lied to me. My father looked me in the eye and lied. “Soraya wasn’t sent here to retrieve something. She was sent here to kill someone.”
“But who? You must be able to guess,” he says. “From all my information, it seems she infiltrated the lady Anissa’s household as her maid. Was the Lady Anissa her target? Was she trying to fool her the way you fooled me?”
“It won’t be Anissa. And,” I point out, “I tried to avoid you. I tried to give you every reason to pursue some other princess.” Even though avoiding him earned me nothing more than his interest. “I was there for a job. I didn’t want to mislead you—if you’d just accepted my rebuff, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”
It’s not the whole truth.
My heart is not mine to give. Without my soul, I’m my father’s puppet. I don’t even have the autonomy to allow myself to care.
And yet, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting him.
I couldn’t avoid the guilt that came with each lie I told him.
For the first time in my life, I yearned to be free to make my own choices. I’ve never been so envious of a fae princess in my life. The other potential brides might have been fools, but there was nothing standing in their way should Keir have looked at any of them.
Except, he was looking at me.
And I didn’t dare return the favor.
Something in Keir’s expression hardens. “You play an excellent part. Tell me…, does lying come so easily to you?”
“Yes. It does.” Learning to lie is the only thing that kept my head on my shoulders during my trials. And I can’t stop my eyebrows from rising. “You had twenty princesses kissing your boots. You were hardly lacking for female worshippers. Don’t tell me you bear a grudge because I didn’t wilt at your feet.”
“No grudge.” His voice roughens. “I just don’t like being lied to. Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart.”
“Oh, please. The only reason you decided I was the one you wanted to pursue is because I wasn’t kissing your boots. You had no personal interest in me.”
Keir’s finger circles the rim of his glass, and if he had a tail it would be lashing behind him. “Do you know the worst part of this entire debacle?”
“What?”
Our eyes meet.
“I would have married you,” he says coldly. “I would have taken you as my wife and I could have loved you. Forever. So thank you for revealing your true intentions before it was too late. Because it would have been the biggest mistake of my life.”
He drains his wine and pushes to his feet, turning to stir the hot coals in the fireplace with the poker.
“Take the room on the left, Zemira.” He strides toward the door. “I’m going to return to the ball.”
“The ball—?”
“You want me to be a distraction? Then I will be a distraction.” His smile as he reaches for the door handle is vicious. “After all, we’re both fae, are we not? Marriage is merely an alliance. Nothing more. Nobody will care whose bed I’m in. Yours… or someone else’s. I will be the best distraction you could have asked for.”
The door slams behind him, leaving me staring after him helplessly.
Someone else’s….
“Right,” I mutter under my breath, sitting on the edge of the mattress and then letting myself crash onto my back. “This is just a job. Find Soraya. Find the horn. Fuck them all.”
It’s so much easier now he knows the truth.
Now I don’t have to pretend.
It hurts the same though.
6
Keir would have married me.
I don’t know what to make of those words.
They torment my dreams, and when I wake in the morning, I find myself no better rested. I’ve spent hours being chased through the Court of Dreams by a rabid wolf, and every time I think I’ve escaped pursuit, I burst into a room and there it is again.
Waiting to devour me.
The sooner I find my sister and the horn, the better.
The first candidate on my list of suspects to question is Lady Anissa. Soraya pretended to be her lady’s maid. I don’t know what sort of deal she struck with the fae lady, but I do know Soraya prefers blackmail.
“Trust is a knife waiting for your back. I’d rather have a noose around their throats,” she once purred.
And yet Lady Anissa is clearly not Soraya’s target.
For one thing, she’s still alive.
For another, you don’t ingratiate yourself in the household when you’re planning to kill someone. You’d be the first suspect. No, you plant yourself in a household that will give you access to your target’s household.
So someone Anissa knows.
Soraya’s rooms are locked. I try the handle early the next morning before continuing on as though I’ve merely lost my way to the breakfast room. Also unusual, for she’s been replaced with a brownie that Lady Anissa spends half her days harassing, and it would be expected that the brownie would be given the rooms Soraya used.
But she hasn’t.
Which means I need to get inside to see what they’re
