The plan had been to prop my feet up on the table as her own stubbornness squeezed the life out of her.

I just hadn’t expected her stubbornness to be so stinking cute.

Because it wasn’t stubbornness, not at all.

Mules were stubborn.

Ellie was tenacious.

I’d seen it sparking in her eyes, steeled in her expression, that unwillingness to yield.

It was so foreign to me, so unattainable. I couldn’t let it die—that iron will. Couldn’t let it burn and fizzle out, only to be seen again when the Fates decided they were done crafting new souls and decided it was time to recycle their Ellie pattern.

I didn’t want to wait that long.

Okay, none of that was actually true.

Ellie had stopped breathing. Those annoyingly adorable brown eyes of hers had gone wide with dread, and I’d been at her side in an instant.

There’d been no forethought. No current thought. Only ever afterthought, which was when I’d realized I’d made a horrible mistake by saving the life of the girl who would have been a whole lot more useful to me dead.

But what’s a male to do when a woman like Ellie Payne is dying, except to jump a table and convince her to breathe again?

I imagined most reasonable families would have labeled my saving Ellie’s life as “quick on my feet” or “thinking fast.”

But no, in the eyes of my father, everything I’d ever done was “rash.”

But rash and quick were just two sides of the same coin.

My father wasn’t the type to acknowledge that coins have two sides, though. After all, his face was only printed on one of them.

Maybe I’d let her die. The first trial typically involved a feat of sorts, one that would likely not have been planned with a human contestant in mind. It would be simple to make it look like an accident.

But then again, she’d probably just turn those wide, beautiful eyes on me and I’d find myself cradling her in my arms and tracing my thumb over the curve of her jaw and…

Great. Now I was fantasizing about saving her.

Already I could tell that the Trials were going to be a raging success.

When I finally arrived at Forcier’s, my mouth practically watering from the enticing scents of lemon and cinnamon wafting on the gentle breeze, I noticed that the cosmetics shop next door was barred up, a “For Lease” sign hanging in the window.

Strange. Madame LeFleur had leased the eye-catching purple storefront for decades, and from how Blaise scoffed at the hordes of women who frequented the shop (she especially loved to mock Imogen for it), I found it odd that she’d gone out of business.

But then someone opened the door to Forcier’s. The scent of freshly baked apple fritters collided with my nostrils, and all thoughts of Madame LeFleur were gone.

CHAPTER 16

ELLIE

It didn’t end up mattering that the prince had prevented my suffocation, because nothing could have prepared me for this.

The pair of servant guards led me to a metal door that closed off the entrance of the cold tunnel where we waited. All I could hear was the sound of my own labored breathing. That, and the rumble of what I assumed to be the crowd outside.

The cacophony of voices shook the ground under my feet, only amplifying my nerves. As if the tremblings from which I’d suffered all night had suddenly bled out of me and now reverberated into the stone floor.

A familiar voice cut through the low rumble of the crowd, and though I couldn’t distinguish any words, the voice itself was distinct enough. Especially since it needed only one word to send a wave of silence crashing over the crowd.

Out there, the King of Dwellen was addressing his people.

We listened to the few disconnected words that punctured the stone tunnel, and I found myself wishing that Evander and I could have been presented together. It wasn’t that together was my preferred state of being when it came to the prince; I didn’t exactly enjoy the prince’s company, or even tolerate it.

He might have saved me from suffocation, but he’d gone back right to being insufferable immediately afterward. The prince had made a point of getting under my skin. Knocking on my door in the middle of the night belting sardonic poetry would have done the job just fine, but the imbecile went as far as stealing food off my plate, and that I could not forgive.

But if he were here, at least I wouldn’t be able to hear shallow gasps that marked the panic in my breath. At least I’d have some rude comment to offend me, to take my mind off what lay ahead, rather than having to sit alone with my morbid thoughts.

I was going to die today; there seemed to be no question about that. At least not in the prince’s mind, or his mother’s. Whether the king expected me to live or not, I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t gotten the impression that he’d been lying that night, when he had sealed my Fate because he believed I might make a decent queen one day.

Unfortunately, becoming queen one day necessitated I outlive the king himself.

Which seemed improbable now that I had a moment of silence to really consider it.

Of course, he had never intended me to be queen. Why would that situation ever come up? If he hadn’t been brutally murdered in the last millennia, or however long the king had lived, why would he expect it to happen during the next sixty or so years of my mortal lifespan?

So why was he doing this? Surely he had nothing against me personally. All of his anger seemed to be directed at Evander.

I didn’t have time to answer those questions.

It occurred to me that I didn’t have time left for much of anything at all.

The king concluded his speech, and the chains on the stone door scraped and reeled, allowing the sun to slip onto the tunnel floors through the widening crack at the bottom of the door.

Once the door had lifted high enough, the sun singed my eyes, but it turned out I didn’t need them at the moment. The guards simply shoved at my back and pushed me into the arena.

How considerate of them.

The crowd went wild in a buzzing amalgamation of cheers and jeers. I couldn’t quite tell the ratio of those in favor of my survival compared to those who would rather get their money’s worth for the price of admittance by witnessing me torn to pieces by some rabid animal.

“Introducing the betrothed of the Prince of Dwellen,” the king announced amid the crowd’s screams.

“And now, my son, Evander Thornwall, the Prince of Dwellen himself.”

The crowd lost it, though again, I couldn’t tell whether the cheers outnumbered the booing. It wouldn’t exactly have surprised me if the crowd was eager for the possibility of the prince’s downfall. It wasn’t as if he was popular amongst the fae or the humans.

But he was devastatingly handsome, so there was that.

I searched for him through the blinding light and found a shadow across the arena, appearing from a doorway. It took a moment for my eyes to focus, but I knew it was him before I had the chance to make out his features.

No one else swaggered quite like that.