My father had refused to allow me to attend. Not that I’d wanted to, though apparently I missed quite the spectacle.
Luckily for Dwellen’s relationship with the kingdom of Naenden, his attempt on the young girl’s life had been thwarted by Queen Abra of Mystral. That, I wished I’d been there to see.
Perhaps my father was capable of true murder after all.
He hadn’t passed that trait onto me.
I’d gotten his nose, and that was about it.
He would have said he hadn’t passed along his intelligence or dignity to me either, that Jerad must have hoarded it all for himself.
Neither did he gift me his propensity for scheming.
Not that I didn’t think about things before they happened. It wasn’t as if I went into situations without knowing exactly what I planned to do.
It was just that rarely did I ever find a situation that turned out just as I had imagined it. There was always some unforeseeable variable (my father would have claimed there was no such thing), like Ellie Payne actually being an annoyingly admirable person, that required a change in the plan at the last minute.
So, yes. I had considered what I would do if Ellie refused to marry me. If she refused to take part in the Trials, and thus suffocated herself to death.
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.
