Not that I cared.

Still, he wasn’t exactly placing great care into the kind of signals he was putting off. And even though I wasn’t under the impression the prince felt any romantic interest regarding me, that didn’t mean I couldn’t have gotten that impression from his actions this evening.

Then again, he had been kind to me about my glassblowing dream when he could have just as easily mocked it. Perhaps I should return the favor.

“Tell me about her, then,” I said, almost having to force the slimy words out of my throat.

Apparently, the effort was obvious, because he shot me a suspicious look. “You don’t really want to know.”

I sighed. “Alright. You got me. I don’t. But…” I said, lingering on that word, “that lobster might have been the highlight of a terrible week, so if you would like to talk about her, then I will, you know, listen. And then promptly scrub my ears out.”

“A true friend,” he mused.

“Oh, is that what we are?”

“I could keep calling you my dearly betrothed, if that’s what you want.”

“Friend is fine, thanks.”

“I thought so. Anyway, back to my story.”

“Gladly.”

“When my father announced we’d be hosting the ball, I planned to dance the night away with the help and refuse to pick a bride by the end. But when I arrived, there she was, standing under a chandelier, sparkling in that blue dress of hers…”

I thought back to the dress I had worn my first night at the castle, the one the prince had requested the tailor make for his mystery woman.

“And I knew I had to talk to her. There was something…” He grinned sheepishly. “You’re going to tease me if I tell you.”

“I’ll probably tease you either way, honestly.”

“It was as if I’d known her my whole life. And when she looked at me—her eyes, I’m telling you, Ellie, I must have seen those eyes in my dreams, they were so familiar.”

“Are you saying this girl is your fated mate or something?” I asked. It was a superstition my father had told me was held by many fae—one that, in my opinion, did more harm than good; it tended to excuse a male’s possessive behavior in the name of some ancient, unbreakable bond.

I expected an “of course not.” Instead, he shrugged, and I watched his jaw work. “I don’t know. Maybe. I never believed in that sort of thing until…” He swallowed. “But I asked her for that first dance. And then the second.”

“And then all the rest, yeah, I heard,” I said.

“And that was it. She stole my heart.”

“Just like my shoes.”

He frowned. “I’m sure she had her reasons. Perhaps she’s poor and wasn’t able to buy clothing for the ball.”

I quirked a brow, slicing a stalk of asparagus in half with my fork. “And that excuses the fact that she stole from me?”

“No. Of course not. It’s just—”

“It’s just that you can excuse it, because you never would have danced with her in the first place if you had known she was poor?”

He groaned and pressed his thumb against his forehead. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

My heart faltered with guilt. Evander wasn’t exactly the model of what I wanted in my future husband. But he had been kind to me today about my fear of heights. He’d even helped me, when he could have easily let the fae bargain do its work, making his problems disappear as quickly as it would have taken me to suffocate. “I’m sorry. I’m just a little bitter about it. That’s all. She’s the one who got me into this situation to begin with.”

“Yes, and what a torturous situation it is,” he said, scraping his empty plate with his tiny lobster fork.

“Yes. Actually. Having to dangle over a pit of myrmecoleon kind of does count as torture.”

“That’s not what you meant, though. You meant having to marry me.” His bright eyes blazed, reminding me of a puppy that had just gotten into a freshly baked wedding cake and was now relying on adorableness to win its owner back over.

I coughed, not entirely unaffected by the annoying puppy eyes. “That’s not fair. You don’t want to marry me either.”

“That’s different,” he said. “I don’t want to marry you because I’m in love with someone else. You don’t want to marry me because you think I’m an idiot.”

I opened my mouth, trying to come up with a way for that not to be the truth.

I came up empty.

We sat in silence for a moment until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “There had to be something else, though. I mean, I’m sure you’ve danced with plenty of beautiful women. There had to be something else that was special about her that made you want to bargain your life away.”

“And there I was, beginning to believe you thought me shallow.”

“I do,” I said, carefully considering my next words. “But probably not when it comes to making serious decisions. Like who you want to spend the rest of your life with. Or, you know, the rest of her life, in the case with a human.”

He sighed, wincing at the reminder of the girl’s mortality. “She just… Well, she understood. All my life, I’ve been treated as an afterthought. As a backup plan to my brother. That’s what’s always been expected of me, and I was content with that role. But then… Then he…” Evander shook his head, as if to dislodge a memory. “And now, instead of ignoring me and pretending I don’t exist like he always has, my father can’t seem to stop criticizing me for how I turned out. For how he always expected me to turn out. I understand why he hates me. It was my fault, my fault that…” He paused, his mouth hanging open, as if the words had simply run out. As if there were none that existed that could explain what had happened. What it had done to him.

I remembered reading the article. How Prince Jerad, the heir to the throne, had died in an accident. An accident involving a stunt that his younger brother had roped him into.

He shook his head, as if to expel the memory. “She just understood, that’s all. We talked, and she understood. All my life, the people who should have seen me, should have noticed the pain. What it was like to grow up unloved, unwanted by my father. The pain I must have gone through when my brother died… No one close to me saw it. Not even my mother. And now the entire kingdom acts as if it’s my fault that I’m the lesser choice for an heir. Believe me, I know that. But no one stops and asks why I was never put in the same classes as Jerad. Why my father never invited me to his study to explain the ins and outs of ruling a kingdom. Why I was left to my own devices. She understood. She saw me. She didn’t tell me what an honor it was to become the heir of Dwellen, she didn’t ask me why I didn’t…. or what my plans were, she asked me…”

“How you were coping with your brother’s death,” I said.

He nodded, covering his eyes with his fists, causing his forehead to bunch. “I wept every night and every morning for months after it happened. That night, not once did she treat me like the heir to the throne. She just treated me like I was someone who had caused the accidental death of his best friend.”

Something knotted in my chest. The way the papers had covered the death of Prince Jerad, one would have thought he and Evander had been childhood rivals.

That was clearly not the case.

Somehow, my hands found his shoulder blade, my fingers pressing into the curve of a knot that had formed in the muscle. He tensed at my touch, but I might have imagined it because he immediately lifted his face from his hands and grinned.

“Look at you, always finding an excuse to touch me.”

CHAPTER 22

EVANDER

Since waltzing into my life, Ellie Payne had laid waste to quite a few of my plans.