It made it that much easier to plunge the knife into Ellie Payne’s stomach.

CHAPTER 31

ELLIE

Something was wrong.

I woke to a gasp escaping my lips, to a hazy awareness that I hadn’t woken from a nightmare or bodily needs or even anxieties, but from something else.

Someone else.

I opened my eyes and promptly screamed.

The shadow over my bed was a woman’s and, in a moment of unclarity, I thought she must be the messenger of death. Her pale white skin and hair were so fair they almost blended into the moonlight coming from my window. And in her hands was a knife, glinting in that same light. Dripping from the knife was a dark, scarlet substance. Blood.

My blood.

The sound that clawed through my throat was not my voice, but something more primal. An ancient survival instinct. Another being, who had resided in the back of my mind all this time, who had never alerted me that I was sharing my body with someone else.

That was the being who screamed.

I knew, because in that moment I couldn’t move.

“You weren’t supposed to wake up,” the woman hissed in a voice dripping with such hatred I no longer wondered if I would die. It was only a matter of who would find my body first.

But then the woman fled, and the scrape of a key turning in a lock sounded behind her as she slammed my door.

She had locked me in.

That was when I remembered the blood.

The shock that had kept my limbs immobile dissipated, and I grasped at my belly. Something hot and sticky and wet soaked my fingertips. My breath tightened.

My blood.

That knife had been dripping with my blood.

I screamed again, this time intentionally. “Help me! Please, someone help me!”

I searched my body for pain, for any other indication besides the blood for how severely I’d been injured, but my mind must have erased the pain.

It knew I just needed to survive.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside. “Lady Payne?” I didn’t recognize the voice and assumed it must have been a guard. “Lady Payne?”

“Yes! Please, I’ve been stabbed!” I gasped.

Voices murmured in the hallway outside as the doorknob creaked and rattled. They were locked out. The woman had locked me in here, and the guards didn’t have a key.

I scrambled for the one tucked under my pillow, but my fingers were slick with blood, and in my haste, I knocked it off the side of the bed.

Another voice, this one familiar, yelled, “Get Blaise! No. Get Imogen. Imogen, the lady’s maid. She’ll have a key.”

The clock struck midnight.

Footsteps again. The guard must have run off, because footsteps pounded in the hallway before they went faint.

“Evan…” I struggled to coordinate my breath with words. I could hardly speak, much less lower myself to the floor and grab the key.

“Ellie? El!” The door splintered, and in sauntered Evander, stomping over shards of wood as if they were blades of grass. In seconds, he was at my side, stroking my forehead with one hand, examining my wound with the other.

“It’s going to be alright, Ellie. It’s going to be alright. Forrest! Call the healer. Then call the one from town.”

“Your Highness…” said the guard.

“Now!” Evander barked. Then he grabbed my bedsheets, ripping a strand from them with his bare hands. “I’m going to put pressure on this, okay?” He wadded up the sheets and pressed them against my torso.

I yelped. Now that Evander seemed to be balancing the entirety of his weight upon my wound, the pain began to pulse, thrumming against my stomach. Or perhaps the shock was just wearing off.

“El, it’s okay. They’re getting the healer. The healer is on his way. I just need to keep applying pressure.”

“I know how it works,” I croaked, trying to nod my head.

A distressed smile broke out across his face, and for the first time I noticed he was sweating.

“Who did this to you?” Evander gritted his teeth, set his jaw. “I swear, when I find out who did this to you, I’ll—”

“No, stop,” I gasped. “I don’t want you to get yourself into another bargain you don’t…wish to…keep.”

He frowned and cocked his head, his brow furrowing. “Who, El?”

“I… I don’t know.” It was the truth, at least in the most exact sense. I didn’t know the name of the woman who had just tried to kill me in my sleep, who had glared at me with such hatred, such vengeance, that it was clear she felt I had cheated her out of her happiness. Out of a life that was rightfully hers.

So, yes, I didn’t know who the woman was.

But I had a pretty good idea.

And from the way Evander’s face blanched as white and frothy as the winter’s first snow, I figured he did too.

Evander said something, but it was as if the words had to swim through sludge before they could reach my ears. My vision went spotted around the edges, and before I could unscramble Evander’s statement, the darkness took me.

CHAPTER 32

EVANDER

The day immediately following the attack, the corridor outside Ellie’s room had been buzzing with members of my father’s staff. Mostly guards assigned to investigate exactly how an intruder had snuck into and out of the castle grounds unnoticed.

So far, they’d come up with nothing. The theory so far was that somewhere among the entrances, there was a stationed guard given to strong drink, one who had allowed the perpetrator to slip by without raising an alarm.