I opened it, the script scribbled in almost illegible letters, probably in haste.

When I held it under the moonlight, my heart stopped.

My dearest Evander,

So you’d choose Ellie Payne over me after all. Well, then. Let’s see who you choose now.

Meet me at the Payne workshop before the moon reaches its apex. Otherwise, I suppose you’ll have to read in the papers how Ellie and Blaise met their ends.

CHAPTER 51

It had been unlike the parasite to leave the note.

Sloppy even.

The parasite wasn’t used to being sloppy.

Efficient? Precise? Ruthless? Yes.

Sloppy, never.

She’d made a mistake picking this girl as a host. The parasite had always found it easy to construct walls between her consciousness and the minds of those she inhabited. There had been the hosts: living out their day-to-day lives as normal, perhaps a bit concerned about how they occasionally awoke in strange places once a month, but too superstitious to admit such to their relatives lest they be burned as a witch.

And then there had been the parasite, lurking in the shadows of their minds, prepared to take over when the glint of that horrible, glorious moonlight crossed the horizon.

But this girl was different. The parasite had known as much the day the girl had first shuffled into the shop, plain and wide-eyed and so deliciously desperate.

The girl was already so used to morphing herself into whatever she thought others wanted. Never bothering anyone with her pain while she inwardly drowned. Once the parasite had slipped into her body, shifting had been like slipping on a pair of shoes someone had already broken in.

But there was something in the girl that the parasite had failed to recognize. She might have scented it, had it not been so utterly masked underneath the girl’s noxious desperation to be wanted.

There was a strength to the girl the parasite had missed, one she never would have tolerated in a host before.

The parasite had always avoided strong-minded hosts because they were difficult to wield. Unyielding and a pain to stuff into the backs of their minds, kicking and screaming and scratching the entire way.

That’s what the parasite had told herself at least.

The truth was that she found that kind of strength intoxicating. More treacherous than the stubbornness, the refusal to be completely locked away, was how that sort of defiance tasted. Sharp and bitter and utterly all-consuming. As biting and decadent as dark chocolate.

The parasite had a difficult time shielding herself from it.

Had a difficult time not letting a little of her host slip through.

Not enough for the girl to gain control of her body, of course. Never enough for that.

No, the parasite kept the girl in iron chains of magic. The girl couldn’t even remember the parasite’s actions when she awoke.

But still. The parasite allowed bits of the girl to influence her, to shape her.

It had served her well at first, allowing the girl’s undying love for Evander, her knowledge of his inner struggles to guide the parasite’s words as she stole his heart the night of the ball.

The girl hadn’t even known what she was doing, hadn’t been aware of it, really. But the prince’s face had been too deeply engrained in the girl’s subconscious. He’d passed right through the bars of the cage the parasite had constructed for her host. The parasite had let him.

So the parasite had told the prince exactly what he wanted to hear. That she was sorry for the loss of his brother.

She’d known to avoid bringing up the fact the prince was the heir. Something in the recesses of her host’s mind knew he hated that.

The parasite had assumed the girl’s closeness to the prince would be a strength.

She could not have been more wrong.

At first, the parasite had assumed that her attraction to the prince was rooted in lust. After all, the parasite had known carnal pleasures during her centuries of moonlit escapades—and there was no denying that the prince was a perfect specimen.

She’d told herself she would enjoy him immensely once she found a way to free herself of the moonlight’s curse and join herself to the girl’s body permanently, using her shifting abilities to remain Cinderella forever and erase the girl’s plain face from existence.

When she discovered that Ellie Payne had tried on the shoes and accidentally bonded herself to the prince, acid had settled over the parasite’s consciousness. But she’d attributed it to annoyance that Ellie Payne would take the parasite’s place as a princess, ruining her chances of ridding the castle of its monarch and becoming queen herself.

And when she stood over Ellie Payne with that knife, she’d told herself she was taking pleasure in it because she would have finally cleared the path to the power she’d always coveted.

The parasite had told herself many things.

Most of them had turned out to be lies.

She’d gone too far. Allowed too much room in the cracks of her subconscious. And though the girl had no physical control over her body, she’d soaked into the parasite, staining her and soiling her with her love for the prince.

Love was a dangerous thing in the heart of a parasite.

All a parasite was good for was taking what they wanted.

And she wanted Evander.

Not his title. Not his throne. Not his power.

She wanted him.

She wanted the prince to drown himself in his obsession with her, to double-cross his every moral code to defend her. She wanted his body and his obsession and his heirs swaddled in her arms.

Yet the parasite couldn’t have that.

Ellie Payne had made sure of that.

And if the parasite couldn’t have what she wanted, then she would do what she did best.

She would take him.

CHAPTER 52