My voice shook. “You killed Madame LeFleur.”

Blaise winced, but she fisted her palms. “It was her. I swear.”

“I’m just going to be honest with you, Blaise,” Evander said, his jaw tight. “I’m not quite convinced there’s a difference.”

Blaise shifted her attention to Evander, a sadness wafting across her expression that ran deeper than her regret for me. “Please tell me what she did so I can fix it.”

My heart constricted, squeezing and pinching and giving way to so much hurt. My friend had tried to kill me.

My friend had tried to kill me, and now she was going to marry the man I loved.

I couldn’t breathe.

Apparently, Evander could breathe. At least, he didn’t seem to have any trouble speaking. But when he addressed Blaise, it was not with the jesting tone a mischievous older brother might use in a younger sister’s presence. No, when he spoke, his voice was a demand, uttered by the Heir to the Throne of Dwellen. “You’re going to tell us what’s going on. Now. Then we’ll consider what you do and do not deserve to know.”

Blaise didn’t miss the condescension in his voice, the way he spoke to her as if she were a child. The hurt that flickered across her expression was more than offense. It was embarrassment and shame and something else just as sinister and intrusive.

She nodded all the same.

And then Blaise told us her story.

“I’d rather not start from the beginning,” she said, her voice going dry. When Evander opened his mouth to protest, she shook her head. “No, I mean, I’ll get to the beginning. It’ll just take some…working up to.”

Evander nodded, crossing his arms.

I just stood there staring, heart numb, as the girl I’d come to consider my friend told the story of how she’d come to be my attempted murderer.

“I didn’t realize I’d been possessed the night of your first attack.” She gestured to me, and I bounced away my gaze, unable to look at her for the bile that rose to the base of my tongue. She cleared her throat. “I woke in my bed, covered in blood. At first I thought my…” Her attention lingered on Evander for a moment before finding the floor. “I thought it was my cycle, come early.” Evander didn’t as much as flinch as he gazed upon her expectantly. “But the blood was all over me, most of it on the front of my shirt. And it was all over my sleeves, too. I knew then something was terribly wrong. But I was in such a panic. I’d passed out the night of the ball, too. Woken up in a ditch, and couldn’t for the life of me remember how I got there. I brushed it off, came up with reasons that made sense, but when I woke up and smelled all that blood…” She gagged, her face paling. “I thought I must have started sleepwalking, or something. That I’d hurt someone in the night. I was in such a daze, I washed my clothes first, scrubbed myself down in the bath. What I should have done… I should have gone to look for you. I didn’t know it was you I’d hurt, Ellie. Had no idea.” She shook her head. “I should have gone to look anyway. I knew someone was out there bleeding, but I was so afraid I’d be called a murderer, that the king would lock me up… It wasn’t right. I know that.”

Evander’s bulging jaw looked as if it were about to burst through his tanned skin.

Blaise sighed and rubbed her temples. “I hadn’t had time to clean my sheets when Imogen found me. She rushed into my room just as I was getting changed into new clothes. Her eyes got all wide when she saw the blood on my bed. I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed it off—said something crass and crude about my cycle to embarrass her, keep her from questioning me about it. I guess it worked, because she told me you’d been attacked in the night.

“I ran. I just…ran. There wasn’t a thought in my head. Other than that you couldn’t be dead, you shouldn’t be…” Goosebumps trailed her arms at the memory. “When I got to your rooms, saw all the blood. I knew, I just knew I’d done it. The smell… It hit me as soon as I turned the corner…your blood. I’m so sorry, Ellie. I didn’t know what to do.”

Her eyes widened, like a puppy dog who’d gotten into dinner and ruined three hours’ work of meal preparation.

Like she hadn’t driven a knife into my gut and left me for dead.

Still, the longing in her gaze stirred something within me, and since I wasn’t yet ready to accept that feeling as sympathy or some other generous emotion Blaise certainly did not deserve, I attributed it to betrayal.

Sympathy and betrayal. They didn’t feel all that different when matched against one another. They both writhed in my belly, gnawing at my insides.

“You stayed with Ellie,” Evander said. It wasn’t said like a question, not in the typical sense, with his voice lilting at the end. But there was a question there all the same.

Blaise hiccupped. “Of course I did.”

Evander shuffled. So did I.

“Were you going to kill me off, in case I woke up and realized it was you who’d tried to murder me?” I asked.

Blaise’s eyes widened. “No. No, I’d never… Not while I was in my right mind. You don’t understand, whatever’s in me… it just takes over. I don’t even remember what I’ve done when I wake up.”

Evander held up his palm, silencing her. “She’s not lying. I left her alone with you multiple times during those days when you were unconscious and recovering. If she’d intended to kill you, she could have done it then.”

I crossed my arms. “If she’d figured out a way to get away with it. Perhaps she had the physical opportunity, but no way to hide the evidence.”

Blaise shook her head, her eyes going weak. She rested her elbows upon her knees, and the burlap sandbag shifted around her. “I never wanted to hurt you. It wasn’t me.”

Evander threw up his hands in exasperation. “Then why didn’t you tell us, Blaise? Why didn’t you tell me? If you suspected you’d been possessed, why not get help? Why continue to put Ellie’s life at risk?”

“Oh, don’t give me that crap,” she snapped at him. “If you’d just arrested her the night you burst into Ellie’s room to save her, then whatever happened tonight—which neither of you will tell me—wouldn’t have happened. Do you know how I felt, Evander, when I found out you had the chance to take me into custody, to discover what I was? It…it crushed me. It was like having the wind taken out of me. Because I couldn’t tell you, couldn’t bring myself to. I was just praying that you would figure it out, that you would…” Her shoulders sagged, and she slumped, running a hand through her long, limp hair. “Honestly, I’m just relieved this is over.”

I couldn’t help but think she didn’t look it.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Evander whispered again, and this time, his inquiry was truly a request. One asked from one friend to another.

She didn’t look at him; she just wrapped the burlap tighter around her shoulders. “I started researching as soon as Ellie made a recovery. I’d spend the night at the library trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Finding any books I could on magic possession and shape-shifting. I even researched the Queen of Naenden, but nothing useful turned up.”

My brow furrowed at that, a memory forming in my mind. “Imogen must have been suspicious of the truth,” I whispered as the other two stared at me. I tapped my finger against the air, as if to tap out the steps of the past. “I found a pamphlet of hers. She’d written all over it, taken notes about shifters. About lychaen. She must have noticed the attack happened on the full moon, and when she found you soaked in blood, she thought you were a shifter.”

Blaise shifted uncomfortably, digging her fingers between the jagged floorboards. “It was my pamphlet you found. I broke into Madame LeFleur’s shop and grabbed it when I was searching for anything that might explain what’s happening to me. The pamphlet went missing weeks ago, and I figured it was Imogen who took it. She’s been onto me for weeks, but she’s too passive-aggressive to say anything. I guess she was waiting for sufficient proof to hand me over. But I was glad for the books she brought back, the ones she thought I wouldn’t find under her mattress. I was desperate to find a way to expel the magic from me before she came out again. I hadn’t figured out yet that she was tied to the moon. If I had, maybe….” She shook her head. “I don’t know how, but maybe it would have helped…”

Evander ran his fingers through his bronze hair and muttered, “A Human’s Guide to Reversing Fae Magic… I found it in your stack of books in the library. I thought you were researching how to undo my bargain with Ellie, but you were searching for how to reverse whatever magic has its grip on you.”

Blaise picked at a strand of her matted black hair. “I was researching both.”

“What I don’t understand is how she possessed you in the first place,” Evander said. “What were you dabbling in, Blaise?”

Blaise’s cheeks heated. With shame, perhaps?

“Blaise,” I said, my voice remarkably even for the concentration of fury that rushed through my blood at the moment. “What happened to Madame LeFleur?”

Blaise lost the color in her cheeks, and for a moment, I thought she might misplace the contents of her stomach as well. “I didn’t know she was dead. Not at first. The morning after you were attacked, I went back to her shop, but it was boarded up. I asked the baker next door—”

Evander’s head snapped up. “You brought back scones from Forcier’s that day.”

Blaise blushed, chewing her lip. “I remembered Ellie liked them.”

I worked my fingers through the pleats in my skirt, refusing to make eye contact with her.

“Anyway,” Blaise continued, clearly dejected by my lack of acknowledgment of her sorry attempt to apologize for almost murdering me, “Mister Forcier said she’d been found dead the morning after the ball.”

It was Evander’s turn for his face to pale. “Blaise?” There was a question in it, one that, even now, he wasn’t willing to ask. Moments ago, when she’d worn a different body, he’d threatened to end her for hurting me.

Would he do the same to Blaise? Would he follow through on his threat? If she’d killed Madame LeFleur, which appeared likely at the moment, would he bring her to justice as he would a stranger from the streets?

That was what she deserved, wasn’t it? For knowingly putting the lives of others in danger to hide her own terrible secret?