I hate myself for saying them.

But it’s nothing compared to the hate I’d reserve for myself if I hadn’t.

I wait in the shadows and watch her stalk from Gunter’s room. I taste the salt in the air as hot tears stream down her cheeks.

My head pounds, but my arms ache for her, to wrap her up and bury my face into her long dark hair and tell her I didn’t mean it. That I said it to push her away, so she could escape this awful prison and never look back.

She doesn’t.

She doesn’t look back.

I listen as she storms up the cold stone steps where Gunter took his last breath.

I have to dig my fingers into the stone to hold myself in place.

Since Blaise’s Turning, something has changed, like the bloodsharing ritual has been heightened to its full effect. A raging possessiveness has come over me, and I want nothing more than to go after her and tell her I’m keeping her for myself.

But Blaise has been kept enough in her life.

Only when she reaches the door at the top of the staircase do I let myself slide down the wall and fist my hair in my hands.

Blaise lied to me. I was angry, furious even, when I discovered she’d knowingly forfeited her life just to save me from having to choose between her and Zora.

But the coward in me is grateful. She’s right. I don’t want to know who I would have chosen. I don’t want to know what having that kind of choice placed before me would have revealed about myself.

Our conversation hadn’t gone as I intended. I’m not sure exactly what I’d been planning, but it hadn’t been to blow up on Blaise. It hadn’t been to strike at the bruise that already blackened her heart.

But I had planned to hurt her, just in a different way.

I knew what I had to do the moment I found the blotchy servant girl roaming the halls. Her name is Sylvia, and she’s always been terrified of me.

She should be. Her skin shows evidence of blood like none I’ve ever seen, but I’ve never laid a hand on her.

She was coming out of the South Wing when I found her. I’m not sure why, but something about that seemed strange, hollowed a pit in my stomach. Abra should have known better than to send a human servant so close to where we were keeping Blaise.

In fact, I was sure Abra knew better.

So I’d questioned the girl and discovered quickly that she’d brought a tray to Blaise. That she’d let Blaise out.

Sylvia’s eyes were still hazy, so it didn’t take much guessing to surmise what had happened. Why Sylvia had let Blaise out.

At first I’d been thrilled—not that Abra had obviously sent a human in Blaise’s path to cause her to fall, probably in some sick, twisted attempt to make me despise Blaise, to make me see in her what I detest within myself—but that it hadn’t worked. Temptation had been dangled in front of Blaise—a willing victim, entranced underneath the compulsion of Blaise’s bloodlust.

Yet Blaise had endured.

The elation, the pride, was quickly crippled by dread, however.

Because if Blaise can control herself, that means she’s ready to go out on her own.

She doesn’t need me anymore.

I suppose it should have been a happy thing. In another world, it would have been.

But I am a fool, and Blaise isn’t the only one of us who’s lied to the other.

She thinks there’s a chance I’ll be able to leave someday. She thinks if the queen was willing to make a bargain with me about the parasite, surely she’d make another. Perhaps if we found another trace of the Old Magic, the queen will free Zora, then I can leave with them.

Blaise is wrong.

She doesn’t know what I’ve done. The bargain I struck as she slept.

It’s not that I doubt Blaise would stay with me. That she’d shackle herself to my Fate and live out the rest of her days as a prisoner to the queen, just to be with me.

It’s that I know she would.

She proved as much when she let me perform the ritual on her, thinking it would kill her, just so I could have my sister back.

Blaise will ruin herself for me if I let her; and I simply can’t let her.

And if Blaise needs to hate me to gain her freedom, then I can live with that.

CHAPTER 46

BLAISE

It’s still daylight. I know because I peeled back a thick curtain just far enough to scald my finger.

The queen might have released me, but there’s no getting out of here until nightfall.

I’m still wiping the stinging tears from my cheeks, replaying Nox’s words in my mind, when the guards find me wandering the halls.

They bring me a letter, sealed in wax the color of blood that drips across the parchment, not yet entirely dried.

It’s from the queen, who requests a meeting with me in the throne room.

Something about the way the fae guards take note of the covered windows in the hall tells me I don’t have much of a choice.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from the queen’s throne room. Probably a looming space akin to my dungeon cell, just cleaner and without streaks of dust lining every surface in the room. The rank of mildew absent. A looming throne instead of a menacing dais.

But when I arrive in the throne room, I’m struck with the sudden urge to suck in a breath.

Even I can admit the throne room is magnificent.

Its vaulted ceilings bubble with carved stone arches, each beset with scenes of battles of beasts with threatening fangs and silvery-painted fur.

The entire room has a greenish aura about it, and I realize windows have been cut into the ceiling, allowing the light of the aurora to waft into the vast chamber.

It seems I could have waited out the sunset.