look at Valerian. Even though the prince who humiliated me in front of the entire school wasn’t actually him, he still hurt me.
Deeply.
“What are we doing here?” I ask. We’re in the hall of antiquities where the beautiful gowns float around the room like specters.
“You’ll understand soon.” He stands there for a heartbeat, almost as if unsure where to start. Then his focus moves upward and catches on something.
I do the same. When I see what he’s staring at, the Summer Princess suspended midair, a puzzled frown finds my face. “Did you . . . know her?”
His eyebrows gather as something dark shifts inside his eyes. “I loved her.”
Oh—oh. I stare at the Summer Princess with renewed interest, a pang of jealousy worming into my heart.
“But you and Princess Hyacinth fought each other in the Nocturus.” I remember now the story of how the princess bested him with the whip and then spared his life.
A wry smile quirks his lips. “Yes. I knew I loved her way before she ever felt the same about me.” He drags his eyes away from the floating Fae girl and settles his gaze on me. “Did you really think a whip with snowdrops would best me?”
“So the story about your father having you whipped isn’t true?”
“Oh, it’s true. But I let her win.”
“Why?”
“Because I had to know if she loved me back.”
“She could have killed you,” I snap, trying and failing not to sound petty as another round of jealousy burns across my cheeks.
“Yes, but once you love someone the way I did her—let’s just say, if she didn’t return my love, I would have preferred death.”
“But she did. Love you, I mean.”
“Yes. We were soul bound.”
I blink, wrestling with my emotions. Part of me hates her.
No, all of me hates her.
“When her father found out we were mates, he locked her up. You see, they had been hiding her rare magic from the world. It was stronger than even my own. With us soulbound, my own magic would have been limitless. But her father couldn’t stand the thought of all that power going to the Winter Court. He was afraid my grandfather, Oberon, would use it to finally destroy the Seelie Courts.”
I take a breath. Why does this sound so familiar?
“She tried to escape. She nearly made it to me. I was waiting just outside the palace walls. We were going to run away together. But”—his hands flex into fists—“her father discovered her moments before she made it out the gates. And he killed her right there while I watched through the bars. He murdered his own daughter to keep her powers away from my court.”
A sob bubbles up my throat and I barely swallow it down. I can’t imagine a father killing his daughter. I can’t imagine any of this.
“She was an Evermore, but the king refused to let a soulmancer perform the proper rites. He knew every court would track her new soul down for the power it harbors. But her mother snuck into the burial chamber and performed the rites in secret. She was interrupted before she could fully complete the act.”
I glance up at the girl again. “So, her soul is just . . . out there wandering around?”
He shakes his head slowly. “No, Princess. Her soul found a body. A human baby who had just died in childbirth.”
“Where? Who?”
Only, at this very moment, I hear his nickname for me, Princess. Really hear it.
Like it slaps me upside my oblivious face.
Princess. How many times has he called me that? I thought he was just being cruel.
He lifts a hand to my face, seems to think better of it, and then curls his fingers into a fist at his side. “All the courts have been searching for her ever since then. I have spies in every court, and when I learned one of the Darken’s followers had dispatched tracker wolves to a small town in the Tainted Zone . . .”
My heart skips a beat.
“I didn’t know it was her, not for sure. Imagine loving someone and then they become someone else overnight. A stranger. They look different, their laugh has changed. Their nose crinkles when they’re amused. They eat with their fingers instead of using utensils, and smile when they’re sleeping, and cry when they’re mad. They’re starving, yet their heart is too kind to kill what they hunt. And anything they do bring home, stolen or otherwise, they selflessly give to their family.”