Page 148 of A Dance of Shadows

Bastien shakes his head. “We need him awake to find out if he’ll give away anything further about what he and Linus had planned. If they’ve already set anything in motion that could harm Aurelia—or anyone else—we’ve got to know. But if he won’t talk, we won’t wait long.”

He glances at me. “You can wake him?”

I reach into my pouch. As I step toward the man I once considered my husband with the crafted pill in my hand, my ribs seem to clench around my lungs like a hunting trap.

I don’t know how I expected to feel at this moment, but it wasn’t like this.

Ignoring the tension tangled inside me, I ease open Marc’s mouth, pop the pill onto his tongue, and shut his jaw so it can dissolve. Then I step back to discover what the emperor will make of the real me—and whathistrue self will prove to be.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Aurelia

It takes several excruciating minutes before the stimulant fully kicks in. Marc’s eyelids flutter. His limbs twitch against the bindings.

When his arms jar against the restraints with a sharper force, his eyes pop open. He stares forward and then down at himself with a bleary vagueness to his expression. “What— Curse it all?—”

His voice still holds a bit of a slur, but when he looks up again and focuses on me, a little of the fog clears from his face.

His forehead furrows alongside the narrowing of his eyes. “Aurelia? What in the blasted realms is going on? Can you untie me?”

He hasn’t processed yet that I’m the one who had him tied up.

I fold my arms over my chest atop my belly. My heart is pounding so hard it sends an ache through my ribs. “No, I’m afraid I can’t.”

He pauses in his struggling. His gaze sweeps across the room, landing on the three men standing farther back around me. His lips draw back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

Rage reverberates through his words. “Did they force you into this? Damned traitors after all. What do you idiots think you’re going to accomplish with this stunt?”

I swallow thickly and speak up before any of the princes can, although Raul’s glower has turned searing enough to burn. “They didn’t force me into anything. They’re helping me. And it isn’t a stunt. It seems the one who’s been playing the most tricks here is you.”

Somehow, my voice remains even. At my last words, Marc’s gaze snaps back to me. His fury wars with bewilderment on his face, twisting the lines around his mouth. “What are you talking about?”

I summon a little of my own anger to steady me in my purpose. “Why don’t you tell me? Your brother informed me this morning that he’s known all along that you ‘confessed’ your secret to me. Because this has just been one more in the long line of sick tests you’ve been putting me through since the moment I arrived here.”

What color Marc has in his pale skin drains from his face. He grits his teeth, but he can’t will away the unmistakable taint of guilt.

“Linus is lying to you,” he insists. “He knows I’m done with him—he’s trying to turn you against me the way he assumes we’ve turned against him. He?—”

“There is no ‘we’!” I break in, with a rawness to the protest that I didn’t expect. My stomach churns. “If he wasn’t already aware you’d told me, how would he have known it was safe to reveal the secret now? How could he have pointed out the exact moment when you let me into your supposed confidence? Rightfrom the start, you came to me with all this talk about conspiracy and murder…”

I should have realized. Is that why I feel so awful? I suspected in the very first moment that agreeing to his scheme was a trap.

Why did I let him convince me he had any intentions beyond breaking me?

Marc grimaces. “All right. When I came to you at first, it was to prove a point. He insisted you’d take the first chance to betray one of us. I said we’d see. But you didn’t, and you’ve put up with so much of his shit without ever asking me to raise a hand against him…”

He trails off, looking down at his bound limbs again as if struggling to comprehend how his current state fits the story he’s telling me.

My voice tightens. “I didn’t ask younotto protect me either. I didn’t protest when you promised I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. So you got your betrayal after all.”

“That’s not—” Marc shakes his head with a growl of frustration. “I didn’t see it that way. Everything I said to you to begin with—Iwasalready starting to think it. Our tour of the continent only drove home how unstable he’s gotten, how easily he could destroy everything our family has built. Why the fuck should he be emperor even half of the time if he’s going to ruin the whole damned thing?”

Raul can’t keep silent any longer. He lets out a snort. “And she’s supposed to believe that, just because you said so?”

“Who the fuck are you to have a say in it?” Marc retorts, and yanks his gaze back to me. Amid all the fury and confusion, there’s something almost pleading in his gray eyes. “I never lied to you, not really. At most I exaggerated my intentions in those early conversations. But the past few months—I’ve meant every bit of that. Iloveyou.”

I sense the princes stiffening at the edges of my vision. I never mentioned to them that Marc had said those words to me—it hardly seemed important. The declaration feels like a joke.

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