Page 88 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

“Why do you deserve this? You, a human?”

And then the next thing I knew, Evelaena’s mouth was at my throat.

Pain, as her teeth dug into my skin.

A wave of sickening dizziness as her venom hit my veins.

I gasped, flailing out against her, my knee coming up to strike her and failing to make contact. Her grip on me was impossibly strong. With every gulp of blood she took from me, my vision blurred.

It was Evelaena’s mouth on my skin.

The Ministaer’s.

My old lover’s.

Panic set in, artificially dimmed by the venom. I was trapped. Helpless. Heir Mark or no. Wings or no.

Evelaena released me, throwing her head back and licking blood from the side of her mouth.

“Youtastehuman,” she hissed. “You look human. You smell human.”

My head lolled. I forced myself back to consciousness through the fog of the venom.

Think. I had to think.

“And it wasyou.” She laughed, hoarse and raw. She straightened, and the pendant fell against her chest, and again, she flinched.

She froze, going abruptly still. Her eyes gleamed with tears.

“I always thought he meant to leave me alive,” she said, barely louder than a whisper. “Always thought it was his plan. That he chose me. But—”

Her hand clutched the pendant, white-knuckle tight, blood bubbling between her fingers.

Suddenly, I understood.

She didn’t just flinch because of the pain of the burns. But she had experienced what I did when she touched that thing. Pieces of Vincent. Distant shards of his memory.

His memory of the night he had tried to kill her, a five-year-old child. And had failed. Not because he intended to. Not because he meant to spare her. But because he had killed so many children that night that he was a little sloppy, and she wasn’t important enough to risk going back for.

And for an odd moment, I understood her so completely that it twisted a knife in my heart. She was obsessed with Vincent. She loved him because he was her only tenuous connection to power and hated him because of what he had put her through. She survived for centuries by building up fairy tales around him, around Lahor, around a crown she might wear one day.

And now she was realizing that she had meant nothing to him.

There was no plan. No secret. No fate.

Just a careless, bloodthirsty man and motives that did not make sense.

I saw myself in Evelaena as clearly as if I was looking into a mirror. Both of us built and broken by the same man. She had prayed for fate and gotten feckless luck. I had hinged my life on luck and gotten secrets.

I got power. She got nothing.

But at least she could get revenge.

You are not like them.

Vincent’s words echoed in my head. I hated him for them. And yet, in this moment, I latched onto them with ugly certainty.

He was right. I wasn’t.

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