Page 149 of Bride of the Fae Prince

Her skin turns gray in a matter of seconds. I sink to my knees, holding her in my arms as her eyes roll back, as the strength in her neck gives way and her head falls to my elbow. Her long silver hair pools on the ground with her glorious skirts.

“Stella? Stella!” Supporting her suddenly weak frame in one arm, I catch her face with my other hand. She’ssogray, so suddenly. Rationally, I knew this was going to happen. This is part of the plan. This doesn’t mean I measured the dosage incorrectly. This doesn’t mean she might not have the immunity I thought she would.

But the thrum in my veins is entirely real.

It’s like I look at her in my arms, at her gray skin and the blue tint of her lips, and I see my worst nightmare. Around us, the dance and music has stopped. Hundreds of curious eyes burn into my awareness, but I don’t look up.

My fingers clench into her hair. “Stella!” It’s a choked cry, a raw scrape of sound from my throat. “Stella,open your eyes. Open your eyes!”

She opens them slowly, meeting mine. Her lashes flutter weakly. Soft brown irises fill my vision.

And then they turn vacant.

Empty.

Her chest stops moving.

“Stella—no!” I scream. My grip in her hair turns frantic, sharp, and no matter how many times I try to tell myself that this is only the exact glamour I told Stella to wear, that she’s not dead, I cannot breathe around the stabbing pain in my own chest.

She’s gone. She’s gone.

She’s not gone,I snarl to myself. But my rational mind doesn’t care.

I bow my head over Stella’s silver one, clutching her to my chest as tears pour in rivers down my cheeks. I wish I was acting. I wish this were a façade.

“Well, isn’t this an interesting tableau?” says a voice as deep as midnight.

The entire air of the celebration shifts in that instant. Curiosity switches at once to tension, even fear, perhaps a thrilling sort of anticipation.

Because the voice belongs to the tall figure, standing hardly a few feet from where I am collapsed on the ground with my seemingly dead wife. A figure wreathed in shadows like a whirlwind of soot and dead embers.

The Neverseen King.

He approaches me, his shadows pulling back from his hooded face long enough for me to make out the smirk tugging at his lips. “I see you played with fire and got burned, my dear cousin.”

And, strangely, it is his arrival that makes my heart remember this is only a ruse. A ruse that will give me valuable information about whether Faradir can see through Stella’s glamours like he can see through any fae’s.

“Did you do this?” I snarl, clutching Stella’s body to my breast. “Did you poison her?”

The Neverseen King only chuckles darkly and turns away—toward where Faradir sits on his throne, pale in the darkness. “It is a good thing I didn’t poison your only heir. That would have made for some thrilling court dynamics.”

“You should be at the Bridge,” Faradir snaps. “It’s almost Lulythinar.”

“I thought I would pay a visit. Part of me misses these celebrations. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a Lulythinar.” He spreads his hands wide, and when I look up from Stella, I’m just in time to catch Faradir give the barest flinch.

Because we all know that the only fae with comparable power on this side of the Veil to the High King is the one who has spent the last three hundred years keeping the doors between worlds. The one who can beckon armies with a single drop of his blood.

Faradir clearly feels what we are all thinking: that if the Neverseen King attacked him this instant, the High King might not win. So he stands, his long robes of dark blue a contrast to his golden skin and hair. “I still remember when you were such a young boy. I remember my sister’s pride when she told me she was with child. When I loved you nearly as much as if you were my own.”

“Thank the Great Kings you didn’t,” the Neverseen King says with a wry chuckle and a pointed look at me as I hold my glamour-dead bride.

“Did you do this?” I snarl once more at him, pitting myself against him so the High King doesn’t realize I’m behind this, too. When he doesn’t answer, I throw back my head and bellow through my raw throat:“Who poisoned my wife?”

That is when Faradir finally looks our way.Trulylooks.

And then it’s as though he completely forgets about his greatest threat standing before him. His bright gaze latches onto Stella in my arms, her gray skin and wide-open, sightless eyes.

He turns white as the Lulythinar moon above us.

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