Ethera narrowed her lovely eyes at me, long dark lashes lowering. “Do you take me for a dunderhead?”
“No, Your Majesty. Of course not.”
Ethera’s guard’s dagger hovered between the bars of the cage. He watched as she considered me. I was sure I wasn’t breathing.
Eventually the corner of her mouth quirked up, and with it, a small crack tore at her lips and up her cheek. A fissure, like in sedimentary rock.
I must have made a terrible face because she waved her elegant hand at me and said, “Oh, hush. Do share whatever it was you felt so inclined to.” Then she nodded at her guard, who sheathed his serrated knife, releasing me back into the bars.
“I don’t want to imply anything improper, but…” I let my eyes trail over her nailless finger and the thin crack along her cheek. “It seems to me you have an ailment, Your Majesty. You know the power that I hold…I could help you. Couldhealyou. Make you healthy again.”
Ethera’s eyes had grown so wide I was worried they might pop right out. She seemed the type. The queen tapped a long, painted finger along her heart-shaped chin. “But you’ve been ensnared by the lilium. You cannot perform any benevolent acts with your lighte now, can you?”
I swallowed my nausea. “We’ll have to wait until it’s left my system.”
Ethera’s teal eyes burned, and I cowered against my better judgment. “And allow you to annihilate my home with me and all my lovelies inside it?”
“No,” I swore. “Never. If you wish to stop decomposing, Your Majesty, you’ll have to trust me.”
Ethera considered me, her mouth a tight knot.
I forced my gaze anywhere but Ethera’s guard’s sheathed knife. “I am not an advocate for violence. I allowed your men to capture me just to set my friends free. I helped you put an end to that bloodbath. I don’t wish to see your home destroyed or to take your life. I just want to spare my own.”
“Very well,” she said in the end as she stood. “I shall be back to inspect you tomorrow morning.”
And then she left in a whirl of fur and wine-colored hair. I exhaled thoroughly.
The greenhouse was cold, and I knew the coming night would only bring more snow atop the glass roof. I wrapped my arms around myself as best I could given the angle and tried not to shiver.
All I could really discern in the stifling darkness were cobwebs and drying brown vines that climbed along the glass and across the dusty floor. And I was unfocused. My mind dissecting over and over again why Ethera would want to prohibit Kane and I from bearing a child…
Before I came up with a single halfway-decent theory, the glass door creaked open. A pink-clad housemaid strolled in with a bowl of something meaty and warm and a hot mug billowing steam into the chilly greenhouse.
The handmaiden knelt and threaded the supper steadily through the birdcage. But before I could take the bowl and mug from her, a commotion sounded from beyond the greenhouse doors.
My eyes shot up.
The handmaiden’s expression had blossomed into one of true fear as the shouts and slamming doors intensified somewhere outside. She offered me one last stricken look before she ran, knocking hot soup across the greenhouse floor.
Not just ran—this womansprintedfor the doors, her footfalls on the floor reverberating into my stiff bones. In her haste she threw the glass wide open, dousing me in a blast of snow-flecked night. The wind set my teeth on edge as she deserted me in a frozen greenhouse clearly destined for some kind of violence.
And there was nothing I could do but sit and listen as that shouting only drew nearer. The squawk of the queen rang out, alongside the low rumble of someone—not Kane. Not any voice I’d heard before.
More shrieking…
My hands braced around the wire of the birdcage. If I hadn’t been doped with lilium I could have torn the wiry iron bars apart enough to squeeze through. Instead I shattered the fallen mug on the hard ground and brandished one ceramic sliver like a dagger.
“We are not finished here!”Ethera’s voice warbled from right outside the greenhouse.
The glass doors swung open and my blood—
The striking,harrowingman that stood before me turned my blood to ice.
Pale, near-translucent skin as if he avoided all sunlight, ice-white hair, glaring expression on that carved, elegant face—all of it aligned with the expected beauty of Fae males. It was the glowing, sinister, bloodred eyes that stole the breath from my chest. Their razor focus. Theirneed.
Aleksander Hale. I knew it in my bones.
And, knowing what I did of the Hemolich, he could sense the way the chilling sensation of beholding him coursed through my veins. The slight uptick of his elegant dark brow told me as much.