Page 83 of The Princess Trap
This was a bad idea. Terrible. There was no way she could—
He was asleep.
Cherry stayed still and silent for another moment, listening closely to the slow, even cadence of his breathing. He was definitely asleep. Just like that. Jesus Christ, he was irritating.
But still, she found herself reaching for him in the dark, tracing the sweeping contours of his face with gentle fingers. She would happily set this fucking palace alight, with both of his siblings trapped inside. That probably said something about her morals, and definitely said something about her attachment to him.
She couldn’t worry about it now though, not with him beside her. Bit by bit, Cherry felt herself relax, felt her mind and her body grow heavy, felt her eyes slide shut.
And somehow, she slept too. Who’d have thought?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Over the week, a pattern emerged. It was arguably more interesting than the routine she’d fallen into at Ruben’s, but it wasn’t half as enjoyable.
In fact, it was absolutely awful.
Every morning Cherry would wake up to find her fingers intertwined with Ruben’s, no matter how she’d gone to sleep. Every morning she’d open her eyes to see him watching her as if she were something precious. And every morning she’d turn away and pretend it didn’t kill her.
Then he’d go about his day, hopefully spending plenty of time with Lydia, while Cherry underwent the complete torture of Magda Jansen’s undivided attention.
On her first full day at the palace, Sophronia had pulled Cherry aside at breakfast to discuss Cherry’sintroduction. Tosociety. Which was to say, the ball.
Sophronia’s soft, pink lips had twisted into a sly little smirkas she murmured, “I understand you’re unaccustomed to events of this magnitude, so I have arranged for someone to oversee the preparations.”
Cherry had returned the sly smirk with an open scowl. “What preparations?”
“Why, for your presentation, darling. Your appearance. It is truly aball, you understand. You’ll need a personal shopper, a stylist—”
“Fine, okay. Whatever.”
A flicker of irritation had crossed Sophronia’s face, like a snake gliding across still waters. “See that you are available and in your quarters around midday. Magda will arrive to discuss the initial arrangements.”
She’d swept away in a swirl of skirts before Cherry could ask who the hell Magda was.
But she found out soon enough.
Magda Jansen had knocked on Cherry’s door as if she were a giant with fists like dustbin lids. When Cherry went to investigate, she found a diminutive, dark-haired, older woman scowling at her. The woman’s hands, Cherry noticed, were a perfectly ordinary size. Smaller than average, even. How she’d managed to make such a racket without bruising her damn knuckles, Cherry had no idea.
“You?” Magda barked. Her accent was more pronounced than Ruben’s, or Hans’s, or even Agathe’s. “Youare my canvas?”
Cherry arched a brow. “I’m Cherry Neita. Person. Not canvas.”
Magda snorted. Then she muttered something in Danish that sounded slightly venomous and pushed her way into the room.
Magda and Cherry, suffice it to say, did not get on.
Over the following days, Cherry became familiar with the sort of misery she’d never experienced before. During the day, Magda picked her apart piece by piece, all in the name of putting her back together again, somehow better than before. Demi and Hans’s absence continued—though, every so often, shethoughtshe caught sight of a familiar, huge, scowling man marching along the corridors like a giant toy soldier.
But the worst part was Ruben.
She and Ruben shared a space. They shared a room. They shared a bed. They shared a plan.
And absolutely nothing else.
She had done this. She’d wanted a wall between them; she’d wanted to regain control of a situation that had been spiralling beyond her understanding, beyond her power. And every time she thought back to the way he’d looked at her, the panic in his voice on that fateful night, the fact that he couldn’t even bear her touch, she felt the hurt all over again.
But now her time spent in this gilded house of fucking horrors had added another dimension to her perspective.
