Page 100 of The Crown of a Fallen Queen
But I can’t.
Terror coils low in my belly. He has no idea what’s coming. No idea what I’ve promised to keep him alive.
Seth searches the dark corridor ahead. “Where were you headed?” His eyes rake over me, and he takes a step forward, arm extended. “Come on.” He reaches for my hand. “Let’s leave this place together.”
My body tenses, and I jerk away before he can touch me. “We can’t.”
I know better than to fail this test. Alaric is nearby—I feel it in the prickle across my skin, in the way the dress hums in warning, and in the chill that hasn’t left my body since he proposed.
Seth doesn’t back down. “Between the two of us, we can fight our way to the warden’s chambers?—”
“Our intel was wrong. Luther might have ordered all mirrors shattered in the capital and allowed Tidecallers boats into Zepharion, but he’s not the new Storm King.” My voice falters. “Alaric is.”
Seth opens and closes his mouth. “Then we have to escapenow.” He shackles my wrist. “I know him. He will hurt you to get back at me.”
“Why would he think I mean anything to you?”
He blinks, stunned. “Because you do.”
He steps closer, both hands on my arms, grounding me.
“You know you do,” he says again, softer this time. Pleading.
I try to lift my arms, to push him back, but they don’t listen. They’re desperate to hold him instead.
I force a shrug. “You said you’d never fall for me. So that’s a gross mistake on your part. Our arrangement doesn’t serve us anymore. Consider it done.”
His breath catches. “You don’t mean that.”
But I do. There’s no way to warn him, no way to explain that death is skulking in the dark. The only way to keep him alive is to convince Alaric that I’m truly done with him.
Something twists in my chest, cold and broken, but I press on.
“The crowns asked me to kill your brother,” I say, the words bitter in my mouth. “That’s the real reason they sent me with you to Zepharion. They made it a condition for us to wed. But youwouldn’t have married me after I’d done it, so we were doomed long before we ever set foot in this place.”
I let the revelation simmer.
A flurry of emotions twist his face like a storm trapped in a bottle. Fury, betrayal. Doubt.
So I remind myself who he is. Why he came to me. What he truly wanted.
My magic. My body. Nothing more.
There can’t be more.
I have nothing else to give.
“You leave if you want. But I’m staying.” I lift my chin, each word another nail in the coffin of our budding romance. “I’m sorry, Seth. Our little scheme has run its course. Alaric asked me to marry him.”
He chokes on a strangled breath. “You’d…sell yourself to him like that?”
“How is that different than selling myself to you?”
The blow lands. His mouth parts, but no sound comes out.
I deserve his obvious disgust. Every bit of that andmore.
“I could never have loved you, Seth. Your mother grabbed one of my arrows and rammed it straight here.” I hit the space over my heart, hard. “She drove it deep and raked it around. She doesn’t deserve to die knowing her son and heir will be king after her.”
