Page 53 of The Crown of a Fallen Queen
I tip my glass in her direction. “You’re more famous than me, these days.”
Beth went from being an outsider to the most famous singer in all the worlds, and a part of me resents her rise to fame, especially since it unfolded in parallel with my harsh fall from grace.
A wry grin curls her red-painted lips. “Are you jealous?”
She’s loved and praised for her talents, adored by the masses while I’m being persecuted and feared. You bet I’m jealous. “Jealous of you?” I wrinkle my nose as though she’s lost her mind.
She peeks at my flock of haters. “You and Seth… It’s all for show, isn’t it?”
Why can’t anyone wrap their minds around the fact that Seth and I want to marry? He’s hot. I’m Devi Eros. He won’t rule without me, and I won’t be pardoned without him.
“Why do you say that?” I quip. “Is it so hard to believe I’m into him?”
“Don’t you think we’ve had enough of these arranged weddings?”
I scoff at the tiredness in her tone. “Last I heard, your husband was going to marry someone else. That explains your bias, I bet.”
Elizabeth Snow spent the last few decades in exile—by choice. She can pretend to be in tune with Faerie politics mere days after her return.
“Call it bias if you want, but it’s a recipe for disaster,” she says.
I slide to my feet, eager to walk away from this conversation. “Because you have the monopoly on love? I don’t love Sethyet, but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t learn to.”
Her eyes widen, like she never expected me to mention love at all, and she chases after me. “Aidan wants to save Willow. That’s all he’s been talking about since the attack on the capital.”
“And what if she doesn’t want to be saved?”
Beth chews on her bottom lip. “She wants Ethan dead above all else.”
“Who could argue with that?” I snicker.
Beth grips my wrists, forcing me to a halt, and scolds me with a stern look. “Willow used to worship you. I know Ethan hurt her, but isn’t there a way to bring her back?”
Beth and Willow were close at the academy. She was Willow’s kindred at her wedding, and my heart gives a painful, forlorn thud, remembering that clusterfuck.
“Listen, moth. I get it. I want Willow back, too. But if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that you can’t heal someone—can’t bring them back to life—no matter how much you love them, if they don’t want you to.”
“If someone could, I think it’d be you. Or Ezra.” Her gaze softens.
Ezra again. By Eros, I need to thread carefully. “Ezra can’t help us now.”
The royals return to the ballroom far sooner than expected, Seth and Elio at the back of the line. My fiancé’s bright smile has dimmed to a sullen pout.
“Everything alright?” I ask.
His sharp nod means everything butfine.
Aidan hurries to Beth’s side and places a hand on her back—his movements subtle but urgent—just as Ethan Lightbringer joins our circle. His arrival steals the oxygen from the air. His bite of power hits like altitude sickness, causing a thin, sharppain along my ribs, the same breathless pressure felt in his city above the clouds. The hairs on my arms stand to attention.
“Violet. Hi. It’s been a while.”
“Hello, Ethan.”
Few here know why this vicious, soulless king once voted for my exile and not my execution. No one ever entertained the idea that a chalk-white king could sire a girl with dark brown skin, and that failure of imagination turned out to be the best shield I could hope for. Their bias worked in my favor.
They never looked too closely at how I managed to sneak around the Royal Academy unnoticed. Never questioned why I was so good at eavesdropping, or why I was the only one who didn’t fawn over his picture-perfect first-born son, while every other girl was desperate to spread their legs for him.
“Aidan. Miss Snow,” Ethan says in his usual glacial tone. “I see you two finally got married.”
