Page 97 of If The Crown Fits
I shut the door behind me gently, but still loud enough for Lance to hear. He turned from where he stood at a desk, twirling a small knife between his fingers. Lance was wearing his crown.
The study was cold and there was a hint of dust in the air, enough to make my nose wrinkle. It had taken longer than I wanted to find Lance, but once I had established he was not already apprehended, I asked the captured servants to tell me where he was.
“Come to kill me, have you?” There was a menacing tone in his voice.
“No,” I said earnestly. “Though I’m surprised no one else has.” I didn’t even have a weapon on me. My only dagger was in the leg of some poor guard I had to fight on the way here. Maybe I had lost my mind. “I have come to right the wrongs.”
He barked out a laugh. “I was wrong about you. You’re not like me — I understand what it takes to stay in power. Even if it requires sacrifice.”
My hands clenched to fists at my sides. “You’re wrong,” I protested. “An uprising was bound to happen. If it wasn’t Arthur, it would have been someone else.”
“Arthur.” He sighed. Then, jabbing the small knife into the desk, his smile was as sinister as I’d always known it to be, but that didn’t exactly do anything to calm my frantic pulse. Though I don’t quite know what unnerved me so when it came to Lance. After all, I had the upper hand now. Lance’s family was dead or missing. His palace was overthrown and I had simply made an effort to have this conversation with him so there would be areckoning. This was my little revenge. This was me telling him that he would spend the rest of his life in misery.
“Arthur,” he said. “Our uncle did always have a more violent side, though he hid it well. But you would know better than I do, wouldn’t you, Elara?”
Elara.
My birth name. The name no one knew except my uncle.
I thought I was going to be sick, felt the breakfast I didn’t even have slowly rising up my throat. “How do you know my name? Why would you call Arthur your uncle?”
Lance smirked and I shivered. “I knew from the very moment I met you that you... that you were very clever, and yet you hadn’t managed to see the single most obvious thing in front of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Exactly what you’re thinking.”
“You’re drunk, Lance,” I spat out. “You’re lying.”
“Drunk? Yes,” he said. “Lying, no. I’m afraid your worst fears have come true, dear sister.”
“I don’t believe you.” Lance was a maniac. He’d lost his mind.
“Look at the painting behind you and tell me I’m lying again.”
Somehow I knew I would regret turning around. But at the same time, I had to know. I moved my eyes away from him, slowly turning to face the wall behind me. And there it was... hanging above the door, a portrait of the prince and princess of Everness. A painting of Lance and Eloisa. Only Eloisa’s face was practically the spitting image of my own.
It was as if I could feel my blood turn ice-cold inside my body.
“Mother had two daughters.”
I shook my head. “No.”
“One was stillborn. Not the youngest, but the eldest. And the second resulted in Mother’s death.”
“No.”
“Only—”
“No!”
“She wasn’t stillborn.”
He looked me dead in the eye, and no matter how hard I searched for it, there wasn’t a hint of a lie on his face.
“But that is what the kingdom was told. That the child died along with our mother. To hide the fact that the eldest princess had been kidnapped on the day of her birth.”
I had forgotten how to breathe.
