I should not be here. This is a conversation too private for my ears.
Elden inhales long and hard through his flaring nostrils. “You did what?” He speaks each word delicately.
“Rowlyn is open to the marriage,” he answers with a casual shrug, much too casual for his brother’s fury, I think. “He meant never to take a wife, so if he should, why not the litalf princess?”
“And why not you?” Elden challenges. “The furthest prince from the throne, the better prince for this union to work in our lands. Or have you forgotten all about the light piercing our darkness in the Wastelands?”
My lips suck inwards.
They seem to have forgotten that I’m here. I’m a ghost, invisible. But I still have ears, and now all the talk about light breaking in makes sense.
Their darkness is shattering, someplace called the Wastelands.
I fight to keep the shock from my face and instead lower my gaze to my tucked-up knees.
Pretend I’m not here.
“Rowlyn is fifth from the throne,” Daein dismisses. “It will make no difference to our troubles.”
Still, I can’t quite make out the connection between the litalf princess and the light breaking through the darkness in the Wastelands.
“Our troubles are growing,” Elden speaks with his jaw tightly wound. “And our parents have summoned us. Mother asked that I bring you to the palace.”
I cut my gaze up for a beat.
Daein’s face finally hardens into something more serious.
I look down again as he turns to find his shirt, draped over a tree stump, crumpled.
Elden’s gaze, however, finds me. I can feel it sear into my face.
“Do not let yourself get lost in her,” his icy voice cuts through me. “Too many great dokkalves have already been taken by her kind.”
Fleetingly, I think of the dark fae General, Caspan, and his kuri wife, Vale.
Daein chuckles something dark and cold. “She is no kuri,” he replies. “But merely a human slave whose flesh I desire. I will tire of her soon enough.”
I choke on a sharp breath. It’s like a knife has been plunged into my heart. He has taken a blade and gutted me clean.
My face twists with the pain building up inside of me and I shoot him a scathing look.
Elden’s voice replies coolly, “Like all your conquests, I’m sure.”
Daein tugs on his shirt. As he fits its hem into his trousers, he turns to me on the bed. “Why are you still here?” His voice is snappish and icy, so unlike it was moments before when it was just us two. My jaw sets as I look up at him. “Leave,” he commands darkly.
I don’t need telling twice.
Holding the sheets to my chest, I scoot off the bed and reach down for my dress. Before I can grab it, Daein snatches it from the floor and throws it at my face.
I wince, catching it with an almost-fall backwards.
“Now.” His tone could cut glass.
He makes it clear I have no time to dress, so I shift the dress to wrap around my body, but it only covers my netherfield to my breasts, barely. I shift out of the sheets, then run for the double doors—I’m too used to those now. Part of the rules he’s given me. No slave corridors, now I must enter into the hallways of guards and officials, merely wrapped in a dress that exposes the entirety of my legs, that reveals too much of me.
I rush out of the bedchamber, my eyes stinging, and the prince speaks no more to me before I leave. Though I feel the sear of Elden’s eyes on me as I go.