Total pages in book: 197
Estimated words: 186911 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186911 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 935(@200wpm)___ 748(@250wpm)___ 623(@300wpm)
I lurched back, tripping over my feet and nearly dropping on the carpet. “What is this? What am I doing here!”
“Hey! You address your princess.” Kaelan advanced on me. “You will hold your tongue, and speak only when spoken to.”
“Fuck you!”
Kaelan’s brows blew up his forehead. I suspect it wasn’t often a Gutter girl spoke to him like that.
“Kaelan,” Emiana said, raising a hand. “I will handle this.”
Falling silent, he snapped to the side—ever the obedient soldier. Emiana gave her first change of expression since I was brought into the room. She smiled.
“Fuck you indeed.” Her voice was a soft, light brush. “You’re angry. You’re scared and worried, but just because you stand in my presence, you’re ordered to hide what you feel. To lock it away and put on the face of a happy servant. Faemen...” She slid a look to Kaelan. “Cannot understand what it is to live bound by such chains. You may even believe that I don’t know either.
“I, Princess Emiana, live in a grand castle high above your problems. How could I ever relate to someone such as you?”
I lifted my chin. “Not to be rude to Your Eminence, but, you can’t.”
“That,” she said, turning her back on me, “is where you’re wrong. You see me and think I have wealth, but is that the case when every coin I spend is under the control and permission of others? You think I have power, but is it powerful to sit silently in a room of advisors and rulers, waiting for a single person to ask my opinion. You think I have freedom, and I ask you, what woman in Lyrica does?” she hissed.
“My magic was bound at ten, same as you. My choices were taken from me, same as you. My father sold me to warm the bed of a brutish man, just like you!” She whirled on me, stiffening my spine. “In the end, we are all the same to them... whores.”
I said nothing. What was there for me to say? To compare our lives was to live in a deluded fantasy. True, I knew nothing of the troubles of a princess, but I doubt she knew what it was to go days without food, weeks without a bath, or a lifetime with no dignity.
“I haven’t convinced you,” she said, reading my expression easily. “You don’t believe we’re all the same, no matter the station? Then, this is all I need to say to convince you.
“The royal line passed through my mother, not my father, King Salman. Try as they did, my grandparents were not able to have the son they wished for, leaving my mother to shoulder her birthright. But did they allow her to?
“No.” The skin around her eyes tightened. “At ten years old, they bound her magic—the only and rightful heir to the throne—and they married her off to the outsider who sits on her throne. The sickness took her when I was five. The earliest memories I have of my mother... are of watching her die.”
Hard and steady eyes beheld me. “You share the same fate as a queen, little whore. What more proof do you need?”
I did not react to her name for me. “Why am I here? You did not bring me before you to tell me I share a queen’s fate.”
She shrugged lightly, padding across the room to the grand window. “As it happens, I did. You see, a year ago, my father’s advisor sat me down and told me history would repeat itself. I would not be allowed to rule the kingdom that is my birthright. As his only child and a female one at that, my father was marrying me off for the good of the nation.
“I expected this,” Emiana said softly. “I was raised by tutors and nursemaids. An advisor had to tell me about my impending marriage because my father couldn’t be bothered to untangle from the limbs of his harem to tell me himself. Someone who never had a trace of affection to show me, would not grant me the throne. I knew it was coming, but I never expected the name he uttered next to be Alisdair Shadowsoul.”
I threw a subtle look toward the door. How close could I get to it before Kaelan struck me down?
“For days, I was in shock,” she continued. “I had been ready to do my duty until I heard that name. The truth of him is in the title. King of Wind and Wild. Shadowsoul is little more than a beast. An animal. He will rip me to shreds with the same blood-dripping claws he used to sign the treaty.
“Well, I say no.”
I inched toward the door. Kaelan was too fixed on Emiana to notice.
“The one thing they haven’t taken from us yet is the right to defend ourselves and fight for our lives,” she said to the fallen stars. “That is what I do this night.”