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The look Daddy, Sir, and Grumpy trade over my head says they already suspected that.

They just didn't want me to.

CHAPTER TWELVE

DOC

She's more than I thought she'd be.

She isn't just a pretty face bred behind palace walls, not just some spoiled brat who got to sleep soft while the rest of us bled for scraps. She's smart. Calculating. There's a spine in her that refuses to bend no matter how many times we've tried to break it, and something about that refusal has started living rent-free in the back of my skull.

Cut that shit out.

She's the enemy. She's the reason we rot on this godforsaken rock instead of raising my son in the only home he ever knew. Her lie—vile, poisonous, dressed up pretty enough that nobody thought to question it—cost us everything. We never had much. We worked ourselves half to death for what little we did have, and it was enough. Bash was happy. He was smiling, whole, alive in a way I haven't seen since, right up until he fell for a rotten apple that turned around and gutted him for it.

I will not let myself forget that. I can't afford to.

“My father hates yours.” Jaq says it flat, like a fact carved into stone.

“Mine wouldn't work with yours either.” Snow's voice comes out steady, but I catch the flicker underneath it, the same flicker I've been watching for weeks now, the crack in her armor she thinks nobody's noticed. “Which still leaves us with no answer for why we're all here.”

Silence stretches out, thick and suffocating, everyone sinking into their own private dread. I watch her gaze flick to each of us in turn, quiet, careful, cataloguing.

I know exactly what she's thinking.

If they're princes, then who the hell are we?

Not royalty. Never were. Lower class, and I used to be proud of that, used to believe an honest day's work meant something more than a crown ever could. Now I'm not sure what I believe. Now there's a version of me that lays awake wondering if her father's blood runs anywhere near as filthy as the men who actually own this island, and I hate that thought. I hate that I let it in at all.

“Or you're all wrong and it's just a coincidence,” Bash grits it out through his teeth, and I can hear how much he wants that to be true. I can hear how much it costs him to say it out loud in front of her.

Snow rounds on him instantly, scorn sharp enough to draw blood. “You can't be that thick.”

His fists curl at his sides. And before I can get a single word out, he's closed the distance, chest to hers, forcing her chin up just to hold his eyes.

He grips the back of her neck, hard enough that her feet nearly leave the floor.

Prince goes rigid beside me, and I feel it roll off him in waves, that same ugly, unwanted instinct to step in, to protect her, and it makes something cold twist low in my gut. I shoot him a warning look he doesn't see. The last thing any of us needs is for my best friend to catch the same disease that's already eating my son alive.

Because that's what this is. A disease. A slow, patient rot none of us saw coming until it had already taken root.

Until I'm proven wrong, until I know for certain she wasn't the reason we lost everything, she stays enemy number one. I have to keep telling myself that. I have to, because the alternative is realizing I don't actually believe it anymore, and I'm not ready to live with what that would mean.

Bash bends until his mask is a breath from her face. The Charms took theirs off and decided honesty was worth the risk. Not us. We don't want a happy ending written into this story. We want her misery. Her ruin. I want the beautiful skin she hides behind peeled back until the whole island can see exactly what kind of snake lives underneath it.

I want that so badly, some nights I can't sleep for wanting it.

Other nights, God help me, I want something else entirely, and I hate myself more for that than I've ever hated her.

“You think you're safe because we have company.” His voice drops, dark and deliberate. “You're the thick one if you think for one second I won't fuck you right here, right now, in front of every last one of them, just so nobody forgets who you belong to.”

Prince's breath catches audibly. Excitement licks up my spine too, ugly and unwelcome, the same twisted hunger that's been living in me since the day she washed up on our shore in chains. My cock is iron-hard, aching, and some sick, quiet part of me is grateful for the distraction, because it's easier to want her body than to sit with everything else I've started feeling for her.

She fists a hand in his shirt, then lets a moan slip loose, soft and deliberate.

“That sounds so fucking good.” She drags her tongue up the side of his throat, slow, filthy, daring him. “But I've got so much of your cum sitting inside me right now, I think I'd take a shower over riding your cock.”

Bash doesn't hesitate. One second she's on her feet, the next she's slung over his shoulder and he's already moving for the door, jaw set like granite, like he needs this, needs to drown something in her before it drowns him first.