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“I believe she may have already begun.”
The silence that follows is the worst kind.
“My father,” she says. Barely audible.
“The decline that looks like illness,” I say carefully. “The pace of it. The way it has moved.”
“That cunts been poisoning him,” Snow says. “Not me. Not yet. Him first. Because a sick king is easier to manipulate than a well one. Because a king who is frightened and fading and dependent on the woman beside him will do whatever she tells him and believe whatever she says.” Her voice doesn’t break. It goes somewhere quieter and more dangerous than breaking. “She’s been killing my father and using him as a puppet while she does it, and I’ve been standing in that palace watching him disappear and thinking it was illness and I never—” She stops. “I never put it together.”
“You had no reason to,” Prince says. “She’s careful. She’s been doing this a long time.”
“You were taken the next morning,” Snow says, looking back at me. “Before you could tell anyone what you heard.”
“Yes.”
“She found out you were in that corridor. Or she suspected.” Snow's voice has taken on the focused quiet of a woman building something in real time. “She couldn't risk it. So she moved everything forward. Sent my father the story about Bash before dawn. Had us removed from each other before I could reach him and before you could speak.” Her jaw sets. “One move. She dismantled everything with one move and she timed it perfectly. My father helped her do it because he thought he was protecting me.”
She looks between the three of us.
“You spent two years on this island believing I destroyed you,” she says. Not an accusation. Just the shape of it, laid flat between us.
“Yes,” I answer.
“And I spent two years on the other side of the water believing you chose to leave.” She pauses. “And that cunt of a queen has been standing in front of her mirror the entire time asking who the fairest of them all is.” Something moves across her face, cold and absolute, without any performance in it whatsoever. “She is about to find out.”
I reach up and remove my mask.
Because someone has to. Because I’m done with the distances I dress as strategy. Because a woman is standing at the edge of a water hole on a prison island who just had two years of deliberately constructed lies laid out in front of her and didn’t crumble. The least that I can do is let her see my face.
Prince removes his.
Bash removes his last. Slow and deliberate, and Snow looks at him the way you look at something you thought you understood and are only now seeing clearly.
Neither of them speaks.
“Take me through everything,” she says finally. Her eyes move to me. “Every word those guards said. Every detail you remember from that night.” A pause. “We’re getting off this island. We’re going back. And when we do, that bitch is going to answer for every single thing she has done.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SNOW
By the time we make it back to the cabin, night has fallen. My mind is reeling and anger is coursing through me without restraint. Two years of my life I spent being angry because I thought Bash chose to leave me. Finding out that vile bitch painted him as a rapist has my stomach churning.
It’s been turning over since Doc said it, since the words landed and I understood the full shape of what she built. Bash is many things. He is heavy handed and relentless. He has never once in his life asked permission for anything he wanted. But force is not in him. Not with me. Not ever. What existed between us was chosen, every single time, by both of us, and the evil bitch took that and twisted it into something monstrous and handed it to my father wrapped in his love for me.
She used his love for me to destroy us.
I press my palm flat against my stomach and breathe through it.
The candlelight through the cabin window is what pulls me back to the present.
Cinder.
Her men.
The reason we were at the water hole in the first place. The conversation that started something else entirely, and I forgot completely because the world rearranged itself around me and took everything else with it.
“Shit,” I breathe, and push forward through the cabin door.
