22. FRANCOIS
I can taste the tang of her defiance.
“You’ll never break Taliesin,” she says, her voice colder than an arctic wind. “He’s the most stubborn, loyal man I’ve ever met. More than you’ll ever be. More than you could ever dream of being.”
I flinch.
It is a microscopic betrayal of my own muscles—a sudden, sharp contraction in the center of my forehead. For a heartbeat, the mask I have spent twenty years perfecting simply… falls. I am exposed, a raw nerve touched by a girl who shouldn’t know that she has the power to wound me.
Aurora watches the slip with a glint of triumph. Another point scored in our mental Olympic Games.
Recovering is an act of sheer will. Rolling my shoulders, I dismiss her jab with a shrug that I pray looks effortless. “We shall see. But for now? Please attend to your hair.”
Pulling a fine-toothed comb from my pocket, I toss it through the bars. It clatters onto the concrete at her feet, a peace offering. I want her groomed. I want her to look like the girl I came here to save—the girl who belongs in a manor, not a kennel.
She doesn’t pick it up.
Moving with a slow, agonizing deliberation, Aurora reaches into her pocket and pulls out the jagged shiv. My breath hitches.
“Aurora, don’t,” I warn.
She ignores me. Grabbing a thick, golden hank of hair, she pulls it taut then begins to saw. The sound is horrific—a dry, rhythmic crunch-crunch of jagged plastic against strands.
“Stop it!” I hiss, my hand flying to the lock.
After fumbling with the keys, I finally get the cage door open, and I am inside her space before I can even think of the consequences.
I reach for her wrist, my fingers itching to use the poison in my veins to turn that plastic into dust, but she pulls away, her eyes wild and bright with a frantic kind of joy—the joy of a martyr at the stake.
Destroying herself for what she believes in.
Another chunk of blonde silk falls to the floor. Then another. A thin line of blood appears on the pale skin of her nape. Enough.
Enough! She will not make herself bleed. She has already bled enough.
“You want a piece of me, Francois?” she pants, the blade hacking through a knot near her ear. “Here. Take it.”
I stand frozen. I need to stop her. I could pin her to the wall and force the weapon from her hand, but the sheer, frantic energy coming off her stops me cold. This isn’t just hair. She is murdering the version of herself that my father owns. She is killing the debutante.
I watch, horrified, as her beautiful, cascading locks become a tangled, pathetic heap on the concrete. What remains is a terrible, choppy bob—uneven, violent, and utterly magnificent.
When the blade finally drops, her chest is heaving. She looks like a half-drowned bird, shivering and fierce.
The silence between us goes on and on. Slowly, I reach out and pick the shiv from the floor.
“Turn around,” I murmur. My voice is thick, strange in my own ears.
Surprisingly, she obeys. Perhaps she is too exhausted to fight anymore.
With trembling fingers, I work on the back—the bits she couldn’t reach. The hairline is a disaster. Using the sharp edge I trim the stray hanks, leveling the mess until it frames her face in a way that is sharp and modern.
Fierce.
I linger for a second too long, my knuckles brushing the sensitive skin of her nape. She is warm. She is alive.
And she is a stranger.
Without a word, I step out of the cage and slide the door shut. The click of the lock feels too definitive. This is not the end of anything.
“Enjoy your breakfast, Aurora,” I say, my mask firmly back in place.
Picking up my breakfast plate, I examine the offering.
Peanut butter on bread. No jelly. A pauper’s meal.
I arch an eyebrow and offer her a small, tight smile, as if I’m holding a plate of lobster Benedict instead of this atrocity.
The peanut butter sticks to the roof of my mouth, cloying and bland. I thought I was the master of this game, pulling the strings to bring my little bird back to her beautiful life beyond these walls.
But as I swallow the dry bread, it feels like I’m swallowing the realization that I came here to rescue a Princess, only to find something so very different; a revolution in a jumpsuit.
For the first time in my life, I am terrified that I might not be her endgame after all.
And that will destroy me.
Years of waiting and planning are at risk because I didn’t dig below the surface of Elite perfection.
I didn’t see the steel beneath the silk.
But now I do.
And it’s more intoxicating than ever.