Chapter 24
LILIA
The look on Hadrien’s face broke something in me.
It was the fractured, hollow expression of a man who’d been betrayed. Who recognized it from experience.
“No, Hadrien… I didn’t—” I started toward him. “I didn’t know.”
He couldn’t think I’d truly led her here. He couldn’t.
“She wouldn’t,” Genevieve said from the doorway, her voice firm.
“Never,” Victor added, stepping forward.
Their loyalty warmed me even as it failed to fix anything. Because the truth was sitting cold and leaden in my stomach, and I couldn’t argue my way around it no matter how many people stood beside me.
“I heard something in the woods on the way here.” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I thought it was my imagination. I thought…” My voice faltered. “If they were following me, I didn’t know. I swear it.”
The words came out, useless. Pathetic, almost. Because they didn’t change what had happened, and they didn’t change who was standing on the grounds. A chill prickled along the back of my neck and raised the fine hair on my arms.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” Queen Mireille strode toward Valgarde as though it belonged to her, and her dark furs swept over cobblestones.
Her pale eyes scanned over Valgarde’s walls as if taking inventory of her newest possession.
Three soldiers followed close behind her, spreading into a loose arc at her back, their armor catching the gleam of moonlight.
They moved with the quiet discipline of men who followed without question.
She cut past me without even a glance, as if I wasn’t even worth noticing.
Typical. That’s how she treated all under her control.
We were nothing to her, expendable, disposable.
She continued toward Hadrien and stopped a few dozen feet away.
Seething, he didn’t say a word, yet he exhaled sharply through his nostrils.
“It wasn’t difficult,” the queen added, continuing a conversation he clearly wanted no part of.
Her voice sounded charming, as if she were pleased about a sunny day.
“I have eyes everywhere. In the forest, the village.” A slight smile spread across her face, and it chilled me to the core.
“It wasn’t hard to figure out where Little Red Riding Hood was going on her little trips to and from home.
” She flipped a dismissive hand in my direction, as if shooing a fly, still not bothering to grant me even a cursory glance.
I brought her here.
Weight settled low in my gut, churning with devastation.
This woman, the one who had stolen three years of free will from Hadrien’s life.
Who had turned his soldiers to stone and forced him to look down on them each day, an endless taunt.
I’d all but invited her here by coming back to Valgarde, and whoever her spies were figured out where I was going.
“And now I know…” She let the pause stretch, savoring it. “Your precious wards are as flimsy as paper.” She threw out a hand in a dismissive manner. “Pathetic.”
Hadrien must despise me. I’d all but escorted his worst nightmare to his door.
My heart pounded against my ribs. Slowly, I mustered enough courage to look over at him, terrified to see hatred burning in his eyes.
What I saw was worse.
I’d never seen him look that way. Not even in his fury, such as the first terrible night when he’d accused my mom and me as trespassing intruders.
Any careful restraint he had was gone, leaving something stripped back and raw on his expression.
His jaw was hardened and every line of his body was rigid with something so deep it had calcified into something colder than anger.
If he had been looking at me with that terrible expression, I might have crumpled. But his eyes honed in on the queen, the fierce hatred turning them from their usual gray to a devastating, brutal, icy silver.
“You don’t belong here.” His voice came out low, each word measured. “How dare you step foot on my land after what you’ve done?”
Queen Mireille tilted her head. Her expression flickered to one of slight amusement, as if she’d been awaiting this encounter for quite some time. She took a few steps forward, and her soldiers moved with her with the precision of men used to following orders.
“Three years cursed,” she said with a one-sided grin that didn’t reach her eyes, “and still as stubborn as stone.” She turned in a slow half-circle, her gaze traveling up the walls of Valgarde—along the ramparts, down to the stone figures on the ground, taking in every detail with an expression of cold satisfaction.
“The poppy is almost completely stone, so you’re almost out of time, Hadrien. ”
He stared at her, his eyes hard and determined. “How would you know?”
She released a bitter laugh. “It’s my spell.” She motioned around her. “Of course I’d know. I control everything around us.”
His jawline twitched and his hand flexed at his side. “You don’t control Valgarde.” His voice was a deadly whisper.
“Yet,” she clipped, that one word a clear threat as she pinned her cold gaze back on Hadrien. “I’ve always been a fair queen, so I’ll give you a choice. Give up Valgarde without a struggle.” She paused and tilted her head. “Or I take it—painfully.”
“No!” I gasped out.
The queen’s gaze snapped to me. She wasn’t as tall as I’d conjured in my imagination, but her eyes pierced. Pale as a skull and without any feeling.
“Quiet, girl,” she snapped. “Or you’ll join the others.” Her mouth curved into a vicious slash of a smile. “A pretty little sculpture in my garden.” The false pleasantness was undercut by a threat. “I already have quite the collection.”
A sound rolled out of Hadrien that wasn’t human, more of a pained, animalistic roar that emerged from deep within his chest, so raw and edged with pain that it shook the ground beneath my soles.
Three years of grief and anguish and guilt seemed to coil in that heart-wrenching sound, which vibrated through my sternum and wrapped around my heart.
As he took massive steps toward her, the gray marble lines in his skin rippled and glowed, turning a fierce crimson, like blood surging through veins. His wings spread wide behind him. I gaped in awe, never seeing anyone so radiant. Powerful.
Magnificent.
All three of her soldiers raised their spears and closed in. My breath quickened as I turned back to the queen. I couldn’t bear what she was preparing to unleash on Hadrien.
She raised one hand without looking back at them. “Leave him to me.”
They obeyed without a word and lowered their spears, but remained vigilant.
She turned to Hadrien with a victorious expression already carved on her face. “Your answer?”
“I would never agree to any arrangement with you.” His voice lowered, seething with rage. “Not in this life. Not in any life. You will never set foot inside my ancestral home.”
“Fair enough,” she said with a cool arch of a brow.
She twisted her hands and I instinctively stepped backward.
Whatever strange circular gesture she made wasn’t like any magic I’d encountered. It didn’t resemble the green magic I worked with to nurture living things or Hadrien’s shifter magic with its grounded pulse. This kind pulled, took, drained.
She spread her hands wider in a slow twisting motion, and the air between her palms darkened. A concentrated mass of something dark, churning with steel-gray webs, a mass that seemed to pull the light toward it and swallow it whole.
The cold deepened as an icy frost coated the green tops of the garden, and my heart panged at the damage.
The hair on my arms stood and my teeth ached with an unsettling rattling. The mass between her hands grew, pulsing slowly, and the smell reached me, a rancid scent with hints of iron and burning ash.
The scent of something terrible to come.
My throat tightened and my ribs clamped around my lungs.
This energy she’d conjured was dangerous, poisonous, as devastating as a low-moving brushfire devouring the forest.
Every thought I had went silent.
The queen cast her hand back and hurled the dark mass at Hadrien.
“Hadrien!” I leaped in front of him, not processing what I’d done until I saw that grave, insidious ball of dark energy coming right at me.