38
I do not obey Evie’s command regardless of her threat—how can I? We are left alone with nothing to do but wait. I drag my foot along the gravel, shivering under the icy fingers of December rain.
“Should we go back to the castle and alert everyone?”
“Rip out your throat,” Evie repeats, not bothering to look at me.
“But—”
Evie slams her heel down, and chunks of street break off into rocks and pebbles.
She whirls around. “ This is exactly why you aren’t fit to be a werewolf.
We listen to our pack. We don’t disregard the rules and order on a whim.
Sin is the Alpha right now, and he told us to wait.
Thus…” She splays her claws wide, like a malicious magician in the middle of a grand show. “We wait.”
I scowl at her. Anxiety ticks in my heart like the countdown to a large explosive while frustration wells painfully in my throat. My body shudders. My bones ripple. But I can’t shift, and I can’t help, and I have to stand here with her . “Don’t you get tired of insulting people?”
“Hmm…” She taps a claw to her chin. “No.”
A truth.
I decide to share one of my own. “I’m not a threat to you, Evelyn. You’re going to be queen one day. We don’t have to be enemies.”
She cracks her knuckles. Her neck. “If you’re not afraid because you won our last fight, I can assure you it was a fluke, and I will kick your ass now.”
“Stop,” I say, though I don’t step away or flinch upon the signs of her aggression.
I won’t be afraid of her anymore. She is just a girl.
“You’ve made living here so… so much harder than it needed to be.
My best friend died, Evie. I moved to this strange fucking castle in a body that no longer felt like mine.
I lost everything . And all you’ve done since day one is make it worse. ”
She bares her fangs. “ You attacked me in the throne room.”
“You attacked my friend on the beach!”
“That was my job!” Evie cries, so loudly that the ground threatens to shatter beneath me. Hell threatens to swallow me whole.
That was my job. That was my job. That was my job.
“Wh-what?” I shake my head viciously, certain that I’ve misheard her. “What do you mean?”
Her jaw clenches, and she glances off into the distance.
“Do you think we were at the beach randomly that night? Do you think I wanted to hang out amongst a bunch of human teenagers? She— Queen Sybil —told us to scout out a potential illegal-Bitten as a practice mission. One of the only ways to tell is…” Her eyes harden, and I’m almost convinced that she’s forcing herself to say the words.
“You rile them. You press their buttons and see if they’ll attack. ”
I stumble backward. A cry wells in my throat, but, as usual, it doesn’t burst forth. It can’t burst forth. I haven’t cried since Celeste’s death.
“You were there—”
“On purpose,” Evie confirms. “Queen Sybil commanded Sin to carry out the investigation, but once we arrived at the beach, he couldn’t. He’s soft, Vanessa. I had to do what was expected.”
The world spins in a wicked rotation. I think I might throw up. Sin… Sin knew. This whole time, he knew . “You killed her?” I murmur, the words slipping from my lips in a torrent of pain. Of grief. “It was… it was you?”
I shut my eyes, waiting for the moment that will change everything. The moment where I’ll have to kill her. Or at least fight her to my own death. My claws sharpen, and my fangs cut into my lower lip.
“No,” Evie says. “I didn’t kill your friend. None of us did.”
I freeze.
Her honesty cradles my heart in gentle hands. It touches the very core of my soul.
She’s telling the truth. But… that doesn’t make sense. Someone killed Celeste. If the queen sent them to scout the situation, then she must have had them deal with it.
Evie sighs and rips a hand through her hair, her claws gone now.
I hadn’t even noticed them vanish. “We didn’t expect a fight to break out between the humans and werewolves.
It caused a disruption, and most of us escaped so we wouldn’t risk our lives by shifting in front of the mortals.
By the time the scuffle ended and everyone made their way back to one another, it had happened already.
She was dead. You were Bitten. And we had to find a way to clean up the mess.
” Her eyes narrow. “Whoever did it isn’t one of us. ”
Her words play on a loop in my head. It’s so much information, I think about dropping to the ground, perhaps sitting in this filthy street forever.
Celeste died here. Months ago, the accident happened not even miles away.
But it wasn’t an accident. They were sent there to scope out the issue for… for the queen.
I glance up at Evelyn abruptly, ideas forming in my head. Conclusions. “Did you sabotage my journal? Did you try to frame me for treason?”
She laughs dryly. “Tell me you’re not being serious. Why would I sacrifice my own position in court? Queen Sybil hates me enough. If she caught me tampering with her precious purple-eyed Bitten, she’d have my head delivered on a literal silver platter.”
My heart pounds furiously. If that wasn’t Evie… “What about the threatening notes? The blood on my mirror?”
She blinks. Her head tilts, and she slows her pacing to stand closer to me. “Vanessa, you look green .”
“Answer me,” I plead, wringing my claws before her. “A straightforward answer.”
“I did not sabotage your journal, write you a threatening note, or put blood on your mirror . I’ve never even been inside your room aside from when I went to collect you and Sin.”
Truths. All truths. Bile rises in my throat.
“But you stabbed me. You hate me.”
“Yes, but I’m not suicidal.” The streetlight above us emphasizes the chiseled lines of her cheekbones and seems to deepen her frown.
“You barged into this castle like a medieval battering ram. You attacked me in public. You hugged my intended fiancé in public.” She holds a hand up when I move to interrupt her.
“It does not matter that I find the Wolf Prince as attractive as a bowl of rotten fruit. There is etiquette in our court. There are rules, laws, expectations, and hierarchies. I have been trained in them since birth, but you… you bulldozed through each and every one, and you thought the consequences would never catch up to you. I don’t like you, Vanessa Hart.
I think you are weak and a stain on our society.
But I do not care about you so much as to sacrifice my own place in the very court I am one day meant to rule.
You’ll die here, with or without my help. ”
Warmth wraps around me like a blanket. Once more, I feel safe, secure. No part of me burns. She’s being honest. And I can’t even be upset with her for it. She hasn’t been threatening me. She hasn’t been sabotaging me. No, I’m not overjoyed that she stabbed me, but she didn’t kill Celeste.
She is just a girl.
A great cavern expands in the pit of my stomach. The conspiracy Sin and I have been uncovering blows wide open. Evie was never out to get me; I only thought she was. Because of the fight on the beach, because of Celeste, because of the alchemical nature of the torture, because of the sabotage.
Someone was setting me up. Someone was setting her up.
From that cavern in my stomach, anger quakes in the aftershocks of the explosion—the realization. Evie, Sin, everyone knew about this. Despite my abilities, they hid it from me. What else… what else could they be hiding?
“If you’re going to be sick, please aim it away from my Prada shoes. They were a birthday present.” Evie pauses before adding reluctantly, “We couldn’t tell you. The mission was classified.”
I chew on the inside of my lip, considering her words. Another howl, farther away, toward the bridge, breaks my concentration, however. Evie tracks it, mentions something about how long her brother is taking, but that doesn’t matter.
She— Queen Sybil —told us to scout out a potential illegal-Bitten as a practice mission.
Queen Sybil also knew about Celeste, and this… this situation is familiar. Too familiar. Every single person who had been Bitten, she knew of first.
“How did you find Sin?” I ask slowly. “Why were you out here tonight looking for him?”
Her gaze tears from the distance, landing back on my face, and she asks apprehensively, “Why does that matter?”
“I know you think I’m stupid and weak—”
“And pathetic,” she adds unhelpfully. I ignore it.
“Queen Sybil outright admitted to me that she loathes you,” I say. “She loathes the bargain she made with your parents. She resents the control they—and you—have over her.” I repeat, “Why were you out here tonight?”
Evie’s pulse rises, an aggressive beat like the thunder throttling the cloudy midnight sky.
She wipes rain from her forehead. “Queen Sybil called me to her chambers to inform me that her son was spotted on the island. She asked me to discreetly take him home. But, as you are well aware, Sinclair has never been discreet in his life. He insisted we stop in every bar on his way back, and then he offered liquor in return for fighting with the locals. I think he wanted to distract me and Eric so he could slip out the back.”
Her words are honest, but she’s wrong. Sin wasn’t trying to distract them .…
You rile them. You press their buttons and see if they’ll attack.
Sin was provoking the locals . If a Bitten human had been there, they would have snapped. We would have been able to rescue them—or maybe question them.
But if the queen sent Evie here, to the beach specifically, it had to be for a reason.
“Did she want you to come alone?” I hurry to ask.