Rose: A Fairytale Reverse Harem Romance Series (Happily Never After Book 4)

by Plum Pascal

  We meet somewhere in the middle of the line, clashing in a tangle of limbs, falling to the ground twined together like Inosculated oaks, never to be parted now that we’ve found each other again. She peppers my face with kisses, not seeming to mind the traitorous fall of tears that completely contraband my joy.

  “Carmine,” she whispers, over and over, repeating it like a prayer. And I’m doing it too, repeating her name like an incantation that could keep her here with me forever. “Sister!”

  “Neva,” I murmur.

  The pair of men come to hover over us, wary and confused.

  “What’s going on?” the golden-haired one asks, eyeing me with faint distrust. “Who’s this, Neva?”

  My sister pulls away from me and stares down at me with a broad smile. “This is Rose Red,” she says, arranging me so I’m mostly sitting on her lap. We’re still twined as closely as we can be, under the circumstances. “Princess Carmine Resia. And apparently, a Chosen One.”

  She grins more broadly then, a bright flash of perfectly straight teeth that no doubt makes her the envy of any woman she comes across. She always was beautiful, Neva. Even as a child.

  “Come inside, Carmine, please. There’s so much to talk about.”

  FIFTEEN

  CARMINE

  The home of Mad Madam Harriet Trilby is a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare. There doesn’t seem to be a surface in the place that isn’t packed with something curious, squirming, or clearly bespelled. It’s an assault on the eyes.

  The floor is checked, the squares seeming to sway or dance if I stare at them too long. Almost every knob or knocker in the place has faces, with eyes that track me across the room. They’re placed in odd, nonsensical places without a door to open at all. I wonder what might happen if I pull them? Would a door magically appear, or would the brass knocker just shout obscenities at me?

  There is barely enough space to navigate the hall. I keep bumping into end tables or writing desks, stuffed to bursting with papers and objects I can’t name. On one is a complete alchemist’s tool set. Something is boiling in one of the beakers, emitting sweet-smelling pink bubbles every few seconds. Hattie bats one away from my face when it comes to bob before me.

  “None of that, or we shan’t get a sensible word out of you for a week.”

  “What does it do?” I ask.

  “You ask too many questions.”

  It’s actually the first question I’ve asked her, but no matter. I boggle at the rear-cinch of her waistcoat, which is the only part of her I can currently spy through all the insanity. Then, in the next second, she’s gone, leaving me to deal with a floating parasol that does its best to club my right ear as it floats lazily past. I swat at it, then glance upward, prepared for more combative decorations.

  Looking up is a mistake.

  The ceiling is patterned similarly to the floor, but with red and yellow stripes adorning the dome. They converge at the center, like stripes on a peppermint and form an almost hypnotizing pattern. They also seem to spin when I stare too long. I sway, suddenly dizzy, and I might have collapsed into the next desk, full of miniature cats lounging on satin bows and small, velvety poufs, if Neva wasn’t there to catch me.

  She gently stops my spinning with a wispy laugh.

  “Hattie’s home is a lot to take in, Carmine,” she starts. “And you don’t want to take it all in at once. It’ll drive you batty if you try. I’m not even sure you can get the full scope of this place. Things seem to change from day to day.”

  “How do you live here?” I wonder aloud.

  Though the more pressing question is how is she here? How is she alive? And if she’s been alive all this time? Why hasn’t she come to find me before now? It’s strange how life works, but I’ve only known my sister to be alive for the last ten minutes or so and in that time, my mind has been a blank—shock perhaps.

  “How… how do you live?” I change the question, facing her earnestly.

  Something of my thoughts must show on my face because the good humor drains away quickly, ushering in a more sober expression. It reminds me forcibly of those old days, when Neva’s tiny shoulders were hunched over with the weight of the world. The only known Chosen at that point, she’d been kept under almost constant surveillance. Too precious a resource to lose, according to our father. Too precious to be allowed to live an ordinary life. Any semblance of fun had to be scraped and stolen. A midnight exploration of the dungeon. Afternoons in the arbor. Hiding in alcoves while Draven searched for us.

  I hadn’t known what Neva was at that point, nor had my mother. Not until Neva had confided in me, and then I’d confided in my mother.

  And then the attacks had happened.

  They’d brought in a charred body wearing her shoes. What poor little girl had been charred to death to act as her body double? Did Neva truly resent me so much for my part in what had happened that she’d leave me to live with the guilt all these years?

  “I’m sorry, Carmen,” she mumbles, reaching out to push a stray curl behind my ear. “I would have come if I’d known.”

  My steps stutter to a halt, my knees locking, and my hand sweeps up to bat her gentle fingers away from the side of my face. My stomach rolls, a sick sense of betrayal slamming into my gut as solidly as a physical blow.

  “If you’d known I was Chosen too?” I hiss, suddenly growing angry as the situation begins to unfold within my mind. “If you’d known there was anything special to return to?”

  Furious tears burn at the corners of my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I’ve done enough crying to last me a lifetime.

  Neva blinks those huge amber eyes at me once in shock, before an echoing sense of betrayal sweeps over her face. Those eyes go glassy almost at once, tears shuddering on her lashes for just a second before they fall.

  “Gods, no! That’s not what I meant, Carmine. How can you even think it? I love you.”

  “You have a funny way of showing it!”

  My voice is rising into a shrill shriek, but I can’t stop myself. All these years, I’ve thought I was responsible for Neva’s death. All these years, mother never let me forget it was my doing. It’s why I’ve tolerated all of her restrictive rules, all the lectures, all the mind-bending visions she’s sent me over the years. Because, somewhere deep down, I knew I deserved them.

  I can’t believe mother let me suffer all these years, knowing I hadn’t killed my sister.

  “Carmine,” Neva begins, tears falling thick and fast now. A blotchy flush creeps up her neck and into her cheeks. I remember just how hard it is to make her blush. She’s as pale as her dearly departed mother, I’m told.

  “No!” I shout. “No, Neva! It’s not fair! How could you never tell me? I loved you so much and you just…”

  My voice falters, cracks and then the lump of unshed tears in my throat becomes too thick to bear and wings the life from my tirade.

  Draven, Titus, and Sabre, who’ve all been perched behind me, move forward, so the line of Draven’s body is pressed to my back. His hand closes implacably around my shoulders and he nudges me forward.

  “The corridor isn’t the place for this conversation, Carmine,” he murmurs. “At least get into the sitting room before we crack open this barrel of shit.”

  I want to argue with him, want to plant my feet and glare at my erstwhile sister until she gives me the explanation that the situation calls for. But Draven is right. We can’t stay here, clogging up Madam Trilby’s corridor. So I trudge forward, glaring the point between Neva’s shoulder blades when she turns to troop further inside.

  Her skin is infuriatingly smooth and pale, not a blemish in sight. She’s always been incredibly beautiful. As a child, she looked like a fine-boned porcelain doll. As an adult woman, she’s like a statue of a goddess, carved from marble. The dress the blonde man helped her into shows off her figure to its best advantage. The thing is barely a slip, made of a silky red material that clings to her every curve. I know it’s probably not meant
to titillate, just something that’s easy to slip on and off for her transformations, but it further pisses me off. I’ll never be as curvy, as striking, as... perfect as my older sister.

  The golden-haired man places a gentle hand on her shoulders when we reach the sitting room. She’s shaking, still crying. He shoots me a dirty look over her shoulder. I return it with a fierce glare of my own. I don’t care if the damn dragon despises me for this, Neva owes me an explanation, damn it.

  An army of overstuffed sofas, poufs, and armchairs crowd around a circular table in the middle of the room, also done up in the spiral red and yellow pattern. A favorite of Madam Trilby’s, it seems. Lounging on top of the table is a striped cat, turned upside down so it can support a tea service on its paws. It grins at Harriet when she tsks at it.

  “Enough of that, you feather-brained feline,” she scolds the thing, rescuing the tea set as the cat rolls to its side. Strangely, none of the cups shift an inch, even as the service tips sideways. Madam Trilby catches me looking and gives me the faintest of smiles, the most friendly expression she’s worn to date.

  “Sticking charm,” she explains. “Cheshire cats are such rascally things. You never know where they’ll turn up or what they’ll be inclined to smash.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that and, even if I had a reply handy, I’m not sure I could force it out. My heart thunders like the hoof beats of a hundred charging cavalrymen. My chest feels cold and, if not for the furious tempo of my heart, it might also feel hollow. It’s like she’s taken a scoop and removed my innards, like one might do to a pumpkin on Samhain.

  The blonde dragon shifter sinks onto the overstuffed red sofa and tries to draw Neva onto his lap. I can tell she wants to fold herself into him, but doesn’t allow him to do more than draw her into a sitting position. The other two close ranks around her, the black-haired, angry one sitting beside the blonde, crouching near her like a stone gargoyle, ready and willing to launch himself at me. The third one looks just as unhappy, but only puts a comforting hand on Neva’s shoulder and glances down at her in concern.

  “You apologize,” the blonde orders. His voice has been a gentle baritone thus far, but now it’s deepened to something more authoritative.

  “Herrick, don’t,” Neva mumbles. “She has every right to be angry.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he counters. “It’s not your fault Tenebris put the damn spell on you.”

  “What spell?” I demand, a little of my anger fading in light of the new information. It’s not gone entirely, but having some alternative to simply being left behind is at least more tolerable than thinking she couldn’t be assed to send word.

  “N… Neva?” Draven says as he stares at her.

  “Draven,” she says with a smile.

  “I thought… you were dead.”

  She frowns. “You saw me on the battlefield, with my dragons.”

  He shakes his head and frowns. “No.”

  “Draven, we locked eyes. Don’t you remember?” Neva insists.

  He shakes his head more emphatically. “I can’t… I can’t remember anything about… the battle.”

  “His memory must have been wiped,” Neva says. “Before he was taken hostage in the dungeon.”

  “And the same was done to you,” Titus says as he faces Neva. Then he looks at me. “Your father arranged to have the sorceress Tenebris put a spell on Neva after she was safely hidden away, only to be broken by a certain catalyst. The cloaking spell that hid her was tied to it. She was supposed to be shipped elsewhere and we… lost track of her.”

  I half-turn, slowly craning my head to stare icily at Titus. He flinches away from the accusation in my eyes, dropping his gaze down to the spinning pattern on the floor rather than hold eye contact. Then I look to Draven. “That’s true?”

  He nods. “It’s true.”

  “You knew the truth about Neva all along?” I ask, the word short and clipped.

  There’s truly no words for the anger and hurt I feel at the moment. First Neva failed to find me and now Draven has kept this secret from me all this time? After all we’d shared.

  “I’m so sorry, Princess...”

  “Don’t be sorry, give me answers! Damn it all, why does no one talk to me? How could you know all this and not tell me? I’ve lived all this time thinking Neva’s death was my fault! Mother brought a charred body to me and told me it was Neva and you let me think…”

  Again.

  My voice cracks, this time snagging on the sob that’s building in my throat.

  “I didn’t know it wasn’t her,” he says defensively, jerking his gaze back up to mine. “I had no idea Neva was still alive.”

  There’s still a flinching around his eyes. He’s truly hurt by my accusation, but I can’t stop. I can’t. It’s like my whole life has been a sham. My mother lied to me, my uncle tried to kill me and now this. The man I’ve loved for years, whom I’ve given my body to in the most intimate of ways possible… he didn’t even think to mention the possibility that Neva was still alive.

  Because he didn’t know, I remind myself. He was magicked not to remember the battle. It’s not his fault!

  Under any other circumstances, the thoughts might warm me, but not right now. Right now, I’m too angry, too frustrated with the whole lot of them to extend a hand of forgiveness. I want to stroke Draven’s cheek, erase the look of abject misery playing out on his face, but I steel myself. I’m through catering to others moods. I’m entitled to have my own feelings about this.

  “Sorry about the fire,” the dark-haired dragon says sheepishly. “I wasn’t aiming for you. Just the night hag.”

  “The night hag had a name,” I snap at him, turning streaming eyes back to the dragons arrayed on the couch. “You could at least say it.”

  “She was a traitorous hag,” he says, standing so suddenly that he upends the books that jut off the end of the table and almost upsets the tea service Hattie has been fussing over. The smell of white tea wafts to my nose. “Your mother sold out all of Ascor to Lycaon and the rest of them. Do you have any idea how many people that killed? And she didn’t stop there, either.”

  “She was still my mother,” I insist, swallowing hard.

  He continues to glare at me. “Your sainted mother came looking for Neva when she discovered Neva was still alive. She stabbed Neva with a drecaine coated dagger. Neva nearly died. She’s only just gotten enough strength back to shift. She won’t be able to face Hassan for even longer. So no, I won’t use the bitch queen’s name. Hag is suitable.”

  I snap my mouth shut, cutting off the angry retort I want to lob at him. Because he’s right. If what he says is true, I can’t fault him for hating my mother. But she was my mother. I may not have many pleasant memories of her but... she gave me life. She raised me, taught me as best she could. And, now that I think about it, she tried to protect me, in her own way. She had to have suspected I was Chosen when the poisoned patches sprouted on my palms and yet, she hadn’t killed me or sold me to someone who would.

  “I think there’s enough to worry about without assigning blame, Malvolo,” Neva says, leaning her weight back against Herrick’s chest. “The point is, we’re all here. We’re all safe, and there’s plenty of time to divulge what’s happened in the last fifteen years.”

  I settle unwillingly onto a scarlet pouf and rest my head in my hands. I shy away from Draven’s touch when he tries to take my hand, instead inching closer to Titus, who’s come to sit on my other side. Draven lets his hand drop after a second, and it clenches into a fist on his thigh. His devastatingly handsome face smooths into something unreadable. A pang of guilt twists just below my navel, but I shove it away.

  Madam Trilby pours us all a generous measure of tea, and I take long pulls of mine, savoring the scalding slide down my throat. It thaws some of the cold that rests on my chest and settles the nausea that’s threatened since I impacted Madam Trilby’s warding spell.

  And for the next hour and a half, I’m reg
aled with tales of Neva’s past, both as a dancer at the Wicked Lyre tavern in Ascor and her more recent adventures with her three dragon mates, Herrick, Malvolo and Reve.

  She glosses over the former, an almost haunted look in her eyes at what she has to recall. Gooseflesh springs into being on my arms and I feel like the worst sort of scum for making her relive this, for being angry with her in the first place.

  She seems grateful when Herrick shifts the topic to the exploits of Neva’s friend Kassidy, the guild thief, and what she knows of the woman’s journey to retrieve Sorren’s heart. Ia is able to jump in to finish the tale, a sour twist to her mouth as she recounts what Discordia said and did in the moments leading up to her defeat and subsequent power drain.

  “So there are three Chosen that have already emerged,” I say, a hint of wonder in my tone.

  Sabre’s been oddly quiet since we’ve arrived, observing me in silence. Titus has curled me beneath one arm, holding me fast to his side at my insistence. He keeps sneaking glances at Draven over my head, but it doesn’t stop him from lightly petting one of my thighs. I try not to focus too intently on it, lest I get excited. It’s bad enough the three of them know any time I’m aroused. At least they all know my arousal is strictly for them. The mortification of having Neva’s men know that I’m stimulated... well, that might be too much to live through.

  “Four?” I repeat, casting Sabre a curious glance.

  He nods. “Kassidy encountered the exiled Princess Arianwen during her mission in Delorood. Aria staged a coup against Triton with Kassidy’s help and came into her power in the process. She sent Lar, Sol’s twin and loyal lieutenant, scurrying to find dry land. I hear she’s formidable.”

  I can’t help another twist of anxiety. So many formidable women. I don’t think I can count myself among them. I’ve been nothing but a burden to my daring huntsmen, have done nothing of note except to kill my own country’s men at arms. I couldn’t even defend myself against Madam Trilby’s spell. Titus had to save me.

  Some Chosen I am.