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Copyright © 2017 by Amanda Bouchet
Cover and internal design © 2017 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover art by Gene Mollica
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.
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CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
A Sneak Peek at Heart on Fire
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For my husband, without whom no meals would have been cooked for the last two years.
CHAPTER 1
Waking up from a deep, healing sleep reminds me of rushing toward the surface of a lake, brightness beckoning from above and bubbles fizzing all around me.
Consciousness threads through me in a delicate weave. It’s afternoon. The air smells of bright sun, hot stone, and endless days of summer drought. Insects chirp, their droning song a parched melody, the heat so thick I could cut it with a knife. I don’t question the time of day, just which day, and I’m guessing it’s not the same day I fell asleep. And almost died. Again.
Under the sheet, I brush my fingers over the tender skin on my stomach, finding the raised bump of a fresh scar there. Just one more mark to join the others, inside and out.
I look toward Griffin’s side of the bed, not surprised to find it empty and the sheets cold. He has things to do, a realm to run.
I sigh, which is absurd. I never sighed until I met Griffin.
The indent of his head still creases the pillow, and I slide my hand into the hollow, thinking about how far we’ve come since he abducted me for my Kingmaker Magic and I fought him at every turn.
But Griffin got more than he bargained for with me, and I still can’t bring myself to tell him the worst.
Harbinger of the end. Destroyer of realms.
I squeeze my eyes shut, craving the blissful avoidance of heavy sleep again. But I’m not tired anymore, and half-truths and glaring omissions fester in my belly, cold blocks of dread sitting right there under the heat of my new scar. Who I am. The dreadful prophecy. I wasn’t even truthful about Daphne’s lurking and threats, and hiding things from Griffin is exactly what landed me in this bed, injured and aching. Griffin’s former lover knew what she was doing when she hid in the shadows and threw a knife into my gut. What she didn’t know was that I would pull it out and throw it back.
The door opens, and I turn my head, my heart thudding at the sight of Griffin. Tall, broad, muscular but sleek, he stalks into the room like a predator, his gait balanced and sure, his glittering, gray eyes focused entirely on me. Inky hair, a hawkish nose, that stubborn jaw, and thick, black stubble make him look hard and intimidating. With his sword strapped on and his dark brows lowered, he’s a warlord on the prowl.
I shiver. I couldn’t want him more.
A lightning storm sizzles to life in my magic-charged veins. I look at Griffin, feel him near, and I can ignore all the terrifying things that make me want to crawl inside of myself and disappear. He stops next to the bed, and my blood simmers with heat and need. I wonder what he’ll do to me. What I’ll do to him.
I reach for him, but Griffin crosses his arms and stares down at me from above.
My hand hangs awkwardly in the air, and my heart hovers along with it. An awful tightness clamps around my throat, turning my voice to gravel. “I can still feel you inside me.”
His stony expression doesn’t change, but his iron gaze dips to my bare breasts. When his eyes flick back up, they’re like frosted granite. “Have you enjoyed making a fool out of me?”
The bottom of my stomach drops out with sickening force. I pull the sheet up to cover myself, clutching it hard to keep my hands from trembling. It doesn’t work. Adrenaline roars through me, making me shake.
“What do you mean?” My eyes are wide, my words reedy. Guilty. It’s a good thing I’m not a gambler if this is my game face. But I’ve never had so much to lose.
Griffin reaches out and rips the sheet from my hands and right off the bed. He holds on to it. “I think you know. Or are there too many lies to choose from?”
I sit up, shame and anxiety splashing red-hot color all over my naked skin. At the realm dinner, Griffin vowed to uncover my secrets. I didn’t think he’d do it this fast. “I haven’t lied to you.”
His lip curls in disgust. “And there’s another one. How easily they slide from your tongue.”
The usual steadiness in his eyes is gone. A storm boils in them instead. Anger and violence roll in on dark clouds. Something devastated and terrible in the way he watches me makes the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Warily, I reach for the sheet, but his knuckles whiten on the linen. Instead of getting into a tug-of-war I’ll lose, I twist, ignoring the sharp twinge in my middle, and then grab a pillow to shield myself. My unbound hair slides over my shoulders, covering me somewhat from Griffin’s livid stare.
“I may have left out a few details,” I admit, turning back around. Really important details. “But what I told you was the truth.”
His eyes flare with a promise of punishment he’s never directed at me before. “Is that so…Lukia.”
I grip the pillow hard, something breaking inside me. Griffin remembers everything I tell him. As his Magoi advisor—his expert on all things magic, royals, realms, creatures, and Gods—I once told him Beta Fisa’s name is Lukia. The missing heir to the Fisan throne. The Lost Princess.
Her name isn’t Lukia, and somehow Griffin knows that now. He knows it’s me.
/> A dull numbness starts to cut me off from the nausea churning in my empty stomach, and I realize I’ve gone light-headed.
“You’re good and just and fair,” I say hoarsely. Looking at him is like seeing a mirage. Here one moment, and everything I could possibly want. Gone in the blink of an eye.
Harshly, he asks, “And what are you?”
The question opens a barely scabbed-over wound, and the answer hurts. I’m a murderer. Fratricide? All in a day’s work. Twice. Serving up innocent people to an evil queen, knowing it was their doom? Been there. Done that. Abandoning Fisa, Fisans, to the whims of a vicious sociopath because I was too scared to stick around? Yeah, that’s me, too.
Bile stings my throat. I swallow, and it tastes like the bitter end. “A liar, a killer, and a coward.”
Intense stillness overtakes Griffin, giving the impression of calm. It makes me shudder on the inside. Before I even see him move, he whips the pillow from my grasp and flings it across the room. It knocks over a vase, and the painted jar shatters, leaving broken pieces on the floor.
I shatter, too, the person I was just becoming fragmenting into shards like the broken vase. That woman only had a tenuous, tentative grip on my heart and mind to begin with. Now, my new, stupidly hopeful expectations float around me in a vortex of shame.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, heat searing the backs of my eyes.
“You don’t share what’s on the inside,” he grates out.
Griffin stares at me, but there’s no desire in his eyes. Only raging disappointment, and I’ve never felt so exposed and vulnerable in my entire life. I don’t just feel stripped. I feel stripped raw.
“So you’ll look your fill at the outside?” I ask.
His nostrils flare. After a charged breath, he tosses the sheet back to me. “Cover yourself.”
My throat closes up. Those two words hurt me more than I ever imagined they could. Like a ringing body slap, they sting from head to toe.
“Catalia Fisa.” Griffin chews up and spits out the name I never told him in full. I’ll never be “just Cat” again. I’m not even Cat of Fisa. I don’t just come from my realm. I am my realm. “Body and soul, Your Highness. Inside and out. I want both. Or neither.”
My heart goes into painful overdrive, twisting and hammering against my ribs. “Neither?”
His flat stare says, You heard me. He doesn’t open his mouth.
“But Griffin—”
“Don’t.” He turns like a caged animal and prowls the length of the room. His voice the low rumble of a breaking storm, he growls, “Don’t you dare lie to me again.”
Pressing my lips together, I wrap the sheet around myself, knot it, and then stand. Physically, I’m at a huge disadvantage compared to Griffin, and lying down only makes it worse. Standing isn’t much better. My legs are weak. My chest feels hollow. “How did you find out?”
“That you’re Beta Fisa? The absent link in the Fisan line? The runaway princess?” He barks a harsh laugh I don’t like at all and then cuts me a sidelong glance from under slashing brows. “That your bloodthirsty mother is one of the few people that can keep me from fixing this Gods damned place and making it better? That you’re the oldest living spawn of the scourge of Thalyria!”
I flinch. That last part isn’t a question, even rhetorical. It’s a condemnation. A slur. Griffin whips another savage look in my direction, his strong hands balling into fists. My eyes track those big, powerful hands. I used to wonder if he would use them to hurt me. Maybe I should never have stopped.
I shrug, a hot-cold knot tightening in my chest. “That’s one way of putting it.”
Griffin’s stare turns blistering. Then his bellow rattles the windows, and what’s left of his usual iron self-control deserts him faster than I can blink. He picks up a chair and hurls it across the room. It cracks against the wall with a menacing thud, one leg snapping off completely. A bowl follows, a basin, and then a pitcher filled with water. I watch in dumbstruck anguish as things splinter, shatter. His face is terrifying to look at. Every inch of his body is coiled taut in anger. He picks up another heavy chair and pounds it into kindling. When there’s nothing left to destroy, he overturns the table with a vile curse and then kicks the underside so hard the wood cracks. The solid piece of furniture screeches across the floor, and I wince.
He swings back to me, looming large and dark and breathing hard. “Flippancy.” His eyes rake over me. “Why am I not surprised?”
Something wilts inside of me under the searing heat of Griffin’s wrath, seeing in the towering man before me the warlord I know is capable of explosive violence. Despite all the times I’ve provoked him, he’s never once looked at me this way before—like he could hurt me.
Usually I laugh, or at least pretend to, in the path of danger or in the face of unmitigated rage. Not this time. I manage to lift my chin, though. “The truth is out. I don’t know what you want me to say. You got me?”
“You got me?” he thunders, stalking forward. “You got me!”
I clamp my mouth shut and hold my ground. I’m indefensible. I’m a lot of things, but a hypocrite isn’t one of them.
My silence always irks him. This time, it drives him into a full-blown fury. Griffin unsheathes his sword, not even a shred of his rational, reasonable, steady self remaining. When he reaches for me, my blood runs cold, but all he does is manually—and none too gently—remove me from my spot next to the bed. Once I’m out of the way, he hauls back with a two-handed grip and swings down with a furious shout. His blade sinks into the mattress, and I gasp. He heaves his sword back up and then brings it down again. And again. Each hit harder and more savage than the last. In a mighty cyclone of destruction, he slashes, spears, cracks, slices, and breaks everything. In mere minutes, he reduces what was once our huge bed into a heap of mangled feathers, fabrics, and splintered wood.
A hot ache crawls up the back of my throat. My eyes sting, and I tuck my lips between my teeth, biting down to keep my tears in check. My mouth still trembles. He demolished the bed, the one thing in this room with any meaning to us.
Cats don’t cry. I will not cry.
Griffin turns to me, his chest heaving and his eyes feral. I almost can’t hold his stare. “Helen, your cousin, had her baby.”
I blink. My emotions are tumbling like a wild tide, deafening me with their rip and roar, and it takes a moment to latch on to the change in topic. “Here?”
He nods, the movement terse like his words. “She heard you were attacked, for some reason thought she’d be blamed for it, and panicked. It must have triggered labor. Her whole family ended up staying here while the rest of the realm dinner guests left.”
“Her family?” Alarm hits me like a fist in the face. I have to run!
“Her husband’s family.”
Oh. Right. “Who is her husband?” I never took the time to find out. Helen and I barely talked at the realm dinner when we accidentally crossed paths. I was too focused on getting her away from Griffin before she gave away my secrets, or I did something unforgivable, like force her to back off with Compulsion Magic.
“Oreste,” he answers.
“Oreste? Agatone and Urania’s son?” I remember him being preoccupied and waiting for someone to join him at the realm dinner. Helen, I guess.
A scathing smile twists Griffin’s lips. “Not jealous, I hope?”
I scoff. “That’s not funny, you know.” And he obviously knows a lot.
“Oreste and I had an interesting conversation while my mother, Egeria, and Jocasta were tending to Helen behind closed doors. Nerves made him prattle incessantly throughout the entire ordeal, and guess what I learned?” Griffin spears his sword into the upturned table, leaving both the blade and the heavy hilt vibrating from the force of his thrust.
“Helen wasn’t his original choice of brides. He and his parents set their sights mu
ch higher, aiming for a Fisan princess and thinking their old lineage, strong magic, and deep coffers could buy them the best there was to have, even if she was little more than a child at the time. But Alpha Fisa must have had other plans for her daughter. She wouldn’t give her up. In fact, Andromeda was so enraged by their presumptuous offer that she sent their messenger back in the form of a bloody stump.” Griffin levels accusing eyes on me. “Know anything about that?”
I don’t answer. I can hardly breathe.
“Oreste, it turns out, is very satisfied now, after all these years of waiting for the ideal wife. Apparently, he’s thrilled he didn’t ‘get saddled with that hellion Catalia. She was wild, hostile, and unpredictable, too much like her mother, and now she’s Beta Fisa and bloody gone, leaving her family in a right mess.’” Griffin’s eyes blaze, burning straight to the bottom of my polluted soul. “Sound like anyone you know, Talia?”
I nod, sickened, unable to force a single word past the awful lump in my throat.
“He described you perfectly. Not physically, but all the rest.” Griffin scrapes his hand through his hair, gives the overlong strands a vicious pull, and then kicks the table again. The central board buckles this time, splintering. “I’ve been so bloody thick about this! About you.” He laughs, and the broken sound makes me flinch. “It had to slap me in the face for me to see it. I just… I never thought you could be part of that…despicable family.”
His words carve a hole in my chest. Despicable. I am despicable.
I start to shake again. A day ago, Griffin was vowing we’d live together, or die trying. Now, he can’t even look at me.
Foreboding, accusing, he asks, “What’s it like being the Lost Princess? The woman everyone is looking for?”
“They’re not looking for me. They’re hunting me.”
“You do a fine job of hunting back.”
I feel myself pale. Griffin saw me kill my own brother. He knows our connection now. Otis deserved it, and it was us or him, but I still did it. I’m that person. I’m everything Griffin despises.
“I didn’t tell you for a reason. This is it.” I hate the way my voice falters, but I can’t help it. Every breath seems to stick in my throat.
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