The prince suddenly moves in, our chests perilously close to touching, our moonlit shadows mingling on the ruins of the tower. He looks down at me with a soft edge to his black eyes—an echo of the softness in his gaze I beheld in the Hunt’s tent, just before the kiss that lit my soul on fire. He smells faintly of not ash and clearwater, but of something like white mercury. Perhaps that’s just the city’s smell.

“Zera.” He says my name gently, like fingers on a windlute’s deepest notes. “Please. Tell me—what are you doing for my sister?”

I want to trust him. I want to trust the warmth seeping into me from beneath his skin. I want to trust his lips, so close. I want to trust that he holds enough affection for me, still, to be this close willingly, to believe me when I speak.

“You actually think I would tell you the truth? After everything I’ve done?” I whisper up at him.

“I’m giving you another chance to,” he says.

I want to believe in another chance. But I know. I know this is just an act—the same one he uses to fool the court, the nobles, the girls who dare bat their eyes at him. Beneath this softness is a brittle disappointment, a deep and betrayed hurt. I can see it, sharp and ever-growing, like rose thorns taken root in his eyes.

No amount of petals can cover the wounds I’ve inflicted on him. On us.

There is no going back.

My sadness and guilt give way to disbelieving fury. He’s using me. He’s using our attraction against me right now. Is he that desperate for information about what his sister is doing?

With perfect, enraged control, I tilt my face up to his, our lips nearly touching as I murmur, “Don’t you trust your sister, Your Highness? You heard her in the clearing. She’s going to stop the war. Isn’t that what you want? A peaceful country for your people?”

He doesn’t step away. On the contrary, he puts his hand on my hip, and my whole body ripples with a shudder from the epicenter. “She can’t do that alone.”

To melt into him right now would be so easy. Malachite might as well not exist, Fione likewise blank. Right now, it’s just him and me and the stars. But our chests pressed together would beat with the sound of only one heart.

he’s using us like everyone else does, the hunger sneers. we are nothing to him but a doll.

I tear myself away, my skin enmeshed in his crying out at the pain of being pulled apart. I turn to Fione, whose cheeks are tinged with the slightest red, her eyes wide. Lucien is trying to use me. All three of them are. But I can use them, too.