“Don’t you dare treat me like everyone else,” I demand. Lucien’s obsidian eyes flicker, the pleasant facade of his nearly crumbling. He drops his hands slowly, reaching into his pocket and procuring a kerchief in his palm, dark blue with red rose embroidery. To clean my face of blood? His black eyes are hard and set with determination as they were the first time we met—him as Whisper, the two of us in an alley not much different from this one.

“Why not?” He tilts his head, a smile carving an impression beneath his cowl. “After all, you treated me like a job.”

His words stab right through my tender parts, and my lungs instinctually suck in a bracing breath of air. He ignores it, still that placid, unreal smile on his face as he offers his handkerchief.

“You were the only one who managed to get beneath my armor. I’d ask you to be gentle with me, until I can construct a new set,” he says, dropping the kerchief around my hand. “But I know you despise obeying your crown prince.”

I barely catch the kerchief before it hits the ground, and when I manage to look up again, he’s gone.

My body aches with the aftermath of the blood tears and the blunt force of Lucien’s emotional stabbing. I wipe my face carefully with the kerchief. He was right to be so brutal. Emotions aren’t jewelry, he’d said. But they are. I’d put some very convincing jewels on to deceive him—rubies of love, emeralds of affection. What remained when I took them off, that night in the clearing?

Me. Just me.

The monster, the girl, the killer, and the liar in her bare flesh.

undeserving of life, let alone love.

He held me so close. He touched me so tenderly. But he did it because I’m like everyone else in his eyes. I deceived him, like everyone else in the court does.

I am nothing special to him any longer.

Faintly, I hear another commotion start in the street—the lawguards shouting about a “fugitive thief” in “dark leather.” They barrel past my hiding place and to the next square over. Lucien’s lingered in the streets of Vetris for years—he knows better than to get caught. So why would he purposely flaunt himself in front of lawguards now?

My thief brain hands me the answer neatly; with the guards gone, it’s a clear shot from where I am to the noble-quarter bridge. My Heartless brain answers me painfully:

He pities me.

6

6

The
Wyrm’s Song

I’m sure of only two things in my unlife: that I have royally fucked up (pun intended, thank you very much) and that Lucien deserves someone far better than me.