“I didn’t think you would.” Her eyes drifted to Tristan, whose face was still bright with excitement, and her lips curved with a sad smile. “You’re the only one who understands what it’s like to love someone, to be willing to do anything for them despite knowing that you’ll never get to be with them.”

Though I didn’t think it was intended to do so, the sentiment was like a punch to my gut. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep Pénélope safe,” I said.

“I know. You’re the only one I trust her with.” But her hands still balled into fists. “This plan of ours is working for now, but it won’t work for long. I’m afraid… I don’t think I can bear to lose her. But the only way I can see to protect her is to kill him.”

Her father.

“When Tristan talks of killing his father and taking the throne, I know he sees it theoretically,” she said. “As a step in his plan. But when I think of doing the same, I imagine it as it would be. The way it would feel to twist his neck or plunge a knife into his heart. What it would be like to pull him apart as a child might a spider. I see the blood on my hands.”

A tremor ran through her and I didn’t know what to do or what to say, because Anaïs so rarely showed any form of weakness. To acknowledge it might do more harm than good.

“I know he’s evil,” she continued. “I know he’s a villain and that he opposes everything I’m fighting for. But he’s still my father.”

“It might not come to that,” I said, knowing my words were hollow because they did nothing to alleviate the fear growing in my chest. “All we need to do is play our parts until Tristan makes his move, then we can pluck Pénélope from danger and your father can learn to live under a new regime or face the consequences.”

“I know,” she said, rising to her feet and stepping out onto the surface of the water. “But I’m afraid that by the time Tristan’s ready, it will be too late.”

Chapter 12

Pénélope

Over the coming days, I found myself a creature consumed, the intrigue I’d become a part of fighting for precedence with more personal thoughts, the only commonality between them that they both centered on Marc. I saw him often, but always we were in the company of others, and that charged moment we’d shared in the throne room, the intensity of physical contact, remained so elusive and impossible to repeat that part of me wondered if it had happened at all.

But while that fleeting few minutes of intimacy slipped further into the fabric of my imagination, the notion that my friends – and my sister – formed the heart of the sympathizer cause became more and more of a reality to me. Over and over, I ran through the events of that day, and those that had preceded them. From Marc arranging for the human trader to transport contraband, to the twins being behind the strange order, to my father’s inference that he’d expected to catch the humans with propaganda. Most of all, I reflected on how Anaïs had lured my father to the King’s audience where he articulated how little regard the upper classes possessed for half-blood life minutes before sympathizer propaganda was released attacking that very belief system. All of it seemed like a perfectly orchestrated plan to stir up anger against the King and the aristocracy, and one that could only have been accomplished by players at the highest levels.