My hair lifted and swirled on the twisted surge of magic, and I knew this was a battle that my sister wouldn’t survive. Not with the King present. But it was a battle that I could stop before it started.

Stepping out of Marc’s grip, I pulled off my glove and held up my hand, the silver bonding marks glittering in the light. “He has saved me, Anaïs. More than you can ever know.”

Chapter 20

Marc

The maelstrom of power extinguished so swiftly that my ears popped, paving stones landing with a crash on the street, shards of white spinning off in every direction.

“What have you done?”

The words came not from Anaïs, but from Tristan. He strode past Pénélope as though she didn’t exist and grabbed my arm, tearing at my glove. I tried to pull from his grip, but magic took hold of me like a vice, implacable and painfully tight, and it occurred to me that never in all our years had he used his power to force me to do something.

The leather of my glove tore down the back, revealing the gleaming silver bonding marks that magic had painted across my knuckles, and Tristan went still, his eyes glassy and unblinking. “Why?”

“Because otherwise, her father would’ve killed her. He tried to today when he found out about… about the child.”

“And this was your solution? To sacrifice yourself so that she might have a few more days?” His grip tightened to the point I thought my wrist would snap. “Why didn’t you come to me for help?”

“Would you have given it?” I asked. “Or would you have merely done everything in your power to stop me from walking this path?”

He dropped my arm. “I suppose we’ll never find out.”

It was no answer, which was so painfully typical of him. As he turned to walk back to Anaïs, I said, “I didn’t just do it to save her, you know. I did it because I love her and we deserve the chance to be together.”

He didn’t respond, instead taking the arm of the weeping Anaïs, steadying her and bending to say something in her ear before pulling her against him. Fresh tears burst across her face, and she clung to him with enough force that the fabric of his shirt tore. He said something else to her that I couldn’t hear, then lifted his head to meet my gaze. And I could see that he didn’t understand – that for him, no amount of self-sacrifice was too great to ask in pursuit of his vision. An almost feral anger burned through me, and in that moment, I prayed to fate that one day he’d love someone enough to throw caution and logic and reason and his cursed plans to the wind for her sake, and to have to bear those consequences and the judgment that came with them.

“Well then, congratulations,” Tristan said. “I hope she’s worth it.” With Anaïs tucked under his arm, he turned and walked away.