by Laura Kenyon
Chapter Twenty-Three
ANGUS
It might seem obvious to say that, as a politician, Angus Kane was no stranger to betrayal. After all, he’d risen from insignificant wretch with no influential allies to prime minister of the most influential realm in the world. He’d lobbied his office from a two-term limit to four. He’d cleaned up the streets of Carpale and kissed babies and incited record crowds to both applaud and threaten to kill him.
History would call this a testament to his intelligence and say he earned his stripes as honorably as he could. But in reality, “as he could” changed meaning at any given hour on any given day. In reality, Angus Kane’s link to betrayal went even deeper than any of his colleagues could ever understand. He was conceived because of it. He was born in the thick of it. He watched his mother disintegrate because of it. And for well over half of his lonely, bitter life, he’d been consumed by it.
Perhaps that’s why his surprise visitor late Friday night didn’t actually surprise him all that much. He’d sat on the front lines as husbands betrayed wives, fathers rejected sons, sisters demolished sisters, and even the best of friends sold each other out for a fleeting gratification.
When she first popped in, Angus felt inclined to summon the Marestam Guard sitting outside his door. But he hadn’t reached the highest elected office in the land by reacting as if everything was black and white, cut and dry. He knew that every enemy had the potential to be an asset. He also knew anyone could be persuaded to turn—especially if they were already beginning to persuade themselves.
So in the end, Angus decided to open the doors of Aaron Charmé’s private office and invite his visitor to take a seat. He would have used the throne room, but the Charmés had stopped greeting visitors there years ago, calling the venue “elitist” and “intimidating.” It was one of the reasons he couldn’t truly hate the Charmés—at least not the same way he hated the others: Letitia with her narcissistic extravagance. Snow with her irresponsible pacifism. The Tirions with their obsessive tunnel vision. And Donner. He hated Donner Wickenham for more reasons than he could count—for his adolescent vanity, for his presumptuous greed, for corrupting an innocent woman, for overlooking everyone around him, for his last name, and most of all, for sharing half of Angus’s blood without having the slightest clue.
The prime minister said barely ten words during the impromptu meeting, having learned that silence and a steely presence work far better than questions. He sat on the armchair, emotionless, holding his cane between his legs and nodding. When the claim came across that Ruby Welles had lost her powers, he started kneading into the marbleized purple sphere beneath his fingers. It had come from Selladóre, on the day of the Great Awakening—the day his plan finally began to seem feasible. There was something about it that caught his eye, so he’d lugged it back to Pastora along with a quibbling young man who called himself Davin. He’d had it cut and polished and placed atop his walking stick. Now, it served as a reminder that his mission had roots that stretched back more than three centuries. It was so much bigger than regular old vengeance.
When his visitor finally left, Angus felt like he’d just captured a goose who could not only lay golden eggs, but could also level entire castles with a single blast from his beak.
“I want every guard on duty by two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” he instructed the chief of the Marestam Guard as soon as Aaron’s office was empty again. “Double what we’ve assigned to Selladóre, get me in touch with your best commander tonight, and quadruple operatives stationed around Carpale’s lower east side. I just received intelligence indicating an imminent attack on the Hall of Curiosities.”
Chief Kind’s eyes bugged wide, exposing a thick line of white around his entire iris. “Yes sir,” he replied, commenting on what seemed to be an emergency-scale response to an unidentified threat. “I’ll lock down the entire area and alert the heads of the kingdoms.”
“No,” Angus said, maintaining the same opaque, confident cool that had gotten him this far. “Plainclothes but carrying. We need to lure them in before capture. Make them feel comfortable before we attack. And I have reason to believe the kingdom heads to which you’re referring have already been compromised. In order for this operation to succeed, it must remain for Parliament’s and my ears only. Please inform your commanders accordingly.”
Chief Kind hesitated for a moment. “But protocol says—”
Angus parted his feet and planted the base of his cane between them. He narrowed his eyes at the man, slightly less than half his age, and waited.
“Of course,” Toby Kind finally sputtered, gluing his arms against his sides. “Whatever you say, Prime Minister.” He raised his right hand in a rigid, speedy salute. “Plainclothes. Armed. Hall of Curiosities and Selladóre. Top notch classified. You got it, sir.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
PENELOPEA
“I don’t know. It’s a lot to swallow,” Penny said, swaying slightly with a half-full glass of champagne in her hand. She and her friends were holed up in Selladóre Castle’s Maritime Drawing Room (inaptly named by the government-sponsored Preservation Society) while Letitia got stitched into her wedding dress on the other side of the building. By some miracle, her mother-in-law had decided that not even Penny should see her before her grand entrance. It was a slight that gave the reluctant queen-to-be space to breathe for the first time in months. “Personally, I think Elmina’s first theory about Ruby holds more water than the one about Angus.”
“You do?” The shock in Belle’s voice trilled over the mechanical noise of her breast pump, which she’d hidden beneath an overpriced blanket with a strap on one end. She pushed herself further up on the couch. “Penny, you think it’s more likely that Ruby’s the villain here than Angus?”
Penny traipsed over to a table overflowing with petite sandwiches, fruit platters, and crudités. It was shoved up against a stunning wall of windows overlooking the East River. “I didn’t call her a villain. I’m just saying we know fairies lose their magic when they cast curses. We have no idea whether … what’s her name again? Janetta?” She turned abruptly towards Dawn, sloshing the remaining half of her drink on the carpet.
But Dawn was too busy pulling at a loose red curl to hear the question. Letitia had commandeered her go-to stylist for the day, and her usual twist updo just hadn’t turned out the same.
“What was the name of that maniac who tried to kill you?” Penny repeated.
“Oh.” Dawn poked at her hair a few more times and then resumed tying tiny purple ribbons around gold boxes of truffles—last-second favors for Letitia’s esteemed guests. “Jacara.”
“Right.” Penny gave an exuberant nod even though her head felt like a bowling ball. She’d barely slept a wink last night, and what few dreams she had were terrorized by a giant lizard in a wedding dress trying to staple a crown to Penny’s skull. “Yes. Jacara. Well, we have no idea whether it’s even possible that Jacara’s magic survived after the curse broke. Even Elmina said it’s never happened before. It just seems like quite a leap based purely on the fact that Angus happened to be there the day the spell broke. Hunter was there too. Does that mean we should be accusing him as well?”
Dawn’s cheeks flushed red first, followed by the rest of her face. She tossed a wrapped gold box into the pile between her and Rapunzel. “Of course not,” she said, her tone slightly hostile. “And perhaps on its own, that could be seen as a coincidence. But don’t forget he’s been hiding Cindy’s disappearance, too. And his public address the other night made it pretty clear he wants the monarchies gone. And for goodness sake,” she added, pointing her entire body toward Belle, “the painting he gave Belle turned out to be a charm—a charm that take pictures, judging Perrin Hildebrand’s column yesterday. Does all of that really seem like a coincidence to you?”
Penny tugged on the monstrous teal bow on the side of her satin dress. She wasn’t trying to start an argument, but these days everyone was wound tighter than Letit
ia at a mud wrestling biker bar. She absolutely believed Angus was up to no good. She believed he was a greedy, conniving old man who’d always wanted to take over Marestam and saw an opportunity when the public started losing faith in the monarchies. But she had a hard time swallowing the whole criminal mastermind, stole-history’s-most-powerful-fairy’s-powers story. Ruby losing her self-righteous cool one day and casting a spell that accidentally wound up affecting an innocent child, on the other hand… That, she could wrap her mind around.
“I’m not saying he isn’t up to something,” she clarified, refilling her glass and popping a purple grape between her teeth. “I’m just saying he might not be the only one.”
“Here, here,” Rapunzel chimed in, though without her usual merriment. She was slumped down in her chair, gazing at her cell phone with a half-tied box of truffles in her lap. Her face and lips were unusually pale, and she hadn’t touched a single drop of food—or drink—since she arrived. Outwardly, she blamed this on “the nauseating presence of Belle’s milking machine,” but Penny didn’t buy it. She’d heard about Ethan—the deceit, the trip to Stularia, leaving him on an island halfway across the world thirty-five hours before his father’s wedding—but never expected to see Rapunzel so crestfallen over a man.
“It’s about time someone else saw through that imperious old nutball,” Rapunzel continued. She then gave a sigh and trailed off, as if the very act of talking was sapping all of her energy. “Sorry, my mind’s on overload. Ethan’s on his way back from the airport and he keeps sending me these cryptic messages that don’t make any sense.” She furrowed her brow at her phone one more time, then looked up. “Sorry. That’s another issue. Back to Ruby. What I meant to say is I don’t trust her as far as I could kick her. But I think Angus is just as bad if not worse.”
Penny frowned. “Thanks for the help,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm and punctuated by a hiccup.
Dawn took this opportunity to commandeer her friend’s glass and replace it with water. There would be a top-shelf open bar after the wedding, but Penny still had a coronation to get through.
“Hey,” Belle cooed in a tone more suited for a drowsy baby. “Everyone here is under a lot of stress, but taking it out on each other is just going to make things worse. Guessing who to trust and not trust isn’t going to change anything now. Hazel, Elmina, and Grethel will find out soon enough what’s going on, and I’m sure they’ll come to us first if Ruby’s been less than genuine. So let’s let them handle it for a few hours and focus on the reason we’re all here today—to support Penny. Okay?”
No one made a sound for several seconds—Penny included. While she appreciated Belle’s words, she was still fairly miffed by Ruby’s decision to assemble her precious triad today, of all days. Her coronation and Letitia’s wedding were going to be stressful enough without a band of renegades flooding midtown Carpale with illegal magic at the same time.
As it stood, Penny had already survived three panic attacks since sunrise—one when Letitia’s black roses showed up with brown along the edges; one because the special-order aisle runner, dyed to match Riverfell’s flag exactly, unfurled six feet short of the doorway; and one because her brother-in-law was still at Marestam General—unshowered, wearing two-day-old clothes, and refusing to answer Logan’s calls. Had her friends really wanted to “support” her, they would have forced Ruby to choose a different day—or at least wait until the “celebration” was beginning to die down. Like midnight. Wasn’t that when magical enchantments were supposed to end anyway? Wasn’t there some sort of secret universal agreement about that?
But rather than open that box of negativity, Penny forced a smile and thanked everyone again for coming to her pre-execution gathering. The coronation would begin in roughly two hours now, and the butterflies in her stomach were starting to feel more like vampire bats. She still couldn’t believe this was happening—and not in the dream-come-true sort of way. She wondered if any of her friends realized she was as much a victim of Donner’s rampage as was Belle, Rye, and Kiarra Kane. Had it not been for him, Kiarra would have insisted Carter take the crown and make her his queen; Logan would have finally seen the light at the end of his mother’s birth canal; and Penny would have started the life she’d always hoped for—the one that involved a white picket fence and chicken dinners that came out overcooked sixty percent of the time.
“How many of these do you need again?” Rapunzel whined, tossing two more boxes into the pile and then collapsing back into the chair.
Penny pressed her lips together and surveyed the pile. There had to be, what, thirty there? Then she surveyed her friends. Each one of them looked mentally and physically exhausted. Belle had excruciating mastitis on top of her other injuries, and was on pins and needles waiting to find out whether the triad could reverse her little boy’s curse. Rapunzel was in a monumental row with the only man she’d ever loved, and she’d been traumatically mum about her reunion with Grethel. And Dawn … well, if Dawn truly believed Elmina’s theory, she could be wiped off the face of the planet any given moment—along with her children. Penny could have scraped the gloom with a hairpin.
“That’s plenty,” Penny lied, scooping up the heap of truffle boxes and tossing them into a shopping bag. “Thanks again for your help.” She then reclaimed her own champagne glass, placed a full one in front of Rapunzel, and circled the room to refill the others. When the bottle was fully drained, she plopped into an armchair and initiated a cheers to their absent companions.
Rapunzel cringed as Belle switched off her breast pump, pulled a full bottle of milk from beneath her cover, and shook her head. Still pink.
“So has Ethan found out anything about Cindy?” Penny asked, desperate to pull a little more life out of Rapunzel. “Last I heard, he was contacting all of his colleagues in Ellada, right? Any luck?” All she got was a quick glance of surprise followed by a headshake. “Well, like Belle said, I’m sure we’ll know everything by the end of the day anyway. Between their powers and what they can draw from all of those charms at the Hall of Curiosities, it should take no time, right?” She took in all the head nods, then thought of something else. “It is just the three of them, I assume. It might look a little suspicious if Ruby wasn’t at the wedding and—”
Dawn nodded mid-sip. “She’s supposed to stay here so as to not arouse suspicion. She’s not very much help to them without her magic anyway.” She looked squarely at Penny. “Yet another reason why she probably doesn’t have anything to hide.”
Penny ignored this comment and took another slug of her opiate. “We’ll see. How’s Hunter doing with everything?”
Dawn started. Her crossed leg slipped to the floor as champagne splattered over her knee. “With what?” she asked, blinking four times in quick succession.
All heads turned toward her and tilted. What was that reaction for?
Penny looked around, confused. “With … with the merger and finally getting control of Selladóre. What else would I mean?”
“Oh, of course. He’s doing well.” Dawn let out a nervous chuckle and stood up. She crossed the room and filled a small plate with carrot sticks and a quarter of a turkey sandwich. “It’s a change, for sure, but I think it will be fine.”
Penny furrowed her brow. Why were all of her friends being so distant right now?
“What’s Liam Devereaux like?” Belle chimed in, half a second before Dawn’s plate tumbled from her hand, sending miniature sandwiches scattering.
“Oops sorry!” she exclaimed, frantically wiping mayonnaise off a bunch of purple grapes.
Penny told her not to worry about it, but Dawn continued wiping as if she was polishing an antique vase.
“He’s nice,” she continued. “I mean, from what I gather. I’ve only spoken to him a few times. Most of those business dinners are all fluff and numbers, you know. No one wants to talk shop with the wife.”
She giggled. Three heads nodded. Six eyes squinted. Something about her mannerisms seemed
fishy.
“Sure,” Rapunzel said, her voice gaining in strength. “Just don’t let your guard down. I hear he’s quite the playboy.”
Dawn’s chin launched up. “You have?”
Rapunzel grinned. “Oh, yeah. Loads of girls—mostly foreigners. Dancers and low-level socialites, so it’s understandable you wouldn’t have heard about them. I guess it’s more about quantity than quality for some guys.” She shrugged. “To each his own, I guess.”
Dawn was frozen, grapes dangling from one hand while the other smothered them with the napkin. “I don’t know if I’d believe that,” she finally said, placing the mutilated grapes back on the platter. “I may not know him that well, but Davin’s not the sort of guy to—”
“Davin?” Penny interrupted, sucking every extraneous noise from the room. “Who’s Davin?”
Dawn sputtered a few times, did a fantastic impression of a meerkat on high alert, and finally caved.
For the next forty minutes, Penny, Belle and Rapunzel sat with mouths wide open while Dawn—perfect little eighteenth century Dawn—told them all about the long-lost love she’d stumbled upon in the woods. She told them how she always thought he’d died during the Great Sleep. She told them about his breathtaking diamond-studded trees and fiber optic flowers and invisible frozen walkway. She told them how his return made her realize how dangerous the mind could be, how it could recreate the past and blind you to the present, and how the one true love she really wanted was the husband she’d pushed away for the past eleven years. And then she told them about Angus Kane’s role in the whole thing.
“The only thing I can’t figure out is why he hasn’t exposed me yet,” she said, now perched on the edge of an armchair, eyes examining the floor. “I guess he’s waiting for the perfect moment. Just in case he needs us for something.”
“Wow,” Rapunzel said, her cheeks finally showing some color. “I … I honestly don’t know what to react to first. The fact that you kept all this from us for months or the fact that you actually did something immoral.”
