by Eva Chase
“I fulfilled my duty to the best of my ability, your—” he rasped out, and the slash of the first guard’s dagger cut off his voice and the light from his eyes. He crumpled in a heap on the ground.
My chest constricted. This man had waited so long for me to show up. He’d believed in me so much. And now he’d followed me straight to his death.
The guards didn’t offer any time to grieve. They lunged at me and Hatter. Hatter bolted for the one now hauling Doria away, hatpin in his hand. A beefy guy barged into the way, shattering the pin with a smack of his sword. He belted Hatter across the forehead so hard Hatter’s hat flew into the air. He skidded backward ten feet across the ground.
They couldn’t kill him too. Anguish and desperation seared through me, and the ring beneath my clothes flared. The vest’s rubies lit up with a glow that pierced my blouse.
I jerked up my arm to block the blow of a baton, and a wave of energy jolted off me. It slammed into the guards nearby, sending them stumbling backward. What the hell?
I spun and ran to Hatter. Blood was streaking through his spiky hair. I snatched at his shoulder to help him up, but he couldn’t seem to lift his head all the way—it kept swaying to the side, his eyes squinting. Oh, fuck, that guard had hit him hard.
And now three more of them were racing toward us, recovered from whatever magic my vest had hit them with. I turned to shield Hatter, willing that magic to activate again, but the rubies’ glow had dimmed. The guards didn’t even hesitate.
Chess’s presence brushed past my side. He hefted Hatter up over what must have been his invisible shoulder and gripped my hand.
“Time to get out of here, lovely,” he murmured in a strained voice.
I glanced back toward the Red Knight’s fallen body, toward Doria in the guard’s grasp—and to the five now rushing toward us. My body protested, but I knew with complete certainty that if we stayed, we were dead meat.
Clamping my jaw against a sob, I spun and fled with Chess.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hatter
I became aware of my surroundings in bits and pieces. First, so loud it drowned out every other sensation for who knew how long, was the blare of pain in my head. It splintered across my scalp and dug through my skull, sparking sharper when someone dabbed a cloth against the wound.
Something was dripping in a halting rhythm, not that far from my ears. A cool earthy smell trickled into my nose. I was lying on a thin padded surface, no weight of a hat on my head. Where was my fucking hat?
Images from before my current situation flashed through my head. The burning replica of the gate. The guards. The guards with their hands clamped around Doria’s arms, dragging her off toward the palace, her eyes so round and terrified—
A jolt of horror shot through me. I tried to find my eyes or my mouth through the pain, but I couldn’t quite get enough of a grip on either to open them.
“Are you sure the guards won’t find this place?” The haze of pain turned Lyssa’s voice fuzzy around the edges. She was the one dabbing at my head. A cool prickling started to seep through the wound, dulling the ache.
“This cellar has been a Spades safe house for as long as I’ve been around and probably a lot longer before that,” Chess said. “If they haven’t found it before, I doubt they will now. I’d have hidden out here myself the other night if it hadn’t proved leaky.”
Her hand stilled against my hair. “I don’t know what else to do for him.”
“It hasn’t been too long. Hatter’s a resilient fellow.” Chess shifted with a rustle of his clothes. “There are people in the Spades with more medical experience than I can offer. I’ll check for guards around here and bring someone who’ll be able to help if I can. There are food and blankets down here along with the other supplies. Use whatever you need.”
“Chess,” Lyssa started, but he must have already slipped away. Her voice fell. Her hand came to rest on my arm with a gentle pressure.
I knew the cellar safe house. Lyssa must have put some of the healing gel on my wound. Its chill had eaten away at the worst of the pain, even if my mind was still muggy. I made another effort to blink, and my eyes popped open.
Relief washed across Lyssa’s face where she was sitting next to me. Her hand tightened on my arm. “Hatter, are you all right? How do you feel?”
“I can’t say this is the most enjoyable sensation I’ve ever experienced.” My voice came out rusty. I cleared my throat. “What happened? Is Doria—”
The distress that flickered through her features was all the answer I needed. I jerked upright instinctively, and Lyssa let out a noise of protest.
I didn’t make it very far anyway. The second my head left the bench I was lying on, dizziness hit me so hard my stomach clenched with nausea. It was either lie back down or vomit and then collapse. I let my head fall.
“I’m sorry,” Lyssa said. “You’re too hurt to go running off anywhere. There was a really big guard, and he hit you hard. Maybe he’s got some kind of special physique like the twins do. Until you woke up, I was worried he’d broken your skull.”
Tiny shards of pain were still wriggling around the numbed edges of the wound. “Let’s not discount that possibility yet. They took Doria? Someone has to go. She can’t— They caught her. The Queen might already have ordered—”
“Stop,” Lyssa interrupted, squeezing my arm. Her voice trembled for a second. “We’re going to get her back. We’re going to save everyone. Chess thinks the Queen will hold onto Doria and the other Spades they caught until she holds her big trial, to add to the spectacle. We’ve got a little time.”
Chess couldn’t know that. And even if he was right, my daughter was chained up in the Queen’s prison now, not knowing if we’d get to her in time, only knowing I hadn’t managed to protect her.
Ignoring common sense, I tried to sit up again. This time Lyssa caught me before my shoulders even left the bench. She bent over me, holding me down gently but firmly. I was going to argue with her when I saw her chin wobble. She clamped her mouth into a firm line, but there was no mistaking the watery gleam in her eyes.
“Please,” she said, so raggedly my lungs tightened. “I know you want to help her. I want to too. We will. But you can’t keep— I think you’re taking the whole ‘Mad’ thing a little too far. Pulling crazy stunts doesn’t help her if it gets you killed.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” I said. “Watch them cart her off and do nothing?”
“No. But if you’d waited a second, you’d have seen how outnumbered we were at the club. Maybe we could have held back and ambushed the ones that took her on the way back to the palace, once they’d split up more. Maybe Chess could have drawn some of them away with his tricks. I don’t know. You didn’t give us a chance to figure anything out. You just ran right in there.”
“They had my daughter,” I said, but the truth of her words was already sinking in. I closed my eyes. “Fuck.”
“If that’s how you were back when you worked with the Spades all the time, I’m surprised you didn’t get killed back then,” Lyssa remarked.
“I probably wouldn’t have done anything quite that suicidal,” I admitted. “I didn’t have anyone I cared about quite that much. And normally there were more of us, working together. I was a wild card—I could turn the tables in ways the Hearts didn’t expect if a mission started to go wrong.”
But this hadn’t been a mission, and I’d made it go wrong. The pain of that realization stabbed deeper than the wound on my head had.
“Maybe you’re a little out of practice after all that time staying out of the rebellion.” Lyssa drew in a shaky breath. “I care about you, okay? I need you. The guards killed the Red Knight. Chess can’t seem to stick around for more than five minutes before he vanishes again, and Theo—” She cut herself off, leaving me wondering what in the lands the White Knight had done to her in the last day. “You’ve been here for me since the start. Maybe it’s a lot to ask, but… I don’t think
I can do it on my own.”
My throat squeezed with emotion. I looked up at her, raising my hand to touch the backs of my fingers to her smooth cheek. “You’re not on your own. I’m sorry. I was trying to make up for all that time hanging back, and perhaps I let myself go too far in the opposite direction. Moderation may not be my strong point.”
A choked laugh spilled out of her. “I’m not sure it’s anyone’s strong point around here. You do better than most.”
She clasped her hand around mine, looking so damned pleased that I hadn’t told her to shove off that I could hardly bear it. She had to at least know why—know that I hadn’t thrown myself at the guards’ fucking swords without a care what happened to her, just off the high of some adrenaline rush.
She had to know what kind of man she was putting her trust in.
“It was my fault,” I said.
Her gaze turned puzzled. She must have been able to tell I wasn’t talking about the skirmish tonight. “What was?”
“The night when…” I wet my lips, searching for the best way to explain. My thoughts were still scattered, and other sorts of pain wove through me thinking back to that time. I did the best I could.
“March and I grew up together. Friends for as long as I can remember. We joined the Spades together, and he met May there, and they just clicked in a way people here don’t very often. We always ran the same missions together. When I took over the shop, I offered them the upper apartment. They were like family.”
“Doria was theirs,” Lyssa ventured.
I nodded just enough to accidentally wake up the ache in my head. “They cut back on the missions after she came, and even though I loved her too, I was restless. It wasn’t the same going out without them. I found out the Diamonds were planning some stupid celebration one night, and I got it in my head that we’d show them if we ruined it. I convinced March and May that we should go for it, just that once, like old times…”
A sharp ache ran straight down my chest. How could I have let myself think—why hadn’t I seen—
Lyssa squeezed my hand in silent encouragement. I girded myself and went on.
“It was stupid—on my part too. We weren’t accomplishing anything other than pissing off the palace folk. March slipped on the way back, must have dropped something, I don’t even know how, but the guards figured out the two of them were part of it. They came and grabbed them in the middle of the night.”
All that anguish on March’s narrow face, not for himself but for Doria. The hoarseness of his voice when he’d asked me to look after her. I couldn’t draw that picture for Lyssa, not as sharply as it was still stuck in my head.
“It was my bloody idea,” I said. “It should have been me. But—I couldn’t even stand up for them that much. They’d have taken all our heads, and Doria would have had no one.”
For a long moment, Lyssa didn’t speak, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at her. Then she leaned right over on her stool to rest her head on the bench beside mine, her nose brushing my cheek. She didn’t let go of my hand.
“That’s when you decided the Spades were too dangerous,” she said.
“We weren’t accomplishing anything in general, really,” I said. “Not since the freeze.” I paused and managed to gingerly tilt my face so I could meet her eyes. “Not until you turned up, looking-glass girl.”
“So, what you’re saying is, our current predicament is really all my fault.”
My lips twitched upward despite myself. “Perhaps a little.”
“Well, if you were expecting me to say you should have gotten yourself killed back then, I’m obviously not going to.”
Lyssa eased closer to kiss me, and Hearts take me, the sweetness of her mouth against mine was almost worth the blow to the head. I ran my free hand along her jaw and into her hair. A happy murmur escaped her lips. She deepened the kiss, and I couldn’t blame everything about the way my head was spinning on the injury I’d sustained, not anymore.
When our mouths parted, she stayed close enough that our breath mingled between us. “Hatter,” she said quietly, “you told me before that monogamy isn’t really a common concept here in Wonderland. How about love?”
I swallowed hard, a rush of emotion bubbling up inside me. “It’s rare too,” I said. “But I think mostly because not many of us want it. March and May had something real. Maybe if we didn’t have so much constant threat hanging over us, more people would look for devotion over distraction.”
“What have you wanted?”
“Mostly neither, since Doria came along,” I said. “I won’t lie—I enjoyed plenty of distractions before then. But I can’t say I didn’t envy what the two of them had. I wouldn’t turn it away if I found it.” I made myself smile. “And I’d imagine a queen can decide to have whatever she wants.”
Lyssa made a dismissive sound. “What about a girl who might not be cut out for being queen at all?”
Did she still doubt her capabilities? I rolled myself onto my side, scooting backward so I could pull her onto the bench against me, my arm around her back.
“Listen to me,” I said, with every ounce of certainty I had in me, “I’ve never known a woman better for that role than you are. If it’s not what you want, then you follow the path that’s right for you. But don’t hesitate for a second if all that’s holding you back is fear. You go for that throne, and I’ll be right there with you, fighting for you however I can.”
Whether there was still room for me in the world she inhabited afterward, I was willing to wait and see.
“Hatter,” she said roughly. Then she was kissing me again, and if this was what she needed, if I was what she needed, then she could have me any way she wanted.
A throat cleared behind her. We pulled apart as Chess shimmered into view, a little hunched beneath the cellar’s low ceiling. He gave me an amused look.
“Glad to see you’re on the mend, Hatter.”
My face warmed, but it wasn’t as if we hadn’t shared a much more intimate moment with Lyssa together not long ago. “And I’m glad to see you’ve managed to stay ahead of the Hearts’ Guard.”
Lyssa sat up, her fingers still twined with mine. “How does it look out there?”
“The palace has made an official announcement that the prisoners taken tonight will be tried alongside the city folk the Queen has already imprisoned,” Chess said, with a tip of his head toward me. “And that trial will take place tomorrow morning. So I feel we should make a hasty journey to the meeting of the Spades. I’ve determined the safest route.”
Lyssa’s body had tensed, but her jaw set with determination. She turned back toward me and touched my face.
“We’re going to get Doria back,” she said. “Whatever I have to do. I promise.”
I pushed myself upright, managing to make it into a sitting position without keeling over this time. Only a light prickle of pain crept across my scalp. “We’ll do whatever we have to do,” I said. “But I promise to rein the Mad in.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “Keep it in your back pocket. The way things are going, we might need it.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Lyssa
My heart sank as I took in the Spades who’d dared to assemble in the dim basement room. We had even fewer than the last meeting I’d attended. Around the low lacquered table, no one bothering to sit on the cushions that served as seats, stood Hatter and Chess, the woman who’d suggested they should hand me over to the Queen, the burly man I’d been sitting next to on those rotating chairs, and maybe a dozen others.
How many of them had the guards arrested after the stunt at the club, and how many were simply too afraid to risk coming now?
Theo hadn’t turned up. Neither had the twins. Had they been out with Doria, working on her plan? I’d thought they’d had a little more sense than to go that far, but they were her friends, so it was hard to tell.
“Did you hear where the trial is supposed to be happening?” I asked Chess.
&nb
sp; He nodded. “Out in the gardens. I noticed a sparkly bit of horsehair snagged on the wall not far from the eastern gate. I’m guessing that was some sort of message from Unicorn?”
“I think we’ll have to take it as one,” I said. Our ally inside the palace hadn’t been able to delay the trial after all, but he had arranged for it to be outside. I hoped that meant he’d talked the Queen into having him and Lion fight first and that he’d be able to disrupt the guards at the gate. We were clearly going to need every advantage we could get.
My fingers itched for something to hold on to. “I should go by Hatter’s and get the other artifacts,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s the wisest idea while we want you to stay on the right side of the prison walls,” Chess said. “I slipped by there too. There were guards all through the place, one in every room. Even invisible, I couldn’t contrive to retrieve anything that’s hidden away.”
It wasn’t as if I’d figured out how to use either of the other artifacts anyway. But they might have kicked in and given us an edge in the moment, like the vest briefly had. I bit my lip.
Just then, Dee and Dum marched into the room. I stiffened in anticipation of Theo’s arrival, but no one followed them. They marched to the middle of the room, hopped up on the table, and swiveled to take in the small crowd.
“We bring word from the White Knight,” Dum said. “Lyssa will lead our planning to interrupt the executions.”
“So you’d better listen to her!” Dee said with a grin. “She’s the one who’s been talking with our inside man. She’ll find the right course of action.”
An anxious murmur carried through the room as they hopped down, Dee bobbing his head to me. My stomach knotted. What was Theo thinking? Most of these people barely knew me.
Maybe that was why he was doing it. If I decided to reach for the throne, I’d have to start ruling sometime.
