CHAPTER TWO: THE FAREWELL BANQUET (1)

EIRA

The black petal was the only evidence I’d been visited by a ghost.

I found it at dawn, curled into the hollow of my pillow where my cheek had been. It was the color of a bruise, velvety, faintly warm, like it had been held against someone’s skin before it landed on mine. No footprints on the rug. No breath on the glass. The ward on the door undisturbed, humming its stupid little hum, as if the whole Shadow Court had collectively decided that a midnight walk-in was simply room service.

I held the petal between two fingers and stared at the door.

“Okay,” I said to it. “Option one: I’m being haunted. Option two: the most dangerous man on the continent broke into my bedroom last night, touched my hair, and left a flower like a serial killer with a Tumblr account.” I turned the petal over. “Option three: I need more caffeine.”

None of the options changed the plan.

That was the terrifying part. A normal woman would have reevaluated. A normal woman would have packed her grief into a little bag and fled back to the Light Court, tail between her legs, confessing to the High Priestess that the monster’s bedroom manners were apparently impeccable. A normal woman would have noticed that a king who breaks in to brush your hair off your face instead of snapping your neck is not, technically, the behavior of a villain.

I was not a normal woman. I was the verdict. Six years of training had made me excellent at ignoring evidence that inconvenienced me.

I set the petal on the nightstand, where it could judge me, and got up to inventory my murder kit.

The suite’s ridiculous bathroom yielded a mirror that didn’t fog — of course it didn’t, this place had standards — and I stood before it in the borrowed midnight robe and did the math out loud, because talking to myself was either a coping mechanism or the first stage of becoming exactly the kind of person Kaelen Thorne already thought I was.

“Plan, Eira. The farewell banquet. He drinks, you watch him die, you walk out a hero.” I tapped each hidden compartment in turn. “Poison. Hand-milled from nightshade the Light Court swears grows only in our own gardens. Tasteless in wine, lethal in ninety seconds, theatrical enough to make a point. Blade one — corset. Blade two — boot. Blade three—”

My hand froze on the inner pocket of the robe.

Blade three was gone.

I went still. Then I went systematic. I stripped the bed. I turned out the minibar. I checked the heel of each shoe, the seam of the silk robe, the hollow behind the tub faucet where I’d taped it myself with my own two hands at three in the morning, humming a lullaby my mother used to sing to steady my nerves.

It was not there.

Someone had searched my room. Someone had searched it well enough to find a blade I’d hidden in a plumbing fixture, and careful enough not to touch anything else, and ballsy enough to do it while a fated-mate bond hummed between my chest and the king who thought I was a spy.

I sat down on the edge of the absurdly large bed and stared at the petal again.

“Great,” I told it. “We’re either being robbed by professionals or adopted by them. Either way, rude.”

I turned the situation over like a coin I couldn’t afford to drop. Someone had been in my room. Someone who knew exactly where to look. That meant someone who’d watched me hide it — which meant either the walls had ears, which I already suspected, or the person who’d searched me at the border had been paying closer attention than I’d given them credit for. Either way, my little surprise was now somebody else’s little surprise, and the banquet was in six hours.

I could improvise. I’d been improvising since I was twelve and standing in the ash of my family’s front hall. A princess who couldn’t improvise was a princess in a grave, and I had every intention of being a princess in his grave.

The poison, at least, was still mine. I’d sewn a second vial into the lining of my gown the night before, because six years of being the Light Court’s perfect little liar had taught me one golden rule: always have a backup plan, and always make the backup plan the one nobody expects. I’d hidden it in a place no one searched — the hollow heel of my left shoe, wrapped in oilcloth, because even Shadowkin guards had limits on where they were willing to pat down a princess.

I tested it with the tip of a hairpin. One drop on my wrist, where I’d wipe it off before anyone saw. Nightshade, hand-milled, slow, theatrical. The kind of death that let you make a speech before you died, if you were the dramatic type.

Kaelen Thorne was the dramatic type. I was doing him a favor.

“Alright,” I said to the empty room. “One banquet. One toast. One dead king. What could possibly go wrong?”

The petal on the nightstand said nothing. It had excellent timing for a liar.