Page 130 of Apprentice to the Villain

She looked to him with pity. “You will regret that choice, I think.”

He speared her with a glare before turning to pour himself more tea from the pot. “I never regret anything.”

“Hmm,” she said, smiling wickedly. “Then I suppose I’ll just have to make you.”

He looked so startled, he nearly dropped the teapot as he returned it to the table with a clatter.

Lyssa didn’t notice. She was too busy tipping a teacup to Miss Halliway’s lips.

His dark eyes found Evie’s.He wet his lips before speaking, causing heat to spike in her blood. “You— I must have misheard you. What?”

It wasn’t a game; the confusion was genuine. But he’d heard her. Just was discomfited by the words. He wanted to run from her so fast that she’d see smoke coming out of his heels.

She didn’t repeat her declaration, just looked at him with disgruntled fondness. This was her first crack in his defenses. The first of many, she knew. “You heard me fine.”

His whisper back sounded painful, his eyes struck by surprise, befuddlement, and heart-stopping fear. “Do not start this, Sage.”

She laid a gentle hand over his, and a shock blazed up her arm at the contact. He flinched under her fingers but didn’t move away as he normally would—just sucked in a breath, his eyes intensely on her face as she said, “Worry not, Your Evilness. It’s already begun.”

He’s petrified.

She recalled a wish she’d made on a star not long ago and how it had come true. How the star had answered her… The words struck something, something nagging in her mind.

“I love this plate! It’s such a funny shape,” Lyssa said innocently.

Evie had allowed Lyssa to have the odd, dark crystal slab her mother had left behind for her. All signs of magic from it were gone, if there ever were any. Except perhaps the joy it gave to heryounger sister. The shapewasfunny, Evie had to admit—and somehow familiar.

Lyssa dropped the plate and frowned down at the sugar bowl. “We are out of sugar!”

The Villain’s face was panicked for just a second before he checked himself into a neutral expression. Clearing his throat, he said, “I think we’ve already added a sufficient amount to our tea in any case.”

Lyssa pouted. “But the table doesn’t look as cute!” Her brown eyes widened as she snapped her fingers and pulled the vial of her mother’s stardust from her pocket. “We’ll use this!”

“Lyssa, don’t!” Evie called, frantic at the prospect of losing that last bit of her mother. But it was too late—in her haste to stop her sister, Evie had startled her instead; Lyssa dropped the vial, and it smashed right onto the oddly shaped crystal.

And then the room went startlingly bright.

Lyssa screamed, and so did Evie as they were both yanked to the ground and tucked beneath Trystan’s arms. “What happened!” he yelled as the light simmered out.

Evie was the first to peek her eyes open, scrambling up to look at the table and the slab of crystal, too. It glowed so brightly—but not brightly enough. “Sir, do we still have that bit of stardust left from the caves?”

He nodded, gently helping Lyssa to her feet before pulling the small vial out of his shirt from a thread around his neck. “There’s barely a thimbleful left.” He uncapped it and tapped the rest of the dust onto the jagged slab, and it glowed, complete and vibrant, changing from a dark, opaque nothingness to—

Midnight, with one bright glimmering star in the dead center.

Lyssa squinted over it. “It looks like a piece of sky.”

A piece of sky.And it struck Evie all at once. Every clue along their journey to find her mother. It had been written plainly in front of her the whole time.

The daughter of wishing stars.

She wanted to be swallowed by midnight.

Your mother’s starlight enveloped her.

Oh gods.

I have no name…by natural law, I can take none.