Page 44 of The Never Queen

“I did.”

A few minutes later, she’s trussed up like a chicken, her wrists bound and tied to her ankles.

“I’m never getting out of this,” she says from her spot on the floor.

“No margaritas until you’re free.”

She scowls up at me. “Diabolical.”

The phone dings with a notification letting us know our order has been picked up by the driver. “It says you have fifteen minutes before it arrives.”

The sense of urgency has her fighting the knot instead of dissecting it. “Slow down,” I coach her.

I’m not sure why I love teaching her knots and how to undo them. I find a great deal of satisfaction out of knots, and equally, the satisfaction out of watching them come undone. Most of my life, I felt like I was trapped in a binding I could never escape, and then when I did, I felt like I’d been cut loose with no rope, no knot to hold me steady, and I drifted for too long.

Nani loved to use the simplest things in life as symbolism. I can’t look at a forget-me-not without thinking of how she used the flowers as metaphors for memories, both good and bad.

I’m sure she’d tell me that the ropes and the knots help me work out something buried deep down inside of me.

So maybe that’s why I’ve been sharing the practice with Darling. She seems particularly wound up lately aboutsomething and while she won’t come right out and say it’s about our upcoming binding ceremony in front of the entire fae court, and Doren’s opposition, I know that’s a large part of it.

I watch her struggle for a few minutes before walking her through some of the binding. She manages to get her ankles free when the phone dings, letting us know the driver is close.

“If you take that margarita away from me, I will burn this place to the ground,” she says.

Kas laughs behind me. He’s been watching her work while he sketches more in his notebook.

“The app tells me the driver will be here in two minutes,” I tell her.

“Fuck.”

I guide her a bit more and she gets the rope tail through the right loop, and the entire thing comes undone.

“Yes! I won!”

“Boys,” Vane calls through the screen door on the porch. “Get out here.”

I’m expecting it to be our food pulling in the driveway, which it is. But the driver bearing our food is Maisie from The Lost Knife.

That can’t be a coincidence.

She sets several brown paper bags on the porch. “Kody will see you tonight at 2:00 a.m. You will meet him in the parking lot behind the strip mall on Rivertown Street. Don’t be late.”

“You could have just called us!” I tell her as she walks away.

“I’m not even going to dissect how fucked up it is that they somehow infiltrated our food order,” Darling says, plucking the giant margarita from the carrier. “Because I have nachos and a margarita and nothing else matters.”

21

WINNIE

By the time we cross the street to go to Ella’s house, I’m already a little tipsy from the margaritas. The nachos did help soak up some of the tequila, and the Shadow soaked up a little more, but at least I’m feeling a bit lighter than when I crawled out of bed this morning.

The party is already underway in Ella’s backyard, lights and smoke and music filtering out to the front of the house. I do think for a brief moment that I can walk into that party with my head held high. I have my four vicious, powerful, fucking hot as hell men in a line behind me.

A thought keeps obsessively running through my head: look at how far I’ve come.

I don’t have to prove myself to anyone, least of all the people I went to school with. So why do I feel like I do? I think most of them expected me to drop out early, maybe because I was failing half my classes, or maybe because I accidentally got pregnant, father unknown.