Page 45 of Not Another Happily Ever After

“Please.” I try and fail to reason with their anger as the hood is torn from my cloak. “I beg of you, please stop!”

“This,” a man hisses, flashing a mouthful of rotted teeth as he holds up the tattered remains of my thin linen hood, “is the least you royals can give us.”

“Yeah!”

Angry voices call out in unison.

My heart swells in my throat as I swallow back the tears, not for my own suffering, but for theirs. “I am so sorry for your pain,” I choke out.

“Pain? What do you know of our pain?” A woman, no older than I, aged by the cruelty of circumstance, seethes.

“Move!”

“Get out of the way,” my knights yell out.

I watch as the points of their blades cut into the sky and the panic in my chest turns tenfold. “No! Stop!” I try to scream above the noise. “Don’t hurt them, please!”

“It’s too late for your pity, princess,” the man from earlier spits. “It’s time you see what this curse has taken!” he yells out, taking the loose end of my neck’s ribbon with the collar of my robe in his hand.

I brace for the blow, sealing my eyes shut as he pulls the satin thread away. “It’s time you feel our?—”

The man’s hands freeze, and the world falls silent as the ribbon and the robe slip free from his grasp.

I feel the cold kiss of midnight on my neck. But the hands once on my body are all falling away. And I wonder, is this it? Is this what death feels like? A moment of silence before the inevitable fall into the ever after?

I peek through tear-laced lashes, but it isn’t death I find. It’s the faces of my people, their bodies still as they stare at my neck. At the pale blue of my arms.

My knights seize the opportunity to push their way to my side, but even their gazes wander to the angry mark that should have taken my life.

I drop my head, unwilling to see what’s reflected in their eyes. There is no hope of hiding the beast this curse has made me now.

“I am so sorry. I’ll take my leave,” I start, when Rhidland’s metal warningzingsthrough the air.

“That is far enough.”

I turn to see past him, to see the man with rotted teeth, once again holding my ribbon and hoodless robe in his hand.

“Forgive us. We didn’t…I didn’t…” He hangs his head low, holding out my belongings. “We thought we’d been left to our own.”

Left to suffer in silence, he means. To carry the burden of a curse they didn’t create.

The ache inside me blooms into a garden of grief. A flower for every heart that stopped believing there was someone who still wished them well. And as I take in my people’s faces, truly searching each and every one, I can see it. That deep rooted desire to not feel so alone.

My knights tense as I step forward, but they don’t try and stand in my way. They do, however, close in around me as I bring myself face-to-face with the man who, only moments ago, was filled with anger and rage.

With steady fingers, I gently take the ribbon and cloak from his hand.

“You know, I once thought that too. But now…” I reach for his chin, forcing his downcast eyes up toward mine. “I see you. I see all of you. And I no longer believe that’s true.”

The man stands a little straighter, wearing his tears and smile all at once. And then he does something that has my breath hitching in my throat.

He laces his thumbs together, his four fingers stretched out on either side as he brings his hands to his chest.

I shake my head, ready to argue my unworthiness when, one by one, the courtyard fills with butterflies. Hundreds and hundreds of them, held before the old and the young alike. But there’s one pair of wings that have my heart stopping altogether. They belong to the tall, masked figure watching with autumn green eyes, their stare full of wonder.

Chapter

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