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Estrella’s flesh started to heal over itself—slowly, too slowly—but it was enough. That magic that existed within her was still there, the creature who had stolen the rest of it dead and gone.

“Where is my pet?” Mab asked, stepping into the clearing. She eyed the damage done to my mate and me with a glare, searching for the daemon that no longer existed.

Estrella’s gaze merely dropped to Mab’s hand, or rather, hermissinghand. A bandage had been wrapped around her wrist, the hand still missing.

If it hadn’t grown back by now…

Estrella smiled, her face sleepy as that eerie golden light pulsed through the ribbons of her cheek, reconnecting the tissue. “Dead,” she muttered, forcing herself to sit in my grip.She leaned back into my chest, the ache spreading from that point where my bones had cracked.

I didn’t care. I’d suffer through it endlessly just to hold her while we faced our punishment.

“I wondered how long it would take you to try. I must say, I’m so very disappointed in you, Estrella,” Mab said, her lips peeling back to show her teeth in a moment of all-consuming rage. “There is a ruthlessness in you that reminds me of myself. If only you could sever your mate from your soul, you just might become something great.”

Estrella coughed, blood trickling from her lip. She raised a single, shredded hand to wipe it away, wiping it on her dress—or what remained of it.

“You mean I might go mad like you? I willneverchoose that fate.”

Mab grimaced, holding out her hand for the guard at her side. Davorin placed a knife within her open palm, wincing back when Mab drew a line upon her bad forearm.

Blood dripped down onto the earth, her lips moving silently in an incantation. Tendrils of smoke rose from the ground where her blood set it on fire, lifting and shifting, blowing in the breeze to form a creature.

The daemon that emerged from the smoke was a different one than Estrella and I had only just banished, but his eyes gleamed as if he knew us all the same. Estrella shuddered in my grasp, leaning back into me as her fear reached a new height.

Mab couldn’t mean to take Estrella’s magic, not if she wanted to use her for her own purposes.

“Take the girl to her room and keep her there. Only harm her if she fights you.” Mab said, her dark eyes glittering like onyx. “I need her whole for tomorrow.”

45

Estrella

After a sleepless night spent staring at the daemon who refused to leave my room, I was forced to dress under his watchful eye. Nila had been beaten, her face bloodied and each wrist bound in iron so that she could not heal herself from her injuries for the part she’d played in the antics the day before.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured to her softly, hanging my head forward.

She didn’t so much as look back at the daemon who occupied himself by rifling through the food they’d sent up for my breakfast, to the extent that I knew I would not be eating that day. His mangled claws had touched everything, shoving it into his jowl-like mouth as if it was all that kept him from devouring the power he felt rebuilding within me slowly.

Too slowly.

I felt the press of it beneath my skin, barely there and just a whisper. Between my father having taken the excess and the magic the daemon had stolen before I realized what he’d done, I felt almost as useless as if iron was on my own wrists.

“It was worth it,” Nila whispered, leaning forward to grasp a hair clip resting atop the bone vanity. “To see the way they looked at you. They finally saw you, Princess. They saw everything that you could be in the war with Mab. I’ll never regret that. Even if they send me to The Mother’s embrace for it.”

“Don’t speak like that,” I said, scolding her as I met her eyes in the mirror. I refused to think of what Mab would do to any who helped me organize a rebellion against her.

Her curiosity with me only went so far. The moment I’d become a real threat,thatwas the moment she would dispose of me.

“Time to go,” the daemon grunted, dropping what remained of the barley bread loaf he’d been gnawing on.

“But she isn’t ready yet,” Nila protested, hurrying to clip the top layers of my hair back from my face. The rest hung down the back of my black dress that seemed to melt into shadows. The gauzy fabric was more solid in vital parts, covering my breasts and intimate areas, and then fading to transparency on my stomach and thighs.

Nila had painted golden symbols on my skin beneath it, echoing the golden swirls of my Fae mark. A golden line trailed over the center of my stomach, starlight twinkling to the sides. Upon the thigh that peeked out from the dress were bands that wrapped around my leg, similar marks placed strategically on my ankle.

“All the Gods will wear similar markings,” she’d explained, distinguishing them from the rest of the Fae in attendance. I supposed Mab intended to treat me like one of the Gods now that she’d determined I was a Primordial, even if she did have to be mistaken in that knowledge.

“Don’t care,” the daemon grunted, grasping me around the bicep and pulling me from my chair. He shoved me forward, making me stumble over the slippers I wore upon my feet.

I’d forgone the heels Mab selected, a small protest if I was to be walking upon the sands of the Cove. I could hardlyfunction in the heeled shoes she chose on solid ground, let alone if the ground shifted beneath me as I walked.