Page 3 of Black Hearted (Cursed Fae #4)

Lorelei

The creaking of metal had my eyes snapping open.

I pushed myself to a seated position just as Queen Liliana strolled into the small stone cell and peered down at me.

“Oh, what a mess you’ve forced me to make.” She clicked her tongue.

I don’t think I’d ever hated anyone in my life until this moment. Dawn’s mother was positively evil. She’d kidnapped me and forced me into a cell.

“When my mother—”

Queen Liliana laughed, the sound grating on my nerves. “Your mother and father are about as useless as you are, dear. Your magic makes the world pretty, but it won’t stop this curse.”

I reached for my magic, testing the earth beneath me, searching for a seed, a root, anything I could make grow and wrap around Queen Liliana’s throat. But there was nothing. Almost like she’d taken me to a barren wasteland on purpose.

“You’re sick,” I spat. “How fierce and loyal Dawn could be your daughter, I’ll never know.”

The hurt that crossed her face had me regretting my words instantly. Losing Dawn must have been hard on her, and my words were cruel.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

But just as fast as the hurt had been on Queen Liliana’s face, it was replaced with stone-cold anger. “Lorelei, I never want to hear ‘I’m sorry’ from your mouth again. It’s weak. Like Dawn, like Aribella, like Isolde. You’re all weak,” she snapped so loud I jumped.

Reaching down, she grabbed my arm and hauled me into a standing position.

The second her skin made contact with mine, I became aware of her headache.

When touching people, I could detect their maladies and then heal them, but even though it went against my nature, I didn’t allow myself to heal her headache; she could live with it for how she was treating me.

As she marched me out of the cell, I glanced down at the heart locket at her throat. The glass casing held the smallest shriveled black heart I’d ever seen. A tiny purple glow emanated from it, and I felt sick now that I knew what it was. The heart of a mate of Dawn’s great-great-grandmother Mae.

If what Isolde told me was true, the princesses of Faerie had been going to Ethereum for centuries and killing their beloveds. It was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Queen Liliana gave me a side glance, looking disgusted with me. “You’re crying.”

I felt bad for Dawn, for what it must have been like growing up under this woman’s rule. Yet somehow, the Summer princess still managed to retain her decency.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked as we moved down a dark hallway. I had no idea where we were, only that there were no flowers or trees for miles around us. If there were, I would have been able to feel them, but instead, the energy of this place was dark, desolate, unforgiving.

When we finally stepped into the underground stone room, Queen Liliana released me, and I skidded to a stop.

We were in some sort of study. There was a desk and shelves packed with books.

Texts and papers were strewn about, and in the center of the open space was the mirror portal—the one that normally sat polished in the Spring Court’s throne room.

My pink moonstone dagger lay on the floor beneath the mirror.

“Did you hurt my parents? My sisters?”

My knees felt weak. I couldn’t remember much about my abduction. She’d knocked me out before I even knew what she was up to, but she would have had to fight half the castle staff to get the mirror portal out.

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t need to. They were dumb enough to give me the mirror for training purposes.”

Training purposes …

My stomach dropped. Did my parents know she’d taken me? Had she convinced them that I was off training?

The one hope I’d been clinging to was that my mother and her guards would burst in here any moment and rescue me, but now that hope was dashed. I did not know how I would escape. But I did know what I was capable of.

Lifting my chin, I crossed my arms over my chest and leveled the queen with a hard stare. “I won’t kill any of the Ethereum lords. So asking me to go through that will be pointless.”

The look that washed over her face was nothing short of evil and caused a full-body chill to creep over my skin.

“Oh, I know that, dear.” She reached out and grasped my shoulder hard, pushing me down and forcing me to kneel before her.

“That’s why I’m going to do it. If your Ethereum lord doesn’t come for you like I hope, I’ll go into his realm and carve his black heart from his chest myself.”

Zane. The handsome man I’d met only briefly already had my heart beating frantically just thinking of him.

“Or any of the others. It’s nice that I have so many to choose from.” She grinned as she dug her nails deeper into my shoulder, and I whimpered at the pain.

“You can’t. Only a Spring Court royal can go through our portal when it opens,” I told her.

“Yes, that’s what you’re here for, dear.” Bending down, she picked up my faestone dagger and fisted it in her palm, and my heart rate spiked.

“You know, there is a lot about these daggers that is unknown— how they are capable of harnessing the power of Ethereum to open the portal home, among many other things. But I read a curious thing recently …”

I felt a tug at my navel and then a sharp stabbing pain in my stomach that caused me to keel forward, splaying out my hands to catch myself.

The dagger in Queen Liliana’s fist glowed a light pink, the same color as the moonstone embedded in the hilt, and I gasped as I felt my magic being sucked from my body.

“They can also transfer power from one fae to another.” She grinned, her eyes going from blue to … purple. Like mine.

5

No.

I writhed out of her hold, trying to kick out, but it felt like someone had sliced my stomach open, and I was bleeding out all over the floor. Except it wasn’t blood, it was my magic.

I wasn’t prepared for the sudden weakness that washed over me, making my eyelids droop. My breathing slowed, and I struggled to stay conscious.

Fear flashed in Queen Liliana’s eyes when she saw how weak I was getting, and she released my shoulder just as the darkness took me.