Page 7 of Hell Hath No Fury (Tear Down Heaven #4)

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I N A LAVISHLY DECORATED , beautifully sunny, pure-white bedroom located in one of the most important, most coveted sections of the fourth tower of Gilgamesh’s palace in the Highest Heaven, Adrian Blackwood awoke to a crushing weight on his chest.

Not a figurative weight. This was a literal twenty-five-pound lump of smooth-carved bone and hammered gold courtesy of the princess who’d slipped into his bed and curled up against him with her extremely heavy head resting on his chest. Again .

“I thought I told you not to do that.”

“And I thought I could make you change your mind,” she replied in the voice he was learning to hate. Bex’s soft, warm, happy voice whispering intimately from the smiling lips of a creature that was not her.

Adrian clenched his jaw and wiggled out from under her, grateful once again that he’d gone to bed fully clothed.

It’d been seven days since he’d stupidly fallen for his father’s lies and gotten trapped here, and every night, there’d been an incident.

He would have avoided going to bed all together if he could’ve, but there was no way to make bottled sleep in Heaven, and Adrian hadn’t figured out enough sorcery yet to curse his body into wakefulness.

He had figured out how to magically clean the muddy clothes he’d been wearing when he’d crawled out from under his quintessence-soaked heart tree to find Gilgamesh waiting like a smug tiger, so at least he hadn’t been forced to strip yet, but that felt like small consolation when he had to pry the princess’s white arms off his body like he was escaping a bear trap just to get out of bed.

“I don’t understand why you’re being so cold,” the princess said when he finally got free, sitting up in the rumpled bed to look at him with the golden version of Bex’s hurt eyes. “You loved it when I rested my head on you back at the Anchor.”

“That wasn’t you.”

“Yes, it was,” she insisted, her voice heating with that familiar Bex anger Adrian refused to acknowledge, because she wasn’t Bex. “I proved it the day you arrived when you asked me all those questions. I got everything right, so why are you still acting like this? Why don’t you believe I’m me?”

Adrian didn’t dignify that with a response.

He just picked up his black boots off the carpet and walked over to the white fur-covered ottoman in front of the white marble wardrobe full of elegant white-silk clothes he refused to wear.

He sat down with a huff and stomped his boots onto his feet before turning to grab his black pointed witch hat off the white dresser.

The hat had been a gift from his aunt Muriel for passing his coven tests.

It had no magic of its own that he knew of, but just putting it on his head made Adrian feel more like himself.

A feeling that instantly vanished again when he grabbed his enchanted coat off the wall sconce he’d been using as a coatrack.

It felt like picking up nothing at all. Adrian couldn’t remember the last time his beloved black coat had been so light.

It should’ve been brimming with useful curses, charms, and magical materials, but the very first thing the Crown Princess had done when she’d locked him in here was force Adrian to empty his pockets down to the seams. He’d tried his best to hide things from her, but the disguised queen who’d ripped the real Bex’s horns off was thorough.

Probably because Gilgamesh had told her the same thing Malik had told Adrian back when he was pretending to be a loving father: that a witch outside his forest was only as good as the spells in his pockets.

There were no spells in his pockets anymore.

Adrian would’ve gladly sacrificed all nine of his remaining fingers to the Morrigan for even one of his trusty curses, but the goddess either couldn’t hear him in Heaven or didn’t want his new white blood, because no matter how much of it he offered, she never replied.

He couldn’t reach his forest either, thanks to the sharp-toothed seal Gilgamesh had placed over the hollow where his heart had been.

He could still feel his actual heart beating far, far away, but he couldn’t touch the roots that bound it or the magic of the Blackwood that flowed through them, which meant he was dead in the water.

He was patting down his coat one more time in the vain hope that maybe he’d find a sap trap stuck to the lining, when the princess darted out of the huge white bed to wrap her arms around him.

Adrian jumped so hard he almost bashed his chin open on the crown of her carved, hornless head.

Great Forest, he hated when she did that.

Gilgamesh’s princess was every bit as fast as the real Bex, but much less conscientious about her movements, or her strength.

She was squeezing Adrian hard enough to bruise, and she didn’t stop when he gasped in pain.

If anything, the sound made her clench her arms even tighter, wrapping herself around his chest like a vise as she buried her cold, hard face in his wrinkled black shirtfront.

“Why are you ignoring me?” she whispered in Bex’s hurt, shaking voice.

“This was supposed to be our reward. We’re supposed to be happy .

” Her head snapped up, the interlocking, cuneiform-marked gold rings of her eyes spinning as they focused on Adrian’s face like camera lenses. “ Why aren’t you happy with me? ”

“Because you’re. Not. Bex,” Adrian snarled, shoving her as hard as he could even though he already knew he wasn’t strong enough to move her.

“Having her memories doesn’t make you her, because the real Bex wouldn’t hurt me with her strength.

She wouldn’t hang on me or sneak into my bed after I explicitly told her not to, because the real Bex actually gives a damn what I think. ”

“But I do!” she cried, squeezing even harder. “I do care! You’re the only one I care about anymore! You’re supposed to be my prince !”

She was screaming by the end, but Adrian didn’t reply. He already knew she wouldn’t listen, so he kept his mouth stubbornly shut, letting his silence do what his arms couldn’t until, finally, the princess pushed herself away.

“Why are you being so mean?” she sobbed, wiping her eyes pathetically even though she was a carved doll incapable of shedding tears.

“I finally got what I wanted. Gilgamesh set me free of my endless burden. He let me put down my sword so I could live the life I dreamed of for once. This was supposed to be our happily-ever-after, but you aren’t even trying.

You’ve already made up your mind to hate me because you’re not a noble prince at all. You’re just a cruel, heartless witch !”

She started crying in earnest then, the biggest sign yet that she was nothing but a carved fake.

The Bex Adrian knew hated for anyone to see her cry, and she’d never use tears to get what she wanted.

He didn’t know why Gilgamesh had bothered trying to pass this bad copy off as real if he was going to do such a terrible job on her personality, but who knew?

Considering how unstable every princess seemed to be, maybe this was the best his father could manage.

It gave Adrian great pleasure to imagine the haughty Gilgamesh failing at something, but while he was never going to accept the princess as anything but an enemy, he still didn’t like listening to her cry.

He had work to do in any case, so Adrian turned his back on the sobbing parody of Bex and strode across his bedroom prison toward the golden door that led to the only other place in Heaven he was allowed to access: his workshop.

True to his word, Gilgamesh had provided his son with a lavish space to study the Queen of Pride’s horns.

The room on the other side of the golden door was bigger than Adrian’s entire cabin, with towering, arched white ceilings, a polished white marble floor, and an entire wall of perfectly clear glass windows (unbreakable—he’d tried) overlooking the White City.

The walls that didn’t have windows were lined with white stone shelves containing solid-gold versions of every tool a witch or sorcerer might need, but no reagents, potion ingredients, cauldrons, brooms, or anything else that could be used to escape.

There was also a parchment scroll posted on the locked door to the hallway outside listing all the sorcery that had been temporarily banned for Prince Adrian’s “safety,” starting with teleportation.

These limitations would be lifted when the prince finished repairing the Queen of Pride’s horns, the pieces of which were spread all over the worktable at the center of the room like a giant unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

Adrian didn’t even spare them a glance. He strode right past, walking straight through the giant workroom to the only thing in the whole place that wasn’t white or gold: a little heap of bright-green needles carefully positioned in the workshop’s sunniest corner under the windows.

Seeing them made Adrian smile for the first time since he woke up.

It didn’t look like much at the moment, but that little pile of green was a tree.

A white pine sapling, to be precise, and it was Adrian’s most prized possession.

He’d gone through hell to get that tree.

Not literally, but he had written a five-page petition to the Crown Prince’s office explaining in triplicate why a tree was necessary to complete his work.

His first petition had asked for three trees, the lowest number that could possibly be considered a grove, but that request had been denied.

After a long back-and-forth where he’d been forced to make a point-by-point justification for why a witch of the Blackwood needed a forest , he’d finally been permitted one seed, a gold basin containing five cubic feet of sterilized soil, and a watering jug with ten gallons of nutrient-enriched liquid.