Page 28 of Madness Becomes Her

“He’s okay. Struggling with my return because I’m…” I wave my hands down my body.

“Older.” She smirks. “That’ll take him some getting used to.”

“It will. The queen summoned him for a hat last minute, and I’d just had some memories return to me about her, and I begged to tag-a-long so that I could find you.”

“I hope you weren’t planning to break me out again. The last time you did that, I slept with the mice in the dungeons for weeks.”

I swallow. That was what I was planning to do, actually. “You’re comfortable here?”

She looks around with a sigh. “It’s all I know.”

“But wouldn’t you want to be with Fin? Come to a tea party? Sleep in your own bed?”

“I’ve been here since I was a child, Eleanor. This is my home. Besides, I see Fin when he comes to hat for the queen. She allowshim to remain afterward, and we talk or play games. He’s very good at chess, if you’ll recall.”

I plop down on the reading bench. “I guess I can calm my nerves now. I was determined to save you, and you don’t want to be saved.”

“There is someone you can save if you’re up to the task.” She sits beside me, her eyes wary, flicking to the door every few seconds. “It would be a dangerous task.”

Ariadne fills me in on her and Finlo’s friend, Prospero, a pipe-smoking caterpillar the queen captured last week. He speaks in riddles, so the queen took a liking to him and tossed him into her dungeons.

Ariadne and Finlo worry that their old friend will shrivel and die without the things the Cheshire Wood offers him as his home and the smoke to fill his pipe, so they’ve been hatching a plan to get him back.

It has to be hard to get into the dungeons of this place. It was hard enough to slip the guards on my way back from the bathroom.

I’m honestly shocked no one’s erupted into the room yet.

“I’ll do anything I can to get him back,” I tell her.

She grabs my hands, and I note the tremble in hers. “Just don’t get caught. Finlo would be beside himself to lose you again.”

“Will you tell me what happened? Tell me why I never returned?”

“I won’t. Finlo would skin me alive if I told you the end of your story before it was time for you to know it.”

I grunt in frustration. “He’s a very frustrating man.”

“Oh,” she says, turning my face with her hand on my chin as she searches my eyes. “Oh.”

“What?”

“You like him.”

“He’s hard not to like. Have you met him?”

“No. I mean… Youlikehim.”

“I—” I think about denying it, but I sigh, and a blush fills my cheeks heatedly. “I truly can’t help it. Even in my memories, I think I always did. But I was young and thought it was a girlhood crush that would fade.”

“Love for Finlo Pennington never fades. It only grows. He’s the best Fae I know.”

Fae.

Unwittingly, Ariadne answered the question left unanswered by my memory loss: What the hell are these folks?

“Be gentle with him, Eleanor. His love for you is deeper than you’ll ever know. Deeper than he’ll ever be able to express.”

I swallow as the door bursts open, and the queen storms inside, red-faced and full of rage.