Page 100 of The Midnight Princess

The desperate heroine shouts into the void, tears streaking her make-up as her lover, standing invisible and mute at her side, looks on.

“These are hijinks?” I bite back a wail.

Ella emits a soft laugh. “We’re way past hijinks. We’re in the part where he’s been banished to a shadow realm for changing his destiny and daring to fall in love with her.”

Vede. I want to grip the edge of a railing and shout across the frozen mountains of Sondmark. Come back.Come back. But Jacob is in the dark heart of Vorburg, and he has frozen me out.

“Tissue,” I demand. Clara reaches to a side table and slaps one into my hand. I stanch the silent tears, only to have the thing almost disintegrate. “Tissue.”

Ella halts the show when I start sobbing. She gathers me into her arms, and I bury my face in her shoulder. Clara wraps an arm around my waist. Freja covers my bare feet while every tear I’ve ever swallowed works its way out. I want to curl up, knees to forehead, but there is no retreating from my sisters. They would only curl with me.

“Tissue?” I ask.

Ella directs Freja. “There’s another box next to my sink.”

A sister slides away and returns.

“Alma.” It’s Clara this time.

“I’m fine.”

“These things go in cycles,” she tells me. “Eventually, the press will ease up.” Clara should know. She’s been the target of enough negative coverage to paper over every surface in the Summer Palace. “When you’re in it, it feels like a hurricane. But the storm will shift.”

“It’s not the coverage.” I press the balls of my hands into my eyes, easing the tight pressure, rubbing away the grit.

Freja’s brow wrinkles and she finds her own answer to the strange sight of seeing her most self-composed sister crack up. “Your engagement is broken, but we haven’t been here for you. I’ve been—”

“It’s not that.” Honestly, if it weren’t for having to look affectionate to Pietor in public and having my name linked with his, I would have forgotten him entirely. When I finished with him, I finished.

Ella stares up at the baroque plasterwork on the ceiling. “This is about Jacob.”

She says it like a scientist holding up a petri dish and diagnosing a bacterial bloom. This is about Jacob. Fact.

“He spent the last week on my couch obliterating an alien horde.” Fact.

My nose prickles with more unshed tears. No. There is to be no more of such things. I sniff, and a fat tear rolls down my cheek.

Freja shakes her head and points to me. “She would not be overset by a tutoring assignment.”

I open my mouth, and the truth comes spilling out, as though bursting through a crumbling embankment, destroying farmland and wiping out thatch-roofed cottages.

“It was New Year’s Eve, and he smelled so good…Every day he showed up wearing this awful suit and every day it matteredless and less…Tailored menswear can save the world, I swear…If Freja hadn’t told him about Pietor, none of this would have happened…All that training, and he still thinks he can go around beating people up when they call me names,” I cry.

“Pietor deserved the fat lip,” Ella spits. “My only regret is that I wasn’t the one who delivered it.”

“Jacob isn’t supposed to be hitting anyone,” I wail, glossing over my own lapse.

Clara snorts. “Max would have flattened the reporter who stalked us, but I told him it was better to cripple him financially. He only agreed because he likes precision weapons.”

Freja pipes up. “I don’t understand. You’ve been all over the papers this week with Pietor. I thought you two were back on. If not, why are you even seeing him so much?”

Ella whacks her. “Keep up. It’s because of the picture in the papers today. She had to get ahead of the story and protect her reputation.”

I sit up, holding my arms over my stomach. “I don’t care about my reputation.”

My sisters go completely still, absorbing the words until Ella breaks the silence. “Excuse me?”

I scrub my eyes with the heel of my hand. My mascara disappeared a dozen tissues ago, and I’m too tired to pretend. “The damage to me is done. I can’t let Jacob—”