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Rather than descending on the food, the butterflies continued to hover around Carissa. One settled on her braid and the others followed suit, arranging themselves so the subtle color gradation of their wings made them into a living hair accessory.

“Not me, the nectar.” Carissa lifted her braid, shaking the butterflies free. “You need to eat.”

Her shoulders tightened, matching the distress in her voice. Ev felt an answering echo from outside, a mourning note in the dragon’s song. Carissa stepped away, waving the butterflies toward the nectar.

“Go on.”

The butterflies circled, confused, as if something drew them to Carissa. She took another step, half-turning and noticing Ev. She started, but quickly smoothed it over with annoyance.

“You’re sneaking up on me now?”

“I thought you heard me come in.” Ev found her tone mirroring Carissa’s again.

Carissa’s cheeks flushed, defensiveness replacing the contouring and highlighting normally there in all her photos. Bare skin, like Ev had stumbled behind the scenes of her feed while she was still getting dressed. Too perfect, too beautiful – but not right now.

“What are you even doing?” It sounded slightly accusatory, not what Ev meant, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

The butterflies flittered close again. Carissa swatted at the air around them, then immediately looked horrified at herself, scanning quickly to make sure she hadn’t hurt them.

“I can’t be in here right now.” Carissa brushed past her.

She didn’t invite Ev to follow, but she didn’t tell her to stay put, either. She pushed through a glass door tucked within the greenery, leading out onto the terrace. Ev found her standing at the railing, arms crossed, body held rigid, conveying a mixture of fury and misery.

“My father switched my shampoo and didn’t tell me,” Carissa said.

A frown pulled at the corners of her mouth, her head canted downward.

Two more terraces sprawled below them, the lowest where Ev had stood overlooking the dragon’s pit.

Carissa’s gaze was directed that way, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything at all.

Ev couldn’t see the dragon from here. It must have an interior space it could retreat to, holding its body in the same knot of upset as Carissa. At least, that’s what Ev guessed, based on the resonating song shivering through her bones.

“You’re mad about shampoo?” She couldn’t keep the scorn from her voice.

Just when Carissa had almost started to appear human, she’d revealed a new level of shallowness.

Carissa wheeled around, her mouth slightly open, anger flashing up into her cheeks again.

“He’s product testing on me, and he didn’t even have the decency to ask.”

“What?” Ev floundered, lost.

“It attracts the butterflies, and now they’re not interested in eating; they’re only interested in my hair.

They’re going to starve to death so my dad can sell them as stupid fashion accessories.

I even offered to look at the formula myself, but all he wants is for me to keep being an influencer, selling products. ”

Carissa’s eyes shone, matched to the hectic flush in her cheeks. No longer too perfect or beautiful, but human in a way Ev had never seen from her before. “Wait.” Her words finally registered fully. “You offered to look at the formulas? Doesn’t the company have a whole lab full of people for that?”

“I like chemistry.” Carissa’s tone shifted to defensive, as if she expected Ev to make fun of her.

Ev was utterly lost. “Then why do you need a tutor?”

“Because I don’t want it, any of it – the Royal Academy, the family business. It’s all bullshit. Hotthorpe could and should be helping people, but they aren’t, so I’m trying to blow it all up by failing my classes on purpose.”

Carissa’s anger, her despair, clattered hooked and spiky against Ev’s skin.

The terrace shuddered, the rumble preceding the audible sound as the dragon bellowed its response.

Not a song this time, but a single, discordant note, setting Ev’s teeth on edge.

The letters papering the back of her drawer, a lifetime stretched before her of trudging out from the trailer park before dawn even pinked the sky, across the tracks to the plant, dark already gathering by the time she dragged her weary bones home to collapse into bed and do it all over again the next day. That was the future waiting for Ev.

“Are you fucking serious?” Her voice rose to match Carissa’s. “You have everything and you’re just going to throw it away like some spoiled—”

“What?” Carissa stepped closer, squaring up to Ev. “Bitch? Princess?”

Somehow, she made the second word sound worse than the first, imbuing it with all the snide dismissiveness with which Ev had always framed it in her mind.

Ev refused to feel guilty or sorry because fuck it, she had every right to be pissed.

She opened her mouth to snap a retort. The terrace shuddered again, cutting her off, the faintest of cracks spidering across one of the flagstones.

Ev stumbled, catching herself against Carissa, hand on her arm.

The warmth of her skin was what Ev imagined she would feel if she could lay her hand against the dragon’s scales – a furnace for a heart, constantly burning, so hot that it threatened to turn the body holding it to ash.

Ev realized she hadn’t moved away, the closeness between them terrible. Carissa’s eyes were a muddy hazel-green. She’d always thought they were a bright, almost turquoise blue. In all her posts, they must have been filtered.

“You—” Ev started without a clear idea of what she meant to say, but Carissa pushed her away. Ev felt suddenly cold.

“I’ll make sure you still get paid,” Carissa said, “but don’t bother coming back.”

A thrum from the dragon, not a roar this time.

It spoke a counterpoint to the frost Carissa put in her voice, the hardness she tried to hold in her eyes and the line of her jaw.

The guilt Ev had managed to dodge before slammed into her with full force.

An apology stuck in her throat, and it was all her, not the dragon forcing emotions on her. They didn’t do that.

Carissa held her glare, but Ev could see how dangerously close she was to cracking, like the flagstone, letting the tremor underneath show through.

“I—”

“Just go,” Carissa said. Her smile turned sharp-edged. “And you can tell everyone at school what a disaster Princess Carissa is in real life. In fact, you’d be doing me a favor.”

Slay the princess, save the dragon. It was what she’d wanted when she first took the job, but Ev had no idea what she wanted anymore.

Shit.

She couldn’t see a way past Carissa’s armor, cracked or not.

Couldn’t see a way to apologize, especially not when part of her was still angry, when the larger part of her was confused.

Should she resent Carissa or pity her? The dragon wasn’t helping either, swirling everything inside of her into a mass of anxiety, guilt, irritation.

She turned, her bag cutting into her shoulder, a tuck-tailed dog slinking away.

***

Ev lay on her side, the only light the glow of her phone.

She couldn’t help it. Despite telling herself not to – she checked Carissa’s feed.

She hadn’t posted anything all day, utterly unlike her.

She scrolled through older posts, camera angled just so, everything cropped and filtered and carefully framed.

None of it was her; Ev could see that now, and she couldn’t help overlaying every image in the feed with the Carissa she’d seen this afternoon.

She hadn’t applied the filter to her eyes out of vanity, but to hide how much it hurt to post the pictures, to pretend to be somebody else.

A mask Ev had chosen to believe, because it made her feel justified in her jealousy that she’d let border on hate.

Shit.

She scrolled farther. Always in the background, Carissa’s dragon. Both of them trapped and chained.

Perfect. Beautiful.

And when exactly had she dropped the too in her mind?

A laugh broke from her, a sound on the verge of becoming a hiccup or a sob, because it was all so ridiculous. Even if there was a chance that Carissa—

No. Ev cut off the branch of thought. No point hoping or wondering along those lines. But she could at least apologize. It wouldn’t gain her anything, but it was the right thing to do.

Ev peeled back her covers, pulled on jeans and an old sweatshirt, her stompy boots, and slipped her phone into her pocket. Time to trespass on the Hotthorpe property again.

She followed the light, the atrium burning as bright as ever, night and day, guiding her through the streets as the houses got bigger, nicer, then fell away altogether until it was just the land surrounding the castle.

The walk wasn’t even all that far – so little space, and such an arbitrary line dividing Carissa’s life from hers, yet they inhabited different worlds.

As she had the first time she came here, Ev circled around the edge of the property, but instead of descending the terraces, she approached the atrium from the side and peered in.

She started at the figure seated on the ground.

She hadn’t really expected to find anyone.

It took her a moment to recognize Carissa. Her head was completely shorn.

Her legs were folded to the side beneath her, feet bare under the hem of a floral slip dress. The thin straps showed off the slant of her shoulders. Her head was bowed, revealing a tattoo where her neck met the knobs of her spine, an intricate and lovely design formerly hidden by her hair.

Ev tapped the thick glass before she could think better of it. Carissa’s head snapped up in a full-body flinch.

Carissa unfolded herself and came to the door. She opened it, but slouched in the frame, blocking the way. The spell-light of the atrium showed her skin was blotchy, as if she’d been crying before Ev arrived.

“What do you want?”

“I…to apologize,” Ev said.