Malice

her dressing table and sets it down again—“I’ll have no daughters. And there’s no extended family remaining—my mother’s sisters have all passed. And so I’m ending the curse forever.”
My mouth goes dry. “No.”
“For the last twenty years of my life, every waking moment has been centered on this curse.” A stubborn curl spills out of a loose pin. The spun gold shines in the candlelight. “I may be a spoiled princess. But it hasn’t been a life. Not at all. Did you know that even when I was a child, visiting dignitaries would kiss me? And their sons?”
A sour feeling churns in my stomach.
“Indeed.” She smiles, but it’s weak. “One never knows when a true love will appear. I had a great-aunt whose curse was lifted at the age of eight by a man thirty years her senior.”
Eight. Hilde’s long-ago words about Graces being cursed instead of blessed float back to me, and I wonder if the same could be said about the cure for Aurora’s curse.
“Since I could read, I’ve been drilled in the stories of the women before me. Who lived, who died, who found their true love and at what age and how.” She sucks in a breath and exhales slowly. “I have had enough. Even with you, the one place I had a rest from court, all we did was talk about the curse.”
No wonder she’d been only half interested in the books during her last visits. I’d accused her of giving in to the Crown. Of wanting Elias. The last stone of my doubt collapses into itself. I am a fool. A selfish, utter fool. “That’s why you stopped coming.”
“No.” Aurora closes the distance between us and grasps my shoulders. “I told you the truth. My mother employed every snare she knew to keep me locked inside these walls. She even had a spinning wheel brought in so that I could better understand Ryna’s silk trade.” The veiled object in her sitting room. “But I should have sent word. I’m sorry for that.”
She owes me no apology. Her hands fall away, leaving cold spots in their wake. “You can’t just stop accepting suitors.” I think of the king. Of how easily he outmaneuvered me. “They won’t allow it.”
Her expression hardens. She’s thought about this a great deal, I realize. And the blood of her ancestors pumps from her heart. Warrior queens. “They can try what they like. But I will see no more. These last months are mine.”
Aurora goes to the window, pulling open the gossamer curtains and looking out into the garden below. It’s the same one where we first met, though the fountain has been restored. The gurgling water has been dyed lavender for the celebrations—as though the incident with mud never happened.
“When I’m not helping with the succession, I plan to do exactly as I please. Until it’s time.” There’s an undercurrent of anxiety in her words, but her body is rigid. She turns to me, moonlight lending a halo around her form. “And there’s only one person I plan to kiss.”
“I thought you said—”
And then her finger is on my lips. My heart kicks up, fire racing through her fingertip and into my bloodstream. I can only stare down, cross-eyed, at my nose.
“I want to kiss you, Alyce.” I can hardly hear her over the stampede in my ears. I drag my gaze up. Her eyes are an indigo-amethyst and glimmering with something I can’t name. The neckline of her bodice rises and falls in a rhythm that matches my own. “You’re the first and last person I’ve ever wanted.”
I cannot feel my feet. That is the only thought that loops through my mind as her face nears. I will fall. My legs are numb. This cannot be real.
But the scent of her washes over me, lilies and apples and cool, night things. Another lock of her hair wriggles loose of its fastening and drops to brush against my arm. Tentative, her hands cup the underside of my jaw, thumbs tracing my cheekbones. I close my eyes. No one has ever touched me like this before. I expect her to pull away at the clamminess of my skin. The flaky, scaly surface of me. But she only leans closer, the space between us as thin as any hope I’ve ever dared dream.
“Will you kiss me, Alyce?”
My heart is a wild thing. Fast as a hummingbird, steady as a hammer. It will break me in half. Burst out of my chest and flail on the rug like a caught fish. And I would be glad of it.
Logic and reason scream at me to pull away. This is the crown princess. We live in two different worlds and we could never—but my lips have other ideas.
Aurora yelps as my mouth crushes against hers, and then she tightens her hold on my neck. My own hands reach up, not sure where to go, but knowing that they must go somewhere. Must do something to pull Aurora closer to me. One snakes into her hair, uncaring as pins scratch and scrape me. The other finds her waist, wrapping tight and reeling her in. She tastes of warm sugar and the dry, fizzy wine from the celebration downstairs. Of hope and freedom and everything lacking in my life.
A rumble reverberates through my bones as I deepen the kiss, both petrified and electrified at my own boldness. An entirely new sound escapes Aurora’s throat, traveling from her mouth into mine in a way that will be my undoing. She slumps a little. I hold her up, parting her lips with my tongue and exploring the velvet within. She pushes me backward, until I’m flat against the wall, her hands spreading wildfire down from my neck and over the sides of my breasts. Her teeth find my earlobe. The furious cadence at my throat.
It’s then that I notice the shaking.
The rumbling I’d thought was my own tremulous body is real. The wall is vibrating behind my shoulder blades.