Liora sat forward. “Not like what? Out of spite? Anger? Rage? You passed the blade across her carotid, did you not? Speak true.”
My eyes opened. “I didn’t want her to become one of those things.”
“The Unseelie wraiths?”
“Yes.”
Her lips curled. Her eyes were lit. “How much of you, though?”
“How much of me what?”
“How much of you longed to see her die? I bet she made you relish her death.”
I stared at the fairy-tale queen with a burgeoning realizationabout the dainty spoon I held. I could use any fucking spoon we wanted to eat the bread pudding, and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to Liora.
“Yes,” I said, “she did.” That was the truth.
Liora nodded once, as if in approval. She pulled off her gloves, one and then the other, and laid them on the table. She studied them as though considering what to do.
I must have misstepped. Said too much. I set down my spoon. “Queen Liora?—”
She kept her eyes down as she smoothed her gloves. “Mira.”
“Pardon me?”
She lifted her face. “My birth name was Mira.”
She let that sit between us. It felt like a secret.
“Why tell me?” I finally asked.
Blue eyes, piercing as cold water. “Because you’re the first queen in six hundred years who would understand why I buried it.”
That struck me right in the chest, sharper than any arrow. “Mira, I?—”
“It wasn’t me.”
My brows rose. “What wasn’t you?”
“The mirror wraith. I didn’t allow it through.”
For some reason, I believed that. I believed it as much as the forward-leaning curiosity I’d just seen from her over Rhiannon’s death. “Who did?”
“That’s Noctere handiwork. In that court, the scepter and the shiv are never wielded by the same set of hands.”
Gawain.
Liora sat back. “I believe yourveyreis investigating the details.”
“How do you know that?”
She tapped one tapered fingernail on the table. “Because he isn’t hovering outside this door.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dorian
By night,this castle was a sham.