Page 42 of The Crown of the Dark Prince
Fiancé.
The word echoed in my mind, but somehow didn’t make sense. It couldn’t.
I stared down at the hand she held between us. Even her nails were immaculate, perfect oval cylinders on top of her delicate fingers. She wasabsolutely the most stunning woman I had ever seen. Of course she was. Of course, Clay would be engaged to someone beautiful.
I stared at the bracelet again. The golden dragon carving.
Gods. He had proposed to her with that bracelet and she was holding it out to me like a beacon, waiting for me to grasp onto that hand in a friendly greeting.
“I should go,” I muttered, magic sparking beneath my fingertips.
“Thea, wait,” Clay said, his voice laced with concern.
The sour taste of bitterness filled my mouth.
Clay was concerned for me. Clay, who was standing half naked in his bedroom alone with hisfiancé,had the audacity to show concern for my feelings.
He hadn’t been concerned enough to find a single moment to tell me he was already engaged or that his fiancé was here in the castle. He hadn’t been concerned that fact might bother me when he tangled his hands in my hair, swore he belonged by my side, and kissed me just yesterday.
Iris’s voice suddenly echoed in my memory.“You have no right to cry over her. You lost that right.”
She had known.
“Get out Clay. I don’t want you here and soon enough she won’t want you here either.”
It wasn’t just Iris, though.
This was why he’d been fighting with Rankor. This was what Kent and Rankor had been silently communicating about. They had known.
They hadallknown.
And none of them told me.
I was going to be sick.
The world spun around me as Clay stepped closer, and Elaina put a warning touch on his hand. By the Gods, she was touching the hand thathad brushed back my hair so recently that I could almost feel it caressing me now.
I turned sharply and retreated down the hall without another word.
“Thea, please!” His footsteps followed me, his voice desperate, but I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t.
If I stopped, I might break.
My skin burned as magic coursed through me, fueled by the raging storm of my emotions.
It wasn’t as though I had any right to be upset. Clay wasn’t mine. He had never been mine, and he never could be. I had been the one to remind him of that time and time again. I had no claim to him—his heart or his body.
And yet, the sight of him with another woman was a blow that struck deeper than anything I had endured before.
I burst through the palace doors into the icy chill of the gardens. Frigid winds swept down from the mountains, carrying tiny white flakes that danced against my skin. Their icy touch did nothing to soothe the fire raging inside me though. My magic surged, wild and untamed, as uncontrollable as it had been that first night I’d used it.
That night, Clay had coached me through it. He’d handed me a single rose, his voice steady as he guided me. That memory had seared itself into my mind, vivid and sharp, alongside a hundred others of tender, stolen moments. Moments that felt like nothing now.
Moments that had never meant anything.
I should have known. I’d spent so much time dreading my own marriage, but it had been foolish not to realize that Clay’s was inevitable, too. He was the Crown Prince, bound by the same duty and tradition that I was. I should have prepared myself for this.
