Page 4 of Not Another Happily Ever After

Then the pity in his eyes hits me square in the chest.

Oh.I sit upright, in-part to protest, but also to make sure I still can.

It only took twenty years. Well, twenty years and eleven months since I drew my first breath—the same one that could have been my last had the pontiffs been wrong about the curse. About me.

“I’m afraid your body is starting to wither away, princess.”

“I suppose I should be grateful it didn’t happen sooner. A knife to the carotid artery will normally see right to that. It’s not the cleanest method of sacrifice, but it’s certainly amongst the most efficient. Wouldn’t you agree?” My throat tightens around a truth I can’t yet swallow.

“Well, I?—”

“Slice the throat open. Take my eye. Steal the life of an innocent in place of a lie. Then carve out my heart and give it away. It should have been that easy.” My vision blurs. “Why couldn’t it have been that easy?”

“Please, princess. You should rest.” I can smell the rosemary on Gally’s robes as he inches closer, but his words sound muddled, as if he’s speaking under water.

Not that I’d listen to them anyway. He wants complacency.

I want tolive.

None of this makes sense. Why did the curse spare my life back then, only to work to take it now? I had thought—hadhoped—that when the only remains in the Evil Queen’s home were revealed to be from a little girl and not a boy, I would finally be free.

“Who am I to pay such a price?”

“Princess?”

Ah.Of course. How could I forget? I was born a girl. The first and only girl to be born into royalty since the Evil Queen’s death. Only, there will never be a crown resting uponmyhead. She and her curse saw to that.

“So this is to be my end. I was born, and will die for nothing.”

My head spins beneath the old man’s weathered hand, his cool palm now slick with the sweat above my brows.

“Now hear this, child.”

But all I do is hear, Gally.I listen to the Council as they puzzle through the peculiar little plot twist that is, orwas,the curse’s final act.

I listen to the ghosts that haunt our halls, their sorrowful songs the only thing that sings me to sleep at night.

But this? This is not a tune I care to hear.

“No life is without meaning. No magic without its price,” Galahand drones on, his nonsensical words blurring the lines between fiction and reality. “But… there is a possibility the pontiffs read it wrong.”

“That’s not possible. I would have died the second they slit my throat,” I let out, meeting the old man’s eyes.

The dim flame flickers in their reflection. His resolve is sound.But is his mind?

He crouches close to me, lowering his voice. “But that’s just it, princess. This curse—I don’t think it was meant to destroy. What if it was cast topreservesomething?”

“To preserve something?”

“Or someone,” Galahand nods.

“Someone?”

Gally casts a look over his shoulder before turning back to me, his voice barely a whisper now. “The first born son…”

The first born son?I reel back, my stomach bottoming at an idea I refuse to put too much weight behind. And not for a lack of curiosity, but because if what Gally suggests is true, and Father finds out, then my heart is to be butchered. Stolen from my chest.

And I can’t afford to believe that what little time I have left may be even less now. Not when I am this close to convincing Father to let me leave.