Page 61 of Misadventures with a Duke

“Don’t you think that this—us, whatever the hell this is—checks enough of the boxes for unusual already?” She lifts her arms and splays her fingers. “Eventually, we’ll get you back to the wardrobe. Do you really want to be climbing back inside that thing, wondering if you’ve left a child behind? Or technically…ahead. Shit. Where’s the user’s manual when a girl needs one?”

Only now do I realize that I have stomped sweaty footprints onto the floor between the kitchen and front window. I halt them with a pair of loud squeaks and make more noise when pivoting back around. My posture is already rigid. I impale the woman with a strict thrust of my glower. “Do you think, for even a moment, that I would crawl back into that cabinet if there is an inkling you are with child?”

As soon as I finish, I nod with satisfaction. That should be fucking enough of that. End of discussion.

But it is the end of nothing.

Raegan’s chest pumps with agitated air. Her nostrils flare.

“Let’s go again with that whole guy-who-knows-nothing-about-this-century theory,” she snaps. “Because in this case, it’s a good one. Because in this day and age, even if we can skirt the rules of your gypsy friend’s spell, this is a lose-lose proposition.”

Thankfully, I am already stopped in my tracks. Still, I sway as if she has flung open a window and let the rain pummel me.

“My gypsy fr—” More figurative rain now, drenching my mind in icy sheets of. “Are you referring to…Kavia?” I narrow my stare. “How do you know that about her, Rayonnement?”

That detail that nobody in our family ever speaks of…inside or out of Château De Leon…

As more wild conjectures daunt my mind, the woman slams hands to the graceful curves of her hips. “You remember the part about us figuring out how Max got here? And then stayed without becoming two-hundred-year-old ashes?”

“Oui.” I mean to state it but barely croak it. The conjectures have turned fiercer than I think. “Mon dieu.”

Fiercer…to the point of agony. Clear, sharp, shards of it all.

I have cheated the universe. Fucked over history. Eviscerated fate itself.

By the laws of time, I should be naught but a pile of bone and dust in the De Leon family crypt now. To avoid that, providence has certainly demanded a specific tariff.

A price attached to a gypsy spell.

Kavia’s gypsy spell.

The toll that she never had time to impart. The instructions I still have not heard.

I scrub a hand down my face as the realization sinks in. As my memory fills with the last few moments that I saw Kavia and Carl, cut short because the revolutionaries were closing in on our hiding space.

Good. Very good, my boy! Now there is only one more thing to remember…

“I never heard it.” My admission is barely a rasp on the thick air. “The conditions of the spell,” I explain. “Kavia never had the chance to tell me. There was a mob. They were after my life—”

“You don’t say.”

Her comment brings some needed levity, as well as a moment to catch my breath. Revision: to snap up whatever air my lungs will allow in. They are as constrained as the rest of me, braced in agonized battle against the memories that keep tumbling on me. But I accept the paltry oxygen as a blessing. It helps me to blurt out the rest.

“They wanted to kill me. But instead, they slayed Magique.”

RAEGAN

“Wh-What?”

I’m shocked I’m able to get that much out. As my mind absorbs the truth of his confession, it surrenders its hold on other parts of reality. The room is rotating. My head spins in the other direction.

They slayed Magique.

What the hell do I do with that?

Bastien loves her. And he’s supposed to get back to the mystical-magical wardrobe, hop back in, and return to her. Then he’ll still be alive, and I’ll be back to normal. That was the reason for making Drue go out in the storm, right? The reason I talked myself out of the ridiculous baby-mama fantasy. Normal is good.

Okay, so it’s…fine.