Evangeline didn’t know if time was like magic and worked differently in the North. But she would have bet her life that it started moving faster the instant Jacks strode away.
Dinner took place at an elaborate table encircling the phoenix tree. It was set with pewter goblets and honeycomb candles shaped like castles, and beside each plate were wooden figurines of tiny dragons all displaying names. Jacks’s name had been placed beside hers. He didn’t show up, but his chair was perpetually full of curious nobles—the Prince of Hearts had apparently been correct about his attention doing wonders for her popularity.
Everyone was friendly in an I’m-only-talking-to-you-because-someone-else-made-you-look-important sort of way. Evangeline heard a lot of what a pretty color of hair, it was just like that princess—of course no one could remember that princess’s name or which prince she’d been married to, but almost everyone remarked on it. Evangeline tried her best to be attentive and polite, but all she could think about was kissing Prince Apollo. A part of her was slightly intrigued by the idea—who wouldn’t want to kiss a prince?—but she didn’t want it like this. She didn’t want to force herself on him, and she didn’t know why Jacks would want her to do this either. What did Jacks have to gain by this?
She wanted to hope that Jacks had been joking earlier when he’d said she would die if she didn’t kiss Apollo tonight. But Jacks seemed like the sort who was probably deadly serious even when he sounded as if he were joking. And given the way he’d left her when she’d turned to stone, Evangeline couldn’t imagine he’d care if she also turned into a corpse. Or—
“Excuse me, Miss Fox.” A palace servant tapped her on the shoulder. “It’s your time to die.”
Evangeline startled but quickly realized that wasn’t what the servant said. He’d actually said, It’s your time to meet the prince. But in that moment, it felt like the same thing. She’d come up with only one theory why Jacks would want her to kiss Prince Apollo—Jacks wanted to kill him. Jacks had painted her lips with his blood, giving her some of his magic, and his magic was in his fatal kiss—which possibly meant her kiss was now deadly.
Her breathing quickened as she approached the steps circling the phoenix tree.
Jacks inclined against the stair rail at the base, head tipped back, blue hair tumbling over one eye, and giving the impression he’d been waiting for her half the night. “Ready, pet?”
He held out his arm like a gentleman.
Evangeline ignored his offer, but leaned closely enough to whisper as they started up the winding steps. “Why do you want me to kiss Prince Apollo? Is this going to kill him?”
Jacks side-eyed her. “I appreciate a good imagination, but use it when you kiss the prince, not when you think about what the consequences might be.”
“I’m not going to kiss him unless you tell me why you want this.”
“If I wanted you to kill the prince, I wouldn’t be climbing these stairs with you.” Jacks wrapped the arm she’d just refused around hers. His gray shirtsleeves were rolled up, so she could feel his skin, cool and rock solid. The contact covered Evangeline’s flesh with tiny unwanted bumps as he brought her closer to his side. “There’s no point in having another person commit murder if you’re going to be in the room with them.”
Evangeline wanted to keep arguing, but Jacks made a convincing point, which was a small relief. Evangeline really didn’t want to die, but she also knew that she couldn’t kiss the prince if she thought that it would hurt him. “If that’s not your plan, what will happen when I kiss him?”
“Depends on how good at it you are.” Jacks’s chilling gaze went to her lips. “You do know how to kiss, right?”
“Of course I know how to kiss!” She yanked her arm free.
Jacks frowned. “Why are you so angry? Do you think the prince is ugly?”
“This is not about how he looks. I don’t want to hurt him.”
“I’m not going to tell you to trust me, because that’s a terrible idea. But you can believe that if I were going to have you harm Apollo, I wouldn’t be around when it happened.”
The air turned redolent with the thick scents of balsam and wood as they reached the top of the steps. Above them, tawny and gold leaves rustled, and Evangeline spied at least half a dozen guards in matching tawny-and-gold tunics sitting on the branches that formed the roof of Prince Apollo’s balcony suite.
She darted Jacks a panicked look.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “No one is going to shoot you with an arrow for kissing the prince.”
But something would happen when she kissed the prince. Evangeline should have tried harder to get out of this. She thought about trying now.
Prince Apollo was standing at his balcony rail, his back to Evangeline as he looked out on the scene below. But then he had to go and turn around.
He was tall, but not as impossibly attractive as Jacks.
Apollo’s face was more interesting than classically handsome. He possessed a slightly crooked aquiline nose, which might have overwhelmed another person’s face, but all his features were a bit intense, from his thick dark brows to his deep-set eyes. His skin was olive. His hair was heavy and dark and cropped closer to better show off his strong features. He’d forsaken the antler crown, but he was still obviously a prince. Utterly commanding as he leaned one elbow against his balcony rail and gave her a smile that said, I might not be the most handsome person in the room, but you know that you’re intrigued.
Evangeline couldn’t deny that she was. Though she wasn’t sure if it was because he was simply a prince or if it was the way he managed to smolder at her. Luc had tried to smolder, but he’d never quite mastered it like Apollo—his eyes were deep brown and amber with tiny flecks of glowing bronze.
“You’re drooling a little,” said Jacks, and he didn’t even have the decency to be quiet about it.
Apollo laughed, darkly musical and absolutely mortifying.
Evangeline considered hiding, but the balcony’s lounge was too low to the ground to duck under, and the prince was already striding closer.
“Don’t feel bad, Miss Fox.” Apollo finished closing the short distance between them. She was surprised that despite the intensity of his face, he appeared to be only a couple of years older than she was. Nineteen or twenty-one at the most. “I think our mutual friend is jealous. He’s been telling me for weeks how gorgeous you are, but until now, I thought he was exaggerating.”
“Jacks told you about me?” Evangeline didn’t even try to hide her shock as her gaze shot to Jacks.
He’d already left her side to wander the small suite, and he met her stare with the same taciturn disinterest he’d shown everyone else when he’d first entered the party. If looks could speak, this one would have told her, Just because I said it doesn’t mean I believe it.
But he had said it. She didn’t care if he’d meant it or not. Jacks had acted as if her appearance that night was a surprise and all of this was unplanned, yet he’d known she was coming for weeks. He’d been setting up this kiss. Why? What did Jacks want? What would happen when she kissed the prince?
Evangeline couldn’t come up with a single new theory. She tried, but it was growing difficult to focus. Something felt very wrong with her heart. It had beat faster when she’d first met with Jacks, but now it was almost as if she had two hearts—her pulse was going wild, pounding painfully in her chest as if it might soon run out of beats.
When she looked back at Apollo, her heart began pounding, Kiss him. Kiss him. Kiss him.
It didn’t feel like a desire so much as a need.
Apollo was close enough that she could just take one step, tilt her head, and then press her lips to his. And yet, Evangeline couldn’t, not until she’d at least tried to learn why Jacks had set this up.
Instead, she managed to say, “How well do you know Jacks?”
The prince’s bold smile faltered. “I’m not accustomed to ladies coming up here and asking about other young men.”
“Please don’t mistake my question as interest in Jacks. I’m not interested in Jacks—”
“And yet you keep saying his name.” Apollo’s words came out as teasing, but his gaze was not. He looked at her the way that Evangeline imagined portraits stared at people when their backs were turned. No more magnetic smiles. No smoldering brown eyes. It was the gazing equivalent to pulling out a knife and tilting it so it caught the light.
It seemed Prince Apollo’s confidence had its limits, or maybe he wasn’t that confident after all. Perhaps he and Jacks were more rivals than friends? Maybe that’s what this was somehow about? Evangeline still didn’t understand what Jacks was really after or what this kiss would do, but she didn’t have time to figure it out.
Her heart wasn’t just pounding now, it was hurting, straining. Jacks said she’d die if she didn’t kiss the prince by the end of the party, and although it wasn’t quite over, Evangeline knew this meeting was. Apollo’s posture was shifting; he was about to dismiss her. Soon he would turn and walk away without another word. If she was going to kiss him, this was her final chance.
Evangeline lifted her eyes, seeking his lips, but somehow her gaze drifted over Apollo’s broad shoulder to Jacks. He leaned against the balcony rail flicking a silver coin with his long fingers.
The corner of his lips twitched ever so slightly, and he continued flipping the coin as he silently mouthed: Will she kiss him? Will she die? Will she kiss him? Will she die?
Evangeline would die eventually, but it would not be tonight.
She focused her gaze on Apollo. Spots danced around the edges of her vision, turning the prince into a blur of dread. “I’m sorry.”
She reached up to cup his cheek, rose on the tips of her toes, and brought her lips to his.
Apollo didn’t move.
Evangeline’s heart skipped. This wasn’t working. Apollo was going to pull away and call down the guards, who would surely shoot her or arrest her or drag her from the party by her hair. But instead of shoving her off, Apollo’s lips pressed against hers, as if this were how he frequently finished conversations with his female guests, and it wasn’t surprising in the least that Evangeline had wanted a goodbye kiss.
His warm hand went to her hip, pulling her close as his tongue slid inside her mouth, stroking hers as if giving her a goodbye gift.
Her cheeks heated at the thought that Jacks was watching the embrace, but she didn’t pull away. Apollo’s technique was better than Luc’s, who was always a little too eager. And yet everything about the way Apollo touched her felt more practiced than passionate.
Fleetingly, she wondered if he’d had painters capture the way he kissed, if that’s why everything felt a little like a performance.
His fingers gently squeezed her backside, digging in just enough to make her feel a jolt of surprise. “Goodbye, Miss Fox,” he murmured against her mouth. “I liked this more than I expected.” He started to pull away, but then his grip around her hip tightened.
And he was kissing her again. His lips greedily slanted over hers as his other hand slid into her hair, destroying the curls Jacks had already mussed as Apollo plundered her mouth. He tasted like lust, and night, and something lost that should have stayed that way.
Evangeline’s heart became a drum, beating harder and faster as he pressed in closer. There were layers of clothing between them, but she could feel the heat coming off him. More heat than she’d ever felt with Luc. It was almost too hot, too hungry. Apollo burned like a fire that consumed instead of warmed. And yet there must have been a part of her that wanted to be scorched, or at the very least singed.
She wrapped both hands around his neck.
Apollo’s mouth left her lips and dropped to her throat, trailing kiss after kiss down to her—
A cold hand clamped on her shoulder and wrenched her free of the prince’s grasp. “I think it’s time we go.”
Jacks pulled her toward the balcony stairs with supernatural swiftness. One moment, Apollo was all Evangeline could feel, and then she was tucked underneath Jacks’s hard arm, pressed close to his cool side as he ushered her toward the steps.
“Keep moving,” he commanded. His eyes had changed from soulless ice to the sharpest blue. “Don’t look back.”
But of course she had to look back. She had to see what she’d done.
Apollo remained rooted in place—thankfully, he was still very much alive—but he didn’t look quite right. He stood in the middle of the suite, intently tracing his lips with his finger. Tracing and tracing as if the act could reveal to him what had just happened, why his control had slipped with a girl whom he’d thought to turn away.
Evangeline wondered the same thing.
Apollo caught her eyes. There were still embers of heat in his gaze, but she couldn’t tell if it looked like passion or anger.
“Jacks, what did you do?” she whispered.
“It’s not what I did, Little Fox. It’s what you’ve done. And tomorrow night, you get to do even more.”
