Bianca was blindfolded at dusk and brought up the stairs into Tris’s bedroom. He led her by holding both her hands and giving her instructions. “Another stair,” he said. “You’re doing great.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me about the furniture in your room. I may need to leave with the blindfold still on, and I don’t want to bump into things.”

  “I’m going to put you in the chest at the foot of my bed,” he said.

  “And where are you going to put the stuff in the chest? She’s going to notice if things are not where they are supposed to be.”

  He breathed an annoyed sigh. “There’s another step. Keep it coming. The chest was full of bedding when I got here, and it’s now on my bed. Stop worrying. A sleep spell takes seven minutes to bind. All you have to do is count to 60 seven times and then unplug your ears. Hopefully, you can figure out what she’s doing.”

  Bianca felt the side of the chest at the foot of his bed bump up against her shin. “That’s the chest?”

  “Yes. I’ll help you get in.”

  To her surprise, he lifted her easily up off her feet and then lowered her into the footlocker. She yelped. The whole thing was disorienting with her eyes covered. He muttered soothing cat-like noises to her, which surprised her even more.

  “What was that sound?” she laughed.

  “What? You didn’t like the cooing sound of a kitty trying to imitate a bird? Does it make you feel hunted?” he asked with a snap of his tongue against his teeth.

  “No,” she contradicted mirthfully. “Exactly the opposite. It made me way too happy. Make more sounds!”

  He made the perfect sound of a cat yawning, and she felt her head lowered onto the softness of a pillow. She bent her knees and squashed herself down on the blanket he had left inside.

  “It’s a good thing you’re so small. I can’t believe you fit.” He paused, “But I suppose it’s right that the dead girl fits in the coffin.”

  “You’re not putting me in an actual coffin, are you?” Bianca balked as she reached to touch the edges of the container.

  “Calm down. It’s not a coffin. It’s just lucky that you fit here, so I didn’t have to stuff you somewhere else.”

  “Like where?” she wondered.

  “Maybe in bed with me,” he said in a low, threatening tone.

  Bianca huffed, not believing he would have carried out his threat for a moment. “How would that have been hiding?”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have been,” he conceded.

  “You should plug your ears too, and count to 60 seven times,” Bianca said with a snug smile.

  Tris laughed. “Should I?”

  “Yes! Then maybe I can wait down the hall, safe in my own bed.”

  Tris didn’t think she was making fun of him. He nodded. “Okay. I’ll try to do it, but I think she will have made provisions for that. I still want you here. I’m going to put a couple of blocks of wood under the lid of the chest to prop it open. It will help you breathe, and help you hear better after you unplug your ears.”

  Tris closed the lid, and Bianca touched the underside of it to see how much room she had inside. It was tight, but it was also strangely peaceful for her, like she was a little girl in a tiny bed and no time had passed at all. She didn’t think about what Tris said about how it looked like she was being put to rest in a coffin.

  A minute later, she heard Tris get into bed.

  “Tris,” Bianca said, mostly to the lid of the chest above her face. “Maybe you should tell me what’s in your room that you don’t want me to see. I told you about the words on my skin.”

  He didn’t answer her immediately. “I’ve been in this room a long time. I’ve changed it. What I want is all over this room. My most private desires are hung up on the walls and carved into the furniture. If you ask me, they are far more private than what I look like undressed. It’s not like you wrote the words that appear on your skin. They have nothing to do with you. This is exactly the opposite. What would surround you if you opened your eyes is what I look like on the inside. They are things too private to share with anyone. I would happily drop my trousers for you rather than show you what my loneliness here has driven me to do inside this room. Do you understand?”

  Bianca did understand. She thought his sentiment unbearably beautiful, but she also knew a thing or two about priests of Tigrix that ruined his comparison. “But you’ve had to drop your trousers a lot worshiping your deity.”

  Tris laughed. “Yes, I have. Every time I do the rite to change into a serval, I have to do it completely naked. I was taught to never let it bother me. It’s not sexual. It’s practical. I’d just destroy whatever I was wearing when I transformed if I didn’t take my clothes off.”

  “Do people watch you?” she asked.

  “Yes, but usually just my father, and he only watched until he was certain I was trained well enough that I could perform it without supervision.”

  Bianca smiled. “You know, I think I’d like that world.”

  “What world?”

  “Living in a place where I could show my skin to at least one person. The words mess up everything. I’m never vulnerable and valuable in the way I want to be.”

  “How do you want to be?” Tris asked, shifting his weight in the bed.

  “When someone reads the words on my skin, I don’t feel safe. The words are instructing the person reading them to hurt me, defile me, rip down my defenses without my permission, and satisfy some curiosity inside themselves. I never feel safe. Now that you’ve explained that about yourself, I see now why I feel so safe with you. Last night I fell asleep easily because I knew you wouldn’t hurt me. Of course, you wouldn’t. You take off all your clothes and offer your heart to a God in exchange for the power to protect others… the way your father and uncle taught you.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “What are you saying?”

  She hesitated. “Just that you’re a very fine man, and I’m glad I found my way here.”

  Bianca was about to say more, but Tris interrupted. “We’d better stop talking now. It’s getting late, and Rose will probably be here soon.”

  He clearly did not want to be told he was a very fine man. Whatever he was trying to hide in his bedroom, he could see easily while she was blindfolded in a chest. He didn’t feel like what she was saying could be true because she couldn’t see his secret.

  Bianca didn’t feel like she needed to know his dark secret to know the best thing about him. He wouldn’t hurt her, but out of respect for him, she did as she was told.

  Tris had promised her he would plug his ears, but she heard his breathing come in deep, regular huffs long before she heard Rose coming up the stairs. Rose spoke the words to the spell before she entered the room. Bianca plugged her ears with her fingers and started counting.

  The counting was excruciating. Bianca didn’t think she would ever finish, and when she did, she heard the most curious conversation.

  “You’re both idiots!” a droll voice said. “Neither of you should have been involved in this operation. He was perfect just the way he was, and then you had to go blab that you were married to him. Idiots!”

  “I’m not an idiot,” a refined, but firm voice insisted. “Father said Tris would make the perfect son-in-law, so that’s what we’re turning him into. It’s just taking a little longer than I expected... than any of us expected,” she amended, seeming afraid to offend the other people in the room.

  Removing her blindfold, Bianca shifted in her place and tried to see who Rose was talking to, but it seemed that no one else was in the room. Rose Trine was talking to herself, speaking from her different personas.

  “Just do what we came here to do,” the regal voice continued.

  “I don’t like this,” a third voice whined. “If we do this, we may void his contract with Tigrix, and none of us wants that. It would make him useless.”

  “It will not void his contract with Tigrix,” the cool, dry voice interjected. “I should know.”

  “You don’t know anything about Tigrix,” the whiny voice argued. “You have never once attended a proper Tigrix moon ritual, never completed any training. It’s merely a rumor that the part of us that is you was a servant of the Demon God. I don’t even know why you get a say in this. We’re ignoring the real question.”

  “What’s the real question?” two voices seemed to say at once.

  “The real question is whether or not you love him.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the droll voice replied.

  “Yes, please stop being stupid,” the royal voice went on. “We’re a princess. We don’t marry for love. We marry for opportunity, and he is the greatest opportunity in the land. Look at him.”

  “Look at those adorable spots on his nose!”

  “Look at his biceps.”

  “Look at his shoulders.”

  “Look at his abs.”

  “Look at his teeth!” all three voices chorused, then they giggled.

  “Just shut up, and do the thing.”

  “And if it doesn’t work?” the whiny voice fussed.

  “Then we’ll try something else. It’s not like he’s going anywhere. I’m tired of coming up here night after night with the intention of doing this and then chickening out because you think there will be something ridiculous like consequences. Cast the love spell. Make him love us. Make him want to marry us,” the regal voice hissed.

  Bianca heard only the first word of the love spell before she covered her ears. The first word was made up of Ls like leaves of a book turning madly in the breeze. It was like all the pages of a romance novel turning to the very end in a matter of seconds. She had never heard that specific spell before, but she knew the language of witches. She didn’t know what to do beyond covering her ears. Tris hadn’t told her what to do. All he had said was that he wanted her to keep her blindfold on at all costs. She had actually already pulled it down to see who was in the room.

  She wanted to wait, do nothing, and wait, but what if there was no going back from this?

  Finally, after preparing herself, Bianca shifted in the trunk, put her feet flat on the bottom, and stood up, knocking the lid of the chest open. Her blindfold was off, but the room was shadowed in darkness, and the only things she understood about the room were that Tris was asleep in the bed and Rose Trine was gone.

  Bianca went over to the bed and put her hands on his shoulders. “Wake up!” she yelled, shaking him, but it was no use. The sleep spell had done its work well, and he was completely asleep. He may as well have been dead for all the action he was going to be capable of that night.

  Without sparing a glance at the room, because the idea of the walls of his room being as sacred to him as her own body was to her had taken deep root within her. She did not want to pry into whatever he was hiding, and she stepped down the staircase without even trying to see what was hidden in the dark.

  But when she got back to her own room, she couldn’t sleep. She fussed and fumed and drove herself crazy. Bianca had a lot of experience with people who were competitive, people who were deathly afraid of not being the best. The love spell cast on Tris wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last, not any more than the sleep spell had. Magic was not a forever thing, and nor was it a passkey to everything a person wanted. As soon as Tris awoke, Bianca would ruin the spell. She had not been taught magic because what she needed was the skills to break magic, not conjure it.

  She was so riled up, she let the wheels of her head turn like that until the sun came out over the trees. Then Bianca did something she never did, something she hated doing, but was sometimes very interesting.

  She undid the buttons at her cuffs and rolled up her sleeve. Exposing her forearm, she saw the words that were always just on the other side of the fabric of her dress materialize.

  ‘Kill her,’ it said in bold, clear writing on the inner side of her arm.

  Bianca paused and looked at it, then she pushed her sleeve down. The words on her arm were not stupid, and Bianca realized immediately that doing that would fix a great many things all of a sudden. If Rose Trine were dead, the spell that kept Tris in the castle would be broken. If Rose were dead, no one would think she was married to Tris. The wars she sought to wage would never happen. Death solved a lot of problems.

  “What if her father comes after me for vengeance?” Bianca asked and exposed the underside of her arm.

  The first message was gone, and a new, smaller typeface appeared. ‘What if your stepmother finds someone else who is willing to cut out your heart? Will you always be safe in this castle with an enchanted Archpriest who can’t transform? You need to cut Rose down and bring Tris to Forest Spire and establish him there as your husband and the new crown prince. It would please everyone, especially your father, and make all your problems disappear. No one would dare attack the wife of an Archpriest.’ There was a different font used for the words, ‘all your problems would disappear.’ The letters were all loopy and fanciful.

  “There has to be another way. Besides, he doesn’t want to marry me,” Bianca said out loud. “He thinks I look like a corpse.”

  The words had changed when she looked down. ‘Make him love you. Don’t worry about what will happen next.’

  Bianca pushed her sleeve down and buttoned up the pearl buttons on her nightgown cuff. She had had enough of the nonsensical words penned on her skin. Where did they come from? Who was writing them? And more than anything, what had they said to the knight, Blackwell, to make him change his mind about killing her? Bianca wanted to turn the words into her servant instead of her curse, but she didn’t know how.

  Tris would not wake her when he woke if she were sleeping in her bedroom, so she gathered up all her blankets and carried them down to the throne room. Once there, she arranged them so she could sleep warmly on the stone and made herself comfortable.

  As she drifted off to sleep, she wondered what she needed to do to break Rose Trine’s love spell.