Page 102 of The Prince's Curse

“Are you asking if I saw you die before?” She nodded. “Yes. Not every time. I…” He shook his head. “You don’t want to hear about this.”

“I do. I need to know the truth so that I can see who she is. I need to know how I fight back so it doesn’t happen again,” she said.

His eyes widened. “She trapped me a little over a hundred and twenty years ago. That would have been after…the third time you—Brigitte—died. The first time, I was with Julian, but I didn’t see you. And when it happened again, we still didn’t understand that it was Armina’s curse. It wasn’t until she tricked me that I realized what she was doing. She imprisoned me for a long time just to amuse herself, and I think it would have been the fourth time when I had to see it for myself.”

“Did she always take care of me? Of her…” Scarlett shook her head. “Pretend to be family, I mean?”

He shook his head. “That was only this time. Before, she just let fate run its course for about twenty-eight years, and then she’d start circling until she found you. One time you—” His face paled. “One time she had a child. Not hers by blood, but the son of a friend who had died.”

“How did she find me—find her?” she asked. She had to stop thinking of those women as herself, even as a strange image tore through her mind, holding the hand of a little boy with black curls as they watched a mound of dirt rising over a freshly buried coffin.

“That I don’t know,” he said. “It’s tied to the spell on you.”

“And does she…did she kill her every time?”

He shook his head. “No. I think that’s how she convinces herself that she’s still got the moral high ground. Shoshanna understands much more about magic than I do, but Armina has somehow twisted fate around you. When it’s time, the magic brings calamity to you, and she never gets her hands dirty.” His eyes were downcast as he took a long drink from the bag of blood. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.“She got even more cruel over time. The last time… You had a boyfriend, and she made me attack him,” he said. His jaw ticked, and he met her eyes with an anguished gaze. “She made me kill him. And you found him dead.”

It was strange to see his anguish, when she had no memory of this man. But she remembered what it was like to see Julian fall with Armina’s magic ripping through him, his body stiff and eyes wide open in a death stare.Some version of her had loved and lost, and had suffered enough that Kova was still haunted by it.

“Why?” she whispered. “What does that have to do with Julian?”

“She wanted to see if she could make you hunt him down. A few weeks after his death, she swooped into your life to comfort you and tell you that what you’d experienced was real, and that she could help you find the man who did it,” Kova said. “It was?—”

“So she killed him just to see what would happen?” she said incredulously.

“When you took the bait, she tried to make me train you to hunt. I refused, so she locked me in the basement for nearly a year and starved me out. When she finally let me out, it was to protect her from Julian when he came looking for her, and then again to bring you back when it was over,” Kova said.

Her throat closed off as tears spilled over her cheeks. “You tried so hard for me.”

“I did for you what I couldn’t do for Lucia. I wanted—” His voice broke, and he clamped his lips shut as he stared intently at his hands. Her heart pounded as they sat together. Though they did not speak, the pain echoing in the room was deafening. “What else do you want to know?”

“I want to know if you’ll be okay,” she said.

His eyes lifted. “All of this, and you’re worried about me? I’m fine.”

“What about Lucia? Are you going to see her?”

His lips parted, and there was a strange pulse of light, his dark eyes going red. “I don’t know if I can. All these years gave me so much time to think. Lucia’s not like me. She’s gentle and sweet. Never hurt anyone, not even by accident. I always thought it was strange that she loved me, even then.”

“And you think you don’t deserve her?” Scarlett asked.

His eyes lifted to her, and he simply smiled.

“I think you’re full of shit,” she said sharply. His brows arched. “And I think you should let Lucia decide if you’re good enough for her, instead of treating her like some delicate creature who doesn’t have the capacity to make her own decisions.”

His jaw dropped. “Scarlett.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true,” she said. “Why would you go through all of this for her and then hide when she’s finally in reach?”

“What if she hates me?” he asked.

“How could she hate you?” she said. “She knows you. I know you and I love you.”

His eyes welled over, but he scrubbed quickly at them. With a nervous laugh, he finished off the blood bag. “Careful with all this. I’ll have you running laps if you keep making me look at myself this closely.” Then he slid around the table, close enough to hold her shoulders. He kissed her forehead, then lifted her chin. “I’ll try to be brave enough for Lucia. But for now, she’s safe. You aren’t. Let me focus on helping you, zaika.”

She nodded solemnly. “Okay. You think they can do it?”

“I think if those two can break a century-old binding, they’ve got a damned good chance at it,” he said.

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