Page 158 of Fearless

It’s my bouquet. I realize now that it had been forgotten after rushing to the throne room. He must have been bringing it to me. Blinking, I lower my gaze to the crumbling flower beside me, plucked years before this moment.

There is that something tugging incessantly at the corner of my subconscious once again. Like the intuition that senses a fight before the first punch is thrown. Or the moment before I’ve fit every observation together, molding the story into place with my mind. Or how a memoryresurfaces at the exact moment I need to pick it apart. Because nothing goes unnoticed.

“I must rush off to a meeting with Kitt, but I will be sure to tell him how beautiful you look in this wedding dress.”

Calum was standing mere steps away from where he is now when the compliment slid from his tongue. But it’s the following string of words that I focus on. The damning ones that echo through my mind.

“The roses from my garden will look lovely with it.”

I had felt that distant nagging then, that prick of intuition, and chose to ignore it. My trust in Calum had built a wall around my heart, yet all it took was a rose to have it crumbling.

Everything is happening so fast, like the inevitable trip before a fall. My thoughts blur, all bleeding into one another. The past comes racing toward my current present, overlapping to create one clear conclusion.

I glance down at the decaying flower.

Ellie’s words suddenly surface from the depths of my mind.

“There is a private rose garden here on the grounds. Pretty pink ones, I believe.”

My head swims.

That rose garden has been here for decades.

Each breath grows shallower.

A Fatal. A Resistance leader. A man who is always in the right place at the right time.

A flood of unanswered questions pours into my reeling mind, making me dizzy. Confusion creeps into every thought, every moment spent with Calum. From his Resistance speech at the Bowl to the very ring on my finger.

I claw at my mind, prying apart strands of my past. A wave of realizations crashes over me in a series of disconnected thoughts.

The notes.

The handwriting.

The Purging Trials.

My mind is a muddled melody of rhymes, all scrolled in that loopy penmanship. One from a scroll in the Whispers. One at the base of Plummet, and one read at its peak.

My heart pounds as pieces of this puzzle begin falling into place.

When I fought the king, his words meant nothing. Until now.

“… a friend told me of his intentions and thisResistancehe was a part of.”

A friend.

Someone close to my father, and the king.

Someone loyal to the latter.

Blooms did not spring flowers from the earth for Calum overnight. No, he has been tending to them for years.

Because he is the king’s Mind Reader.

It’s as though the world has tilted beneath me.

But that is not all. That is only the beginning.

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