Page 85 of The Nightmare Before Kissmas
I swallow any immediate reaction and instead, I ask, “Are youstill okay with all this? The fake-courting scam. Our… eventual marriage.”
Iris bites the inside of her cheek. “I still worry what it would do to our people’s trust if they found out this was all a lie,” she whispers. “And now that thiscompetitionis underway, I worry that it would make me look flippant and selfish tonotchoose one of you at the end.”
“Fuck what—” I bite my tongue to cut back my response ofFuck what other people think.Because she’s always cared what people think of her, how she’s perceived in her position, in Easter, in life; and it’s all for a valid reason, what with some of her court questioning her family since before she was even born. I won’t cheapen her concerns with my own reactions anymore.
I take her hand and squeeze her fingers. “I’m sorry. If I can figure out a way to stop this and have it be for a legitimate reason, I’ll let you know.”
She squeezes my hand back and releases it with a soft sigh. “In some ways, being forced into this is easier. I can see the appeal in just letting your father take the lead and make decisions the way my father does.”
“You deserve better than this though. You deserve two people fighting over you because they’re both madly in love with you, not because they got lassoed into it.”
One corner of her mouth lifts, but the smile doesn’t blossom, just stays wilted on her face. “I used to want a love story like my parents. To look up in a café and know—it’s you.”
“You could have one. A better one.”
“No.” She meets my eyes. “Iused towant their love story. My dad always said he saw my mom at a café in Strasbourg and justknewthat she’d be important to him. But I’ve seen what it can do now, whenhappily ever afterends. This isn’t a fairy tale, Coal. We’re a prince and a princess but it’s our jobs, not some storybook title, and I know Easter has problems but I barely know how to keep it afloat as is, let alone fix the issues. What are we supposed to do?”
She’s as stuck as I am. And she’s been pushed to the point where she’s starting to doubt that there will be a happy resolution, andgod,how did I let things get this bad on so many fronts?
My eyes find Hex again.
“I don’t know,” I whisper to Iris. “But I know it isn’t like this in all the Holidays, so maybe it doesn’t have to be like thishere.”
Chapter Twelve
Dad makes Iris and Hex ride in his sleigh back to the palace. At dinner, another more relaxed event in the library, he never strays far from the two of them, surveying what they say and who they talk to. He eventually transfers Iris off to me, supposedly when he’s decided she’s had enoughHextime, and I bite back any retort at the look of exhaustion on her face and just go along with it.
It’s only after Iris excuses herself for the evening that I make my way over to Kris, who is fuming as openly as I am. He’s usually way better at capping himself—washe better, or did he spend more time worrying about how I’d react to what Dad does?
He isn’t concerned about it now, though, and it almost makes me relax. At least he’s put any notion of me abandoning him out of his head.
“So you think Halloween’s setup is better than ours?” he whispers.
We’d had a sleigh to ourselves on the way back, and he’d taken the news about the blackmail and other Holidays as well as I had.
We’re next to the fire, eyeing Dad, a few members of our court, and Hex, and every muscle in my body is aching with holding tense for so long. And from the skating. I’m going to need an ice bath at this rate.
“I don’t know. It seemed like it, the way he mentioned it. And they have to be pretty intrinsically tied, if Halloween is so worried about losing their support.”
“Dad worries about losing support too, though,” Kris says. “All his shit about keeping our image clean for the press—”
“That’s not about keeping allies appeased. It’s about keeping people believing certain things to feed the Christmas-wholesomeimage. Because honestly, I’ve never heard Dad worry about losing an ally. What we have are… joy-victims, mostly.”
“God, that’s harrowing.” Kris tugs at the collar of his shirt. Another festive sweater, this one bright red with white stripes that saysIs That a Candy Cane or Are You Just Happy to See Me?across the chest.
The goofiness clashes so potently with his palpable rage that I can’t help but grin, and I could hug him for that break in the seriousness.
“Do you remember much about the stuff we studied when we were kids?” I whisper. “About Christmas’s history?”
“Some of it, yeah.” Kris shrugs, dismissive at first, but he softens. “The origin stuff. And I remember one thing about a gift tradition—people started giving books during the Victorian era, elaborate illuminated things. I wrote a letter asking Dad for one, like kids are supposed to, because I wanted to be all formal about it. And there it was at Christmas. I still have it. He had no business giving an antique to a nine-year-old.”
I smile. That happened after Mom left. So Dad was capable of not being cruel, even in the after.
We used to be happy, weren’t we? At points.
Kris’s eyes cut over my shoulder and he pushes off the fireplace. “Go time.”
I swing around to see Hex walking for the door, nodding his good night to a few people.
