Grim Lovelies (Grim Lovelies 1)

Grander than any bedroom she’d ever seen, even Mada Vittora’s. Heavy wooden furniture with red brocade upholstery had been pushed to the sides, and the once-expensive rug was worn where someone had paced back and forth enough to wear it nearly through. Other than the fine wallpaper, the walls were mostly bare. There were no portraits here. No busts or statues. A piece of paper fluttered on the wall, and she took a step closer, smoothed a hand over it. A . . . playbill. For a production in Paris. And beneath it, a branch from a tree with dying orange leaves.

Things from the Pretty World.

“Anouk,” a hoarse voice called.

“Beau!” She threw open a small door. He was in the next room—?a meeting chamber, by the look of it, but the table had been moved aside to make room for five cages. They were identical in size. Heavy iron padlocks on the bars. Beau was in the first cage, the top of which was low enough to force him to his knees. He clutched the bars. A bruise bloomed on his temple.

She rushed inside and fell to her knees by his cage. She set down the broom. They clasped hands through the bars.

“Those entrance guards, the ones made of stone . . .” He winced. “I didn’t even see them coming.”

Anouk’s stomach shrank as she thought of marble fists on his flesh. The Marble Ladies must have dragged him from the car, their earless heads not even hearing his screams.

“I’ll get you out of here.” She tugged on the padlock. Rusty. Ancient. Unbreakable, except perhaps by a master thief. “We need Cricket—”

“No—?the trunk by the doorway.” Beau was breathing heavily, his hand pressed to his head. “Lady Metham put the keys in there.”

Anouk spotted the trunk. She crawled over and fumbled with the rusted brass clasps. They didn’t want to open, so she slammed the broom handle against them until they broke and then threw the trunk open. It was filled with paper, stacks and stacks of it. From the hallway, the clocks chimed another hour, but she disregarded them. She leaned deeper into the trunk, pushing through the papers to get to the bottom, searching for the key—?

But she didn’t find the key. She didn’t even find the bottom of the trunk.

There was no bottom.

The trunk wasn’t a trunk at all, but a passageway. A hole. She was pitched so far forward that she tumbled into the trunk. She reached for something to stop her but could grab only the broom, which fell with her. Papers sliced at her skin and muffled her screams as she fell down the tunnel. She kept falling through papers that had no end. The sensation of falling down changed to falling up. Being pulled upward by some enchanted force. And then she felt four wooden sides again. She was back in the trunk, only it was a different trunk, and she was tumbling up and out of it and landing on the soft rug of a small room. There was a fire crackling in a hearth. A wide oak desk, carefully organized with stacks of multicolored folios and parchment and squat black jars of ink and other writing implements and ingredients: onion skins, dried eel, lemons. The tools of a spell-scribe. And there was only one spell-scribe in Castle Ides, though he went by a more official title now.

A shadow fell over her.

Prince Rennar looked different as he crouched beside her. He’d removed his crown and his frost-gray jacket. His white shirt was rolled to his elbows, the button at his neck open.

“Little beastie,” he said. “It looks as though you’ve lost your way.”

And then she remembered, too late, that the floor plan changed at the chiming of the clocks. Wherever she was, it was far from her friends.

Just where he wanted her.

Chapter 27

Seven Hours and Thirty Minutes of Enchantment Remain

Anouk clutched the broom to her chest, protective of the spell tucked away inside. She could crack the handle over Rennar’s head. Shove the blunt end into his face. But his expression made it clear that he wouldn’t be caught off guard again. The Royals had underestimated Anouk and her friends, and that had given them the slightest advantage in the salon. But the element of surprise was gone now.

She scrambled backward and pushed herself to her feet.

“What do you want from us? You and Mada Zola conspired to get us here. The two of you are . . .” She was almost too embarrassed to say it. “Amants. Lovers.”

Until that moment, Rennar had worn the mask of confidence that came so naturally to the Royals, but now he gave her a surprised, curious look. “Lovers? Why would you say that?”

“Those . . . those clandestine communications,” she stuttered. “Meetings in secret. Talk of a queenship.”

A corner of his mouth tipped up, both boyish and arrogant at the same time. “Ah. I forget that you’ve been cooped up in a broom closet most of your life. You aren’t familiar with the ways of the Shadow Royalty. Mada Zola was more powerful than many handlers knew. Her abilities surpassed even Vittora’s. I didn’t banish her for insubordination—?I knew that was a lie—?but to keep her power in check. But our world is in danger, Anouk. Every day the Pretties develop new technologies. The ways of magic are fading. I decided that an alliance of her power and mine might be the only way forward. So I offered her a place at my side. A queenship. Though among Royals, marriages are not the romantic storybook things that Pretties tell their children. They are political unions of power.”

“A union designed to capture us. Those five cages I saw are for the five of us, aren’t they?”

He didn’t deny it. He straightened, dusting off his hands. The spell-scribe room was barely large enough for a desk and a chair, and with the two of them in it, the space felt too full. “And yet only four have come. Where is the fifth one, the gardener?”

She paused, surprised. All of her bravado disappeared and she sputtered, “You mean you don’t know either?”

“If I did, I would have come for you at Montélimar. We were waiting for you to lead us to him.”