Cinderella Is Dead(76)

I rub my wrists as I look around the room. In the corner, the tattered remains of a book lie on the ground. I pick it up and leaf through the pages. It’s Cinderella’s tale.

Of course this would be here.

I toss it back into the corner and bend to look through the keyhole. I see the wall opposite my cell, the darkened hallway. The smell of damp earth fills my nose. I know exactly where I am. I’m in one of the little rooms where I heard a woman’s voice on the night I escaped the ball. I go to a wall and knock on the stones.

“Hello? Is someone there?” I wait. The steady drip of the water is all I hear. I call out again, louder this time. “Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Be quiet,” comes a hushed voice.

Grabbing the candle, I try to look through the little hole where the water trickles out, but it’s too high.

“Hello?” I call again.

“There’s a loose brick at the bottom of the wall,” says the voice. “Take it out and stand on it.”

I find the only intact brick and, following the voice’s instructions, I pull it out and stand atop it. A flicker of a candle from the other side outlines another person, the dark-brown orb of their eye glinting in the dim light.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“You should be quiet.”

“He’ll come back for me, regardless,” I say. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“You seem to have accepted your fate quicker than the others. That’s probably a good thing. No use crying about it, right? He’s just going to kill us anyway.” Her blunt attitude about her terrible fate makes me pause. She’s waiting for death, and it sounds like she wishes it would hurry up.

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

“A few weeks—maybe longer. It’s hard to say.”

“How did you get here?”

She laughs lightly. “Blowing up the Colossus was a punishable offense. Who would have thought?” Sarcasm colors every word, but it is all tempered with hopelessness.

My foot almost slips off, and I scramble to keep my balance. “You did that? Are you émile?”

There is a rustle on the other side of the wall. “How do you know my name?”

“I’m with Constance! I’m Sophia. We’re here—or I’m here—” My voice catches in my throat and tears well up. I don’t even know if Constance has made it to the castle. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to see her again, but I have to set that aside for now.

“She lives?” émile asks. “And there is a plan?”

“Yes. But I—I just put my dagger in the king’s neck, and he laughed in my face.”

She huffs loudly. “That sounds very much like Constance, always stabbing someone.” I think I hear her laugh. “But as you saw, it doesn’t work with him. He has been poisoned, stabbed, and a few of the girls on this row tried to get close enough to him to slip a rope around his neck. He was quite amused by that attempt. It failed, obviously. And he made them pay for it. Tell me, have you or Constance been able to find anything else out about him?”

“Yes.” I hesitate because I know how it will sound, but I continue anyway. “Do you know that King Manford and Cinderella’s Prince Charming are the same person?”

“I’ve learned the impossible truth from the other girls on this row. Before I was captured, I would have said that it cannot be, but now I have seen too much to discount it.” She sighs heavily. “But it doesn’t matter. He’s killed or captured so many of us that there are barely enough of us left to stage any sort of real resistance.”

“How many of them are there?”

“There are seven other girls in the cells next to us, and I hear there are more cells in the bowels of the castle, but none of us are in any shape to fight back. Some of them have been here for months, maybe longer. We don’t have enough to eat or drink, and the draining—the draining is too much.”

“The draining?” I ask.

“Oh, Sophia.” émile sighs. “You cannot know what it’s like. It’s like dying. He wraps you up and then you’re falling, and if you return, you are—changed.”

I press my face against the bricks as I struggle to hear. My heart is beating furiously. “How? Tell me how he does it.”

“It’s a kind of magic I’ve never even heard a whisper of. He siphons the life from your very soul. There is a light, a pull, and whatever he takes from you, he uses to make himself young, to live as long as he so chooses.”

My mind runs in circles, and a memory from the ball stands in my mind. The door Liv was taken through stood open for just a moment as the king exited. The old woman with the snow-white hair—wearing Liv’s dress. It was her. The king had done that to her. And when I saw him across the crowd, he looked different, happier, his eyes brighter.

I begin to pace the floor. The light from my vision and the pull at my chest, the illustrations in Constance’s book of tales, and Cinderella’s own words all fit together like a puzzle.

This is how he does it.

This is how he keeps himself young. And just as the thought settles in my mind, another terrible reality makes itself clear. I run back and stand on the brick.

“The ball. Is that its purpose? To bring the young women of Lille here for him to do this?”