The Everlasting Rose (The Belles, #2)(63)

“And of course you already know our favorite Belle, Camille Beauregard,” Lady Arane says.

I step forward into the night-lantern light.

His mouth drops open and his eyes comb over me. My gaze burns into his. My nerves tingle with revenge. The world around us dissolves. The mountain. The Iron Ladies. The pockmarked lanterns. The teacup dragons.

It’s just him and me.

Memories of the night of Sophia’s party hit me in waves—the secrets I’d shared with him spat back at me in front of everyone, my private words twisted into unrecognizable shapes and stretched out in the open and subjected to judgment, our closeness exposed to light and air and shriveling like rotting fruit.

His eyes telegraph a thousand apologies.

The teacup dragons gaze out of my waist-sash and cock their heads to the side.

“Camille.” My name sounds like a firework when he says it. A loud, popping thing that echoes off the walls. It throws me out of our bubble and back into the long corridor with the Iron Ladies gawking at us.

“What is this about, Lady Arane?” I ask. “Is this some sort of trap?”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s an enemy.” I grit my teeth.

“Not to us.”

“Camille, let me explain...” Auguste starts toward me with his hands out.

I stretch the petals of the flower in my hand until they’re the size of the lift carriages we took up the mountainside. Lady Arane and her disciples jump back, shouting in alarm, but I pay them no mind. I cinch the petals around Auguste’s waist, trapping him in place. “Don’t come near me.”

“What are you doing, Camille?” Lady Arane steps closer to me, but I am still as stone. “He’s taking us to see Princess Charlotte.”

“Step away or I’ll snap him in half,” I tell her, “and then do the same to you.”

“Let us talk in private,” he says, his breath ragged as I coil the stems tighter and tighter around his waist and rib cage.

“We had a bargain,” she reminds me.

“Our bargain is on hold,” I yell.

Anger flares in Lady Arane’s black eyes as she glances from Auguste to me. Her jaw clenches and her cheeks vibrate with rage and helplessness. Finally, she nods and her disciples move farther into the passageway, but their daggers remain fixed on me, glinting in the night-lantern light. Ready to stab me at any moment.

Auguste and I stand face-to-face. I hold him pinned like a doll. His eyes gleam.

“Are you going to let me out of this flower?” he says.

I tighten it around his waist, thickening the fibers until they’re like metal and have the capacity to crush his bones. “Should I?”

“I’m sorry,” he stammers out through labored breaths.

“Sorry?” I laugh. That word is too small to wipe away the things he did to me. “That’s it?”

“I admit it all. I was wrong. At first, my mother had me convinced that helping her was the right thing to do.”

“You lied.”

“I withheld information.”

His expression is anguished, but I can still sense his smugness, like his lips would betray him at any moment and tip into a half-smile.

The memories become a tornado, the turning of a télétrope off-kilter.

The way we argued.

The laughter.

The way he slipped beyond my boundaries.

The sparring.

The way he touched me.

The secret post-balloons.

The way he kissed me.

Sophia’s voice rings out between us: “I’ve been told you think I’m a monster. That you called me that, in fact.”

“You told Sophia everything she needed to know to terrorize me and my sisters.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“You made me love—” My voice breaks, and I clear my throat.

“I loved you,” he says. “I still do.”

The words are like poison darts to the chest. The betrayal twists into bitterness that feeds the anger.

“I tried to stop it all, but I was too late. The pieces were already in motion.”

I don’t believe him.

I can’t.

“I was just a game token on a board to you.”

“No, you were much more,” he insists, struggling against his bonds. “I hated having to...”

His words become a vise tightening around my heart, so I force him to feel the pain, too. I tighten the petals around his core, and he lets out a piteous cry.

His words stumble out between gasps for air: “That’s why I’m here. When I realized I couldn’t stop what I’d started, I convinced Sophia to choose me as her king. I knew I was clever enough to get her to. Then, I could stay close and disrupt all her plans. I’ve been working with the Iron Ladies for the past month. Right, Lady Arane?”

Lady Arane steps out of the passageway, arms crossed, sweat shining on her gray forehead. “It’s true. He’s been our palace informant. Integral to keeping tabs on Charlotte and her condition.”

“How?” I prod.

He slumps forward. Sweat pours down his face. “I can’t feel my legs.”

I loosen the petals’ grip on his waist ever so slightly.

“After what happened with Claudine, I found Violetta and helped her leave the palace. We kept in touch. When she joined the spiders, I fed her information, and she got me a meeting,” he tells me.