Valerie

Chapter Twenty-One

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Everybody must get what's coming to them. Even an Iron King.

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As my heat approached and my appetite grew and my entire ached with both pain and want, I knew that I had to hurry Pemina along. In a better world, I could wait to gain her trust. In the maybe six weeks I had left, I restored to showering her with gifts: the dresses I said I didn't need, the makeup that Aeneas sent, even a pair of earrings that I told Margery that I "lost." Plus, Pemina always looked like she wanted these things more than me. Her face would brighten as she came to attend to me in the morning, even more so when I mentioned that I had no use for something.

Today, I handed her a warm cookie from off my tray and watched as she bit into the molten chocolate. A smile bloomed across her face. Then, her eyes flicked back open, and she was looking at me with familiar confusion and apprehension.

"Do you mean to say something?" I asked.

She shook her head no.

"I know you want to say something to me. Speak. I don't care for the formality."

"I have nothing to say, your Highness."

"You wonder why I give you so many gifts?" She shook her head no, but her expressions always bled into her face. "You think I want something from you?" She shook her head no again. "You would be right if you were thinking that." She froze and it was my turn to smile. I don't think I was as warm or at peace as she was though.

"Margery will be here in a few minutes to feed me some fertility serum or stimulant or poison. They're all about the same to me." I pulled my hands out from under my comforter and set them on my stomach. My head sank low into the pillow. In my mind, I looked like a sick woman, though in the mind of any werewolf to come across me, I was in the peak of health, the peak of physical form. A wave of warmth seared across me. My body is no longer mine. "You know I was a human girl once."

She nodded. "A servant in a King's palace. For years. How did you..."

"We don't have that kind of time. I could tell you the story though⁠⁠—if you give me what I want."

"Your Highness, with all due respect⁠⁠—"

"Which could be very little?"

She flushed, her face turning red. Looking at her like this, I saw she was especially young, maybe fourteen, with light brown skin and a smattering of freckles that made her look even younger.

"Which is as much as is afforded his Majesty. But your Highness I've heard rumors. And things about you. They say that you're⁠⁠...well...I don't know."

"They say I'm insane. And dangerous?"

She nodded, turning her face away from me so I couldn't see exactly what expression was on her face. Smart. So she knew that she could be read like an open book.

"They would be right."

Her eyes jumped to mine. I couldn't think of any other way to convince her but to lay my thoughts bare to her. We were cut from the same cloth: two human girls, poor and forced to work to survive. Only, I'd been snapped up and turned into a bedridden caged bird and she was still living in her human town, somewhat free, and probably afraid of what the future may look like.

"I have an idea that I want to take to a human leader. I have a goal that I've been thinking about and a score to settle with that mate of mine. A score to settle with a lot of people, actually, if you get what I mean."