#Chapter 104 A Royal Suspicion

Ember Ella keeps my secret, the way she's kept every secret I ever handed her since we were girls. But that night, when we finally get an hour alone and I tell her the whole of it—the desk, the potion, the flight, all of it—she holds my hands and says the thing I've been most afraid of hearing. She tells me I can't keep this from Kaine, not for long, that a thing like this doesn't stay buried because it claws its way up through every layer of silence you pack on top of it. I push back immediately—it has to stay buried, she doesn't understand what the Queen would do—but Ella's face goes grim in a way that silences me, because she does understand, better than almost anyone. She's the one whose mother does things, she reminds me, and she's just telling me what's true: secrets like mine have a clock in them, ticking somewhere I can't hear it, and everyone around me is starting to. I don't have an answer for her. She's right, and I hate that she's right, and I lie awake half the night