Whenever her family bothered to pay attention to Regina before she came to the Capital, they had thought of her as a nervy, delicate girl.

Indeed, it was a miracle that Regina had lived to be one-and-twenty. Even as a child, she had been sickly and fussy. She had been a weakling who would surely have died from illness if she was not born into a noble family with the resources to keep her alive.

Though she had grown healthier as time went on, enough to live a mostly normal life, Regina sometimes felt her childhood weaknesses press upon her… especially when faced with the unexpected.

It said something about Regina’s life that ‘unexpected’ did not mean assassination attempts, which had become strangely mundane as of late.

Instead, her definition of unexpected had become much, much stranger over the past six months…

Which was why, when she woke up in the middle of the night before her wedding, Regina realized her body still had a reaction to the ‘unexpected’...

…because her body had no ability to prepare for Artem hanging upside down on her bedroom canopy like the world’s shiniest spider.

The shriek that came out of Regina’s mouth actually caused Artem to startle and fall on top of her, leading to a compromising position that would have forced them to wed if they were not due to be wed the next day.

“Why,” said Regina, her brain blissfully disappearing into a lovely land where things made sense, “are you clinging to my canopy above my bed?”

“I am not clinging to the canopy above your bed, darling,” said Artem helpfully. “I am currently lying on top of you.”

“Yes,” Regina said through gritted teeth, trying to ignore how warm and pleasant Artem’s body felt as it enveloped her own. “However, you were doing that – and I would like to know why you came into my room without my invitation!”

Perhaps “anger” was not the best way to greet the man who potentially had inspired most of her murders, but Regina had long since passed the fear of death. Regina, in fact, was now firmly in the “complain to the management of death about their shoddy shop service” stage of her life.

So without further ado, Regina stared at Artem with a look in her eyes that suggested that if he did not give her a satisfying answer in the next ten seconds, she would pluck the shiny brooches from his chest and use them to disembowel him.

Regina was not sure whether to be even more angry or impressed that Artem’s reaction to her fury was to swallow abruptly, as the color of his eyes completely vanished into black.

“My fierce falcon,” said Artem, pausing for a moment, looking slightly dazed, and then smiling sweetly. “I was clinging to your canopy because there were too many vases for me to cling to the floor.”

Regina had to admit he had a point there.

“I,” he said softly, “know how much you value your vases.”

Regina hated to admit that his number of points continued to grow.

Sighing, she pushed Artem away until he slid off of her, even as she moved until her back was against the sturdy wooden bed rest.

“Fair enough,” she said. “Even so, you still have not explained why you are in my room in the first place… unless you make a habit of visiting women in their rooms in the middle of the night.”

Regina’s gaze sharpened at that.

The thought of disemboweling Artem with his own brooch had somehow become even more attractive.

“Women?” said Artem, looking genuinely confused. “You mean Mother or you? Mother would lovingly show me how to carve my heart out with a knife if I arrived in the middle of the night.”

“And I would not?” cried Regina, somehow both insulted and flattered.

“You already have my heart,” said Artem softly. “You have no need to carve it out.”

Genuinely unsure whether this statement was more heart-warming or horrific, Regina just stared at Artem.

‘By the blood,’ Regina realized, ‘Artem has a tongue that could flatter the most practiced of harlots. He either does not care about the trouble he would receive by visiting me, which is fair considering tomorrow’s wedding, or he is covering up some sinister objective with a tongue of honey. After all, he seems aware that arriving in a woman’s bedroom means trouble based on his mother’s reaction. Does that mean he is here for trouble? If so…’

Regina calculated the distance between herself and the nearest ceramic vase before realizing she would never make it before it was too late.

‘If so, I need to stall long enough for Henrietta to find me, as she will foresee Artem’s visit with this many vases near me.’

Regina smiled and hoped it was convincing.

“If I own your heart,” she said, as playfully as she could, “then what has happened to the remaining parts of your body?”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“They are quite sore,” said Artem plaintively, somehow getting even closer to her, which was quite a feat since he had been right on top of her. “They ache from not having been able to feed you toast for nearly a week.”

It was a splash of cold water as Regina realized a few very important things all at once.

First, she realized that if Artem was indeed determined to murder her at this very moment, there was very little she could do about it. Short of Henrietta immediately bursting through the doors after receiving a well-timed vase-based vision, Regina had no way to protect herself.

She could try diving for a ceramic vase and lobbing it at Artem’s head… but she had already seen him deflect vases before with his brooch, as well as kill people by stabbing them through the heart with small metal objects.

All she could do was stall and hope for the best.

Second, she realized that if Artem was in fact innocent of all her dark suspicions, he must have visited her because he was actually concerned for her. After all, since they had become engaged and Artem had moved to her family’s townhouse, they had never gone more than a few hours without being in each other’s company.

If he was a kind, gentle person with unexpectedly lethal abilities picked up from a lifetime of fending off his own family, she could hardly blame him for wanting to make sure she was doing well before they wed.

Finally, she realized that she had missed him and that being this close to him made her heart race so hard in her chest, it was a wonder it had not already exploded.

“It is hard,” said Regina finally, “to eat toast without you to prevent me from taking bites too large to digest.”

It was. That was the worst of it.

This was why Regina had spent a lifetime of not expecting things from people… so that she would not start tearing up over the thought of having to eat toast on her own.

“Then…” said Artem, his hand reaching out to her face before pulling it back as his voice trailed into nothing.

It occurred to Regina, quite suddenly, that Artem might have as many questions as she had.

Whether or not he was trying to murder her, he probably had not expected her to flee after his very personal demonstration and then spend a week barricaded in her room.

She wondered why he could find it so easy to stab someone in the heart but so hard to ask her why she was hiding from him.

It also occurred to Regina that her behavior made her an even larger threat to Artem, if he did want to murder her, because she had practically guaranteed that the wedding would proceed as planned.

At least from his perspective, she must have made it seem as if she was allowing no opportunities for anything to disrupt the wedding that would bring him one step closer to a very unwanted kingship. Perhaps even now he was trying to determine if he could kill her and make it look like an accid-

“Darling,” Artem suddenly said. “Are you…. angry with me?”

“Yes,” Regina admitted, still in the middle of mulling over all the possibilities of Artem’s motives and actions, and immediately went still as she realized what she had done.

Artem stilled utterly above her and Regina wondered if this was the end, if this was the way she finally-

“I,” said Artem, his voice strange, unfamiliar, “would never force you to live a life you did not want.”

Did that mean, Regina thought in dawning horror, that he would rather kill her than live with her in a life that he thought she did not want to live?

If he planned to live a more unobtrusive life, and he thought Regina wanted to be queen, did that mean-

“I have not,” said Artem, still continuing in that strange, almost rough voice, “shown you well enough what I can do for you. I misunderstood and I have, da, not been as I should be.”

Regina stared up at him, at the tortured look on his face as he haltingly tried to explain… something.

She did not think he wanted to kill her.

It did not, in fact, make her feel better.

After all, a man could make himself do what he did not want to if he felt a pressing enough need.

“Mother said that I should show you as she showed Father,” said Artem, his voice full of a frustration that she had never previously heard in his joyful frolicking tones.

He ran a rough hand through his hair. “Пиздец! I do not think that stabbing you with a knife and then kissing you will solve this problem! Father is strange!”

Regina felt the world narrow down to a dull tunnel of fog.

So the King and Queen wanted Regina dead too.

In fact, the entire royal Alpin family must have wanted her dead all along for pushing their second prince to be king above their first one and their loathing of her had been obvious since her very first vision and why had she not realized it?!

Artem was saying things and Regina knew he was saying things and some wounded part of her soul realized that killing her would be hard for him…

…but the other part of Regina did not care.

Artem had come the night before her wedding to tell her she would never be safe with him.

He might not hurt her tonight, but if anyone knew how people could learn to justify horrible things, it was a daughter of the Sheridan family.

If Regina had any doubts about her plans for her wedding, they had all been burnt to ashes.

She knew that she would have to use this night to say her final goodbye to Artem, but it hurt.

It hurt even to raise her face to him, to look one more time at the man she had thought she could trust.

However, when she finally got the nerve to bring her eyes up from behind her tense hands gripping her coverlet to Artem’s face…

She saw what she had never expected to see in any Artem, no matter how harmless or murderous he might be.

Almost against her will, as if she could no more stop her hand from moving than she could stop breathing, Regina gently traced a finger under Artem’s eye.

“Are you,” she said in complete bafflement, “crying?”

He was, she realized, as the pale light from the moon filtered over his face.

“I,” said Artem, his voice so rough that she barely recognized it, “do not want to lose you.”

“I do not want to lose you either,” said Regina, and the blood-cursed truth of it was that she meant it – no matter which Artem was real.

As she embraced him, as she hid her face in his shoulder, Regina wondered what face Artem was making.

After all, she would never see him again.