They Hanged My Parents as Traitors, Now the Prince Needs My Heart novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: One Heartbeat

Nobody in the kitchen moved.

The oven ticked as it cooled, and the dough on the board sagged where Sioned had left it.

I read the last line again, out loud, because I did not trust my eyes.

"Neither shall die while the other lives."

"Bronwen," said Cadoc.

"Don't." I held up the page. "Let me say the last line. Neither shall die while the other lives. That is the whole of what I am."

"It was given."

"It was taken from you. You didn't know."

"I held out my arm," he said. "I'd do it tonight."

"It cost you half your life."

"It cost me a bond that was already hollow." He said it quietly. "Hollow, Bronwen. That's the whole joke of the name. I've been the Hollow Prince for twenty-four years because there's a gap in me exactly your size."

I couldn't breathe.

"I'm the curse," I said.

"You're not a curse."

"Then what am I?"

"My heart," said Cadoc. "Half of it. And I have been looking for it in towers and ledgers and old men's books, when it was scrubbing pots in the east wing."

Dafydd made a noise at the back door.

When I turned, he had his sleeve pressed against his mouth.

His eyes were streaming, and he was nodding, over and over, at nothing.

"I knew she'd done something," he said thickly. "Your mother. I was fourteen, carrying the kettle up the Row that night. I saw her face. I never asked."

"Dafydd."

"I'm all right. Carry on."

Sioned rinsed her hands in the basin.

"There's a way to be certain," she said. "Give me your wrists, the pair of you."

We held them out across the board.

She took Cadoc's left in one hand and mine in the other and shut her eyes, and for a minute nobody spoke.

"Hm," she said. "Dafydd, drop a plate."

"What?"

"Drop a plate. Behind her. Quickly."

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