The airship teetered once more, sending the prince through the curtains in two quick steps. The guard glanced after him, and though Risa couldn’t see the guard’s face, her bad feeling suddenly turned very,verybad.
She started for the curtain, Brunhilda’s spell pulling her forward. It was perhaps the only time she didn’t want to ignore it. Brunieleaped from her arms, landed in the middle of the airship, and yowled, body arching in warning.
The guard startled, lifting their nose from the porthole, and reached for something at their hip. A pistol, Risa grasped belatedly, the handle gleaming. It had to be a very poor choice of weapon in an airship hurtling through the sky where no calibration of its body accounted for a sudden hole ripping through its steel flesh.
The curtain fluttered as a pilot dressed in the Regent’s colors of green and red walked out. Dark goggles covered their eyes. Something metal shone in their hand as it was leveled at Amina’s head.
Great.Another pistol.
Risa knew what was happening before the pilot even lifted their goggles. Her stomach flipped. Her heart stuttered. She should have known the moment Javi had skirted around her feelings the night before.
There was no way to escape her bad luck. Not a thousand miles in the air, and not by pushing people away. She couldn’t outrun her shadow. It would always find her.
Amina began to reach for her daggers, but El Gib shook his head in warning.
“Uh-uh, Princess. Not when we have your principito.”
Javi stumbled out from behind the curtain, followed by the second pilot—Carlos, of course—holding something against Javi’s back. The first guard shed their leather cap and goggles, letting their long curls tumble down. Bella stood there, pistol in hand, looking a little queasy from the flight.
Javi sagged in defeat at the sight of the beautiful Sanguine. “I see all my past mistakes are coming back to haunt me.”
“Youwish,” Bella teased, blowing him a kiss.
“I guess you settled your differences, then?” Risa asked, staring pointedly between El Gib and Bella.
Brunie launched himself at El Gib, claws ready to attack, but the Sanguine grabbed him out of midair and dangled him menacingly at Risa.
“Don’t even think about opening yer mouth, girl,” El Gib reprimanded Risa, shaking Brunie for emphasis. “Ya talk too much without saying anything at all.”
She swallowed her words, not daring to test El Gib and his pistol while they were in the air.
Wait—who was flying the airship?
Her thoughts were interrupted by Bella gesturing at Amina. “Are you sure that’s the princess?”
El Gib wrapped his hand—pistol and all—around Amina’s hair and pulled. The princess gritted her teeth as her head was forced back and the light from the airship chandelier caught on the scar across her cheek and throat.
“Looks like it.”
Bella glanced past the prince, to where the airship controls blinked bright red in warning. “Let’s go before the ship goes down.”
“You don’t need her,” Javi said, sounding rather put out, though his frantic eyes betrayed him. “You want the bounty? Fine. I won’t put up a fight. But leave the girls alone.”
What was he doing?
Risa’s curse liked easy targets—that was why her parents had had so many accidents in the beginning. Before she learned to tamp down her true feelings, when she still ran into their arms and told them she loved them, even as the rain fell loudly on their roof and flooded their gardens. When they still tried to treat her like a realdaughter and hadn’t known the consequences for loving her. Javi saying such a thing might make it look like hecared. About her. About wanting to save her.
Risa stepped forward.
But El Gib shot her a cold, dead glare and smiled a wide, cruel grin that twisted his hideous face into something monstrous and stopped her in her tracks. He slowly looked back at the prince, and his lips curled further.
“All we need is for ye to be dead.”
Carlos slammed the heel of the pistol against the back of Javi’s head. The prince crumpled into a heap on the carpet. Dark red bloomed beneath his head, staining the rug.
Risa screamed, heart lurching at the sight of Javi’s unmoving body. El Gib twisted Amina’s hair until the princess was screaming, too. Another groan rocked the airship as the front tipped downward.
This was all her fault. Javi was probably dead. Amina had been discovered, so close yet so far from reclaiming her rightful place in Madros. Worst of all, Risa could do nothing to fix this. All she was good at was breaking curses, and that was debatable.