Minerva batted her eyelashes at me and pushed her shoulders back. "Do I look lonely?" she said.
She looked like someone I wanted to push onto her back right then and there. Like someone I wanted to kiss until we were both dizzy. But there were things you didn't say to a princess, not when your station was so far below hers.
***
On her first day working as a maid, Eve finds the king dead on his throne. His murder kicks off a cascade of intrigue, and as the plots of the nobility come crashing down around her, Eve is torn between hungry princes, the ever-watching eyes of the royal court, and a mad princess who seems to know far more than she lets on. Complicating everything further is the Imperative, a magical curse through which the Andan nobles have bent the world to their whims. If she is to survive, Eve must learn what it means to find strength in the face of overwhelming power.
The Maid and the Monarch is created by EOK Gifford-Smith, an EGlobal Creative Publishing signed author.

The Maid and the Monarch

I have said those words three different times to three different people. Isaac, Dean, and Oliver. The only three people I have every truly hated. The three men who killed my father.


Isaac had a arsonist's soul; he loved to burn things. I don't know where he picked the habit up, but in the time I knew him, he was a thief, a murderer, and a thug for hire. All of those things, he did with an unnecessarily incendiary flare. It was his idea to light my house aflame that night.


I shouted at myself, banging on the walls of my own mind. I was conscious enough at this point to feel angry and helpless. I raged against my own thoughts, my own mind turned against me. I didn't care about Isaac and Dean and Oliver, I didn't care about... about the lake.


Chapter 28: Remembering III