He has to bring this to me now, to feel his own weak sense of responsibility when I can't do as he asks. I'm saved from having to humiliate my father when Ethpeal interjects herself, pushing him back and away from me.
"And why," she asks in a cold and terrible voice, "are you here if Oleksander is in such danger?" We all wait for a response, but he simply stares at me, mute and anguished. She turns her back on him when he doesn't answer. "Charlotte," she says, tone low, bitter chill gone from her words, "what do you want us to do?"
Part of me wants to plead "why me?" when she looks at me like that. But before I can allow that shred of fear to rise, I feel the wereprincess I am wake to the occasion. Maybe if my father hadn't come, I would have allowed the scrap of weakness life. But no, I
