He finished off the remnants of his drink, and this time, he pointed the iron at her heart.
“Wait!” Evangeline cried. “Can I have a last request? I don’t think Apollo would want you to murder me.”
“I’m sorry, I really am, but you’re not leaving this room alive.”
“I’m not asking you to spare me.” Her voice cracked. If this didn’t work, these could be her last words. “I’m just asking you to call in your soldiers. Tell them my crimes, and then let one of them kill me. Your brother wouldn’t want you to murder his wife.”
Tiberius frowned. But she could see another bout of indecision ghosting across his face. He sensed this was a bad idea, but his judgment was impaired from the antidote; he wasn’t certain.
“Please. It’s my last request.”
Slowly, Tiberius lowered the poker.
The soldiers were called back in, but Tiberius didn’t waste time with pleasantries.
“I need you to kill her.” He shoved the fire iron into the hand of the closest guard, a tall woman with a heavy braid and fury in her eyes.
“Wait,” Evangeline breathed, hoping she hadn’t just made a terrible miscalculation. “You need to tell them my crimes first.”
“Evangeline Fox,” Tiberius ground out, “you have been sentenced to death for the crime of…” His jaw seemed to stick. He opened and closed his mouth several times, but no words came out.
“You can’t say it, can you?” she asked. Her antidote might not have worked as exactly as she’d hoped, but it was working. Additional effects of serum for truths may include … the inability to tell a lie.
Evangeline could have cried with joy. Although Tiberius looked as if he really wanted to kill her now.
“What have you done?” He glowered at the empty bottle in his hands. “Did you poison me?”
“I gave you a truth serum, which is why you can’t honestly say that I killed your brother. Ask him,” Evangeline begged the female guard with the iron. “Ask him who killed Apollo.”
“End this,” Tiberius ordered the guard. “She—she—”
The guard had lifted the iron, but she hesitated at the prince’s stammering.
“Can’t you see—she’s fed me some sort of magic,” Tiberius growled, sweat beading on his brow. “She’s obviously—” But he couldn’t call her anything untrue.
“He keeps breaking off because he can’t lie,” Evangeline said, “and he knows that I’m innocent. I had no reason or desire to kill Apollo—I was the person with nothing to gain and everything to lose, and Tiberius knows that.”
“She’s—she’s—she’s telling the truth—” The prince’s face turned red. “Evangeline didn’t kill my brother. I did.”
52
Tiberius staggered on his feet.
If Evangeline had been standing, she would have undoubtedly lost her footing as well.
She expected him to try to take the confession back or grab the iron from the guard and run her through. Wasn’t that what a murderer would do? But perhaps it wasn’t just the antidote side effects that had torn Tiberius’s confession free.
Instead of fighting back, Tiberius fell to his knees and brought his hands to his face. “I didn’t mean to kill him. It was supposed to be you.” Eyes rimmed in grief and anguish met hers. “I didn’t want to hurt my brother. I found a poison—a Fate’s tears that were only supposed to affect females. But it seems that story was a lie.” Tears finally streamed down Tiberius’s cheeks, long, endless rivers of them.
It was almost like when she’d cried from LaLa’s tears, only his heartache was entirely real. Tiberius sobbed the way that only broken things could, and Evangeline couldn’t help but start crying with him. She cried once more for Apollo, she cried with relief that she was still alive, and she cried for Tiberius. Not for the part of him that had tried to kill her but for the part of him that had killed his brother by mistake. She didn’t know what it was like to have a sibling, and given all that had happened between her and Marisol, she doubted that she would ever understand. But Evangeline understood how it felt to lose family, and she could not fathom being responsible for that loss.
She didn’t know how long they both sat there crying. It could have been half the night, a handful of hours, or minutes that merely stretched out to feel like forever.
The female guard who’d been poised to kill her had untied Evangeline right away, but it wasn’t until after dawn that several of the other guards escorted Tiberius out to take him to a holding cell. He didn’t try to fight them.