Withering Rose (Once Upon A Curse Book 2) by Kaitlyn Davis

doesn't stop until he's taken me up a
winding staircase, through a heavy wooden door, and out to an
overlook at the top of the castle. My breath catches almost
immediately as I take in the scene.
    We're at the end of the world.
    Not really, but that's what it feels like
when I look out toward a new view of the town I've never seen
before. The window from my room looks in the opposite direction,
toward the front entrance to the town and beyond into the
mountains. But from here I see the back gardens of the castle.
They're formally designed in intricate patterns, but time has
turned them wild, as it seems to have done with everything else in
this place. Yet the gardens aren’t what has drawn my eye. I look
behind them, gaze following the winding streets full of homes, all
the way to the edge of the city wall. And beyond it, there is
nothing but empty space.
    The ground has fallen away.
    I see sky and the distant hue of grassy
fields far, far below.
    There are no mountains.
    There is nothing but what I imagine must be
an impossibly steep cliff stretching down to new land hundreds of
feet lower. And the truly strange part is that the cliff does not
fall away in a straight line. No. The land disappears along the
same curved edge of the crumbling city wall, wholly unnatural in
its arch. And I know immediately this must have happened on the day
of the earthquake. Somehow, Cole's magic was able to protect his
home, to keep the land within the city wall from disappearing. But
the mountains that used to be beyond that back edge of the town
vanished during the earthquake, merging with the flatlands of Earth
in a bizarre seam.
    My father and the base can't be too far
off.
    They must be out there on the edge of the
horizon, just far enough away that when I used to gaze at these
mountains as a little girl, I never noticed how strangely they rose
from the ground.
    "Ten years ago," Cole begins softly, drawing
my attention from the vista, "I was still just a prince."
    He leans casually with his forearms on the
balcony, slightly hunched over. But his eyes are anything but
casual. They're as hard as steel, flashing like metal glinting in
the sun right before a deadly strike. He's not looking at the same
view I am, he's seeing something else, something locked away in his
memories, something terrible. And I want so badly to reach out and
comfort him, to simply place my hand on his shoulder, to let him
know he's not alone.
    But I don’t. Because his eyes are glazed
over. He's in another world. And I don't want to pull him out of it
before he's finished saying whatever it is he brought me here to
say.
    "My father was still alive," he continues,
voice rumbling like soft thunder. "My father was still king. When
the earthquake struck, we were at home. I remember the ground
shaking so much that it knocked me off my feet. I remember changing
forms midway through the fall. I remember even as a bear I couldn't
keep my footing. But when it stopped, we were okay. We were fine.
The city was safe, almost everyone I knew had survived. The ground
outside the wall had fallen away. We thought it was some sort of
strange magic. I wanted to explore, but my father had no interest
in the outside world. As long as I was safe and his people were
safe, he didn't care about anyone else. And then a few months
later, everything changed."
    He pauses, breathing deeply, finally
blinking.
    And then he turns to me, gaze questioning as
it travels down the length of my body and back up, examining every
inch of me with those piercing eyes, determining if I'm worthy of
this confession.
    I don't move.
    I'm afraid that anything I do will make him
stop.
    But he just turns back toward the sky and
swallows. "Some of the wolves came back after a hunt and said they
saw a group of men with peculiar weapons camped out in the
mountains. My father sent sentries to watch them, to keep an eye on
the strangers. But all the reports came back the same. They were
tracking something. They were