Chapter 11 - THE NAME INSIDE THE PENDANT
The missing silver pendant became the next key. Palace artists enlarged a portrait from the ball and identified its shape: a small crescent moon crossed by a line.
Anastasia had seen it before. Cinderella’s father gave it to her as a child. Inside was her birth name, one Lady Tremaine had forbidden after taking control of the estate.
No one remembered the name.
Lady Tremaine claimed the pendant was lost years earlier. Drisella confessed their mother had taken it and sold it to a traveling jeweler.
The jeweler’s records led to the palace itself. Queen Helena had purchased the pendant two years before the ball.
Adrian confronted his mother in the dark wood library. Helena opened a hidden drawer and produced the empty chain.
“Your grandmother told me a nameless girl would someday approach you wearing borrowed light,” she said. “If I possessed her true name, I could command her to leave.”
“You knew Cinderella was coming?”
“I knew someone would.”
The pendant was no longer on the chain. Helena had placed it inside the Moon Door’s seal twenty-five years ago.
She explained the royal bargain. Queen Aurelia had asked the Hollow Court to preserve the dying kingdom during a plague. In exchange, the royal bloodline owed them “a love chosen above truth.” Aurelia later tried to break the bargain and vanished.
Adrian’s love for a copied woman could complete the debt.
Ella listened from the doorway.
May you like
“So every time he chooses me,” she whispered, “the door opens wider.”
Behind the tower wall, something knocked three times.
