A P RINCESS W ORTH K ILLING . Copyright © 2026 by Kylie Somick. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written consent except for the quotation of short passages used inside of an article, criticism, or review. This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Cover design by Kylie Somick For my big sister. The Gwen to my Lidya. I love you always, Seastar. PROLOGUE A BLOODCURDLING SCREAM ECHOED ACROSS THE GREAT HALL before my sister sank to her knees. Heavy, black smoke engulfed the room after it emerged from the very box in front of me—weathered and bound in iron. The plumes encircled the room, not knowing what to do with their empty tendrils. Their wispy fingers should have been merging and morphing into a shape that would imprison me to a curse until I died, but instead scattered with confusion. I could not begin to understand the fear that roared from my sister’s lungs or the quiet gasps of the guards behind. All my eager mind saw was a room buried in smoke that promised a curseless life—a relief. Since I was young enough to understand, I had been told stories of how every human born on the island of Winter would be bound to a curse from the moment the clock struck midnight on their twelfth birthday. A smoke would arise from the unlocked slats of wood and iron to assume the symbolic shape of their cursed fate. A sealed mouth would erupt for the inability to speak. A broken heart for a loveless life. The symbols were endless, and yet, there I stood, twelve years old, with a huff of empty mist dancing around my head as my sister’s cries echoed off the vastness of the ballroom. I was not cursed. My soul was not bound to a life-altering burden, and yet the tears of my sister were not bubbling and airy. Her screams were violent. They scraped the walls of my eardrums like the tip of a sword on a porcelain plate. The fear bubbled first, popping like acid in my belly until it burned the walls of my throat. Then came the lightheadedness, as though all of my blood had left my brain to tend to the lacerations in my stomach. The sight of my mother harbored no aid. She quite literally embodied emotions. Her face could contort into the personified versions of anger, joy, or sadness. However, despite her cursed inability to keep her emotions hidden, her face was entirely clipped and callous. It almost made me nostalgic for her blatant feelings. I turned to her in earnest—a child begging for answers. “I am not cursed! Should we not be celebrating?” My petite voice was lost amongst such a large room filled with so many bustling bodies. So many witnesses who stood anxiously waiting to see what burden the Winter Princess would amass, and so many witnesses who were brutally disappointed. I couldn’t understand why—why nobody was happy. Why the celebrations had been slaughtered by horror. It only fueled the boiling torture inside of me, choking me until I was certain my breakfast would resurface. Faces swirled around me. Faces that I had always known that no longer looked at me like I were the young girl they watched grow. Some of them being footmen who eyed me with what I could only assume was sympathy, while other servants wore expressions that reflected that of hunger. I somehow felt tiny and entirely enormous at the same time. The expansive walls, coated with decorated wallpaper, closed in on me as the weight of my curseless box suffocated me. There was no certainty within me that my little lungs could handle such strain. Something tugged my shoulder, pulling me swiftly away from my mother and father as their eyes communicated noiselessly with one another. They struggled to make sense of the empty nothingness of my curse, and when I was nearly out of range, I saw what could have been the beginnings of a frown upon my mother’s lips. A frown that curved boundlessly downward and promised me nothing but empty jars of collected terror. I was unable to fully comprehend it before I was dragged across my own home and down a set of ragged concrete stairs. A set of stairs that I recognized all too well, and the very moment my toes scraped the familiar surface, my heart rate spiked as I began lashing in the anonymous grip. I refused to be put back down there. I would have gladly kicked whoever held me in the places the rays of sun could not reach and they were to release me immediately or I would have them hanged off the west tower of the castle. “Lidya, it’s me.” A familiar, broken voice interrupted my fruitless thrashing. “You’re hurting me.” The captor let me go once we finally reached the bottom of the stairs, and I swiveled to see my older sister, Gwendolyn, rubbing the side of her stomach where I must have elbowed her. Her cheeks were painted in splotches of red, and she wiped a tear from the lining of her soft jaw. There was immediate relief upon seeing her and then arrived a different layer of fear. It was darker and more deeply rooted in the essence of my soul. “You know I hate it down here.” I frowned, examining the dark room around us. Prison cells skirted along the wall, still terrifying despite their vacancy. The only source of light emanated from the dimly lit sconces that decorated the concrete on each side of a cell. My trips there were reserved for times of misbehavior. My parents would lock me up for several hours in the dark, my only entertainment deriving from the incessant dripping that I could never discover the source of. Sometimes, my brain would play tricks on me in the dark, showing me different types of ghouls, goblins, or the shadow of a burly man. “They were going to send you somewhere far scarier, I am sure,” she admitted as she looked up at the door that she had hastily locked behind us. “When I got my curse, they sent me to the west dungeon for a week to try to figure out what to do with me.” I gasped, her words nearly knocking me to the ground. Not only was the west dungeon darker and filled with mold, but I didn’t even notice. My sister had been swept beneath the rug for an entire week, solely because there had been no room for a princess with fertility issues. What kind of sister was I? I knew our parents had been keeping her holed up in her bedroom for the past three years, but I never knew they had subjected her to confinement in the west dungeon. I pictured the small, red-haired girl sobbing in the icy void as she wondered what could be so wrong with her that her own parents would not bear to look at her. My young heart threatened to shatter into a billion pieces. Since her Unboxing Ceremony, I had been thrust into training, lessons in dance and table manners, and dress fittings that were all meant for Gwen. Everything that was rightfully hers became mine all because she could no longer produce a child to carry on the royal name. It wasn’t fair—I knew that—but I was as helpless as a bird without its wings. There was nothing my little hands could do to change it, and every night I dug arches into my palms for their uselessness. I physically shook the thoughts away as they began to nag at the strings knitted around my heart. It hurt more than her reaction to my empty box. “I don’t understand, Gwennie.” My hands trembled. “Shouldn’t I be excited that I do not have a curse?” My sister shook her head, swallowing the remnants of her cries from earlier. “After my ceremony, I overheard Mother and Father trying to make light of the situation. They said, "At least she is not without a curse." I remember thinking that would be a good thing, but after a long day spent in the library, I found an old tale.” The sconces flickered around her as if she were telling a story of ghosts, sending a shiver down my spine. “The tale was long, so I will spare you the details, but it is said that the only cure for the Winterian curses is the blood of the curseless.” Her tone was hushed despite it being just the two of us down there. I must have appeared deeply confused because she repeated, “Your blood is the cure, Liddy. Once people find that out, they will stop at nothing to get it from you.” My heart skittered in my chest as panic settled in. There were endless possibilities of what it would mean for me. I was too young to have to search for ways in which I could keep myself alive. “Is it just a drop of blood? I can share that, right?” I questioned, and my sister blinked as if she hadn’t considered that. Her eyes flitted around for a moment before she pulled out the pin that kept her curls from her face, pressing the metal between her teeth. She took my wrist, plucking my index finger out in front of her and grabbing the pin with her other hand. “There’s only one way to find out,” she whispered, looking between my eyes with a glimmer of hope and a sizzle of guilt. The sharp end of the pin plunged into my finger, drawing a small dot of red that swelled larger as she squeezed the skin surrounding it. I yelped, retracting my hand, but she only held on tighter. Then, as her lip curled and nose wrinkled, she brought it to her mouth with a wave of nausea tugging at her bobbing throat. When the drop of blood hit her tongue, she tossed my finger away with a gag. Her palm flew to her mouth, and I tried not to take offense at it. I supposed nobody’s blood would truly taste anything other than foul. I peered down at my finger and the smudged line of crimson upon it, watching as another small droplet emerged from the microscopic hole my sister had created in my skin. It didn’t hurt anymore, even as it continued to bleed. It was almost fascinating—my blood. It could cure every single person born on the island, and there it was, sitting idly on my finger. Winterians would have killed for that drop, and yet, I still wiped it gingerly on my gown. Silence wrapped its deadly tentacles around the damp room as Gwen placed her hands upon her abdomen, waiting to feel something—anything. I buzzed with anticipation, bouncing on my heels as I watched her closely. I almost expected swirls of glittery smoke to fizzle off her body or a vibration to rip through her skin. The dungeon air thickened around us, clogging my throat with the stench of mildew dripping from the stone walls. I could feel the concrete closing in on me like it always used to, and if Gwen didn't speak up soon, I was going to suffocate on the haunting memories of that terrible place. “I don’t feel any different.” She slumped with a quick pace around the room, and I tried to ignore the similar defeat within me, partnered with the relief of hearing her voice. I stared at her belly as she walked, reaching a hand out toward it. “How would we know? It’s not as though we can watch your uterus magically heal.” “I think I would know if I were cured. Feel it somehow. Like an ache or...a fluttering.” She retreated, letting my hand drop, then averted her gaze. “But it still feels empty and cold.” I watched as she cupped her hands around where her uterus should have been, looking down at it wistfully in knowing she would never be a mother. It twisted my innards to watch, even as a twelve-year-old who knew nothing of what motherhood meant. When we were little, I would throw my baby doll across the room, knocking out one of its eyeballs and running it over with my toy stroller fifteen times. But Gwen would pick up the baby to feed it fake milk and bounce it in her arms as if the inanimate object needed consolation. She would coo and pat the doll’s back until it “fell asleep.” I supposed I never truly thought about how terribly her curse affected her, but I saw it just then. I saw it in her eyes how desperately she wanted my blood to work, and it didn’t. I wanted to reach out and hold her. To give her more of me so that she could live the life she so desperately wanted. However, I had the nagging feeling that it would take more than I could ever provide. Based on the reactions of everyone around me, it didn’t seem like a gift I could so easily share. A gag rose in my throat when I imagined being drained of all my blood until I turned pale and my body stiffened from death. “How will I know how much I have to give?” I choked and Gwen met my eyes with her increasingly saddened ones. “Will it kill me?” My entire body shook. I didn’t want to die. I hadn’t yet found love, nor discovered my favorite style of music, nor learned the faces of every painting within the castle. I would have done anything for my sister, but death wasn’t something I knew how to face. “Oh, Liddy. I...don’t know.” Gwen frowned, and it only shattered me further. I thought older sisters were supposed to know everything, and if Gwennie didn’t know—I was doomed to the land of forever rumination. Tears welled in my eyes, and I was about to pull my sister in for a hug when a blinding light blanketed the both of us. The wooden door at the base of the stairs had been swung open, and in the threshold stood our mother, looking the part of zeal incarnate. She hobbled down the stairs and took me by the shoulders, her eyes wide as her curse flickered on like a match and her skin turned a pale yellow of determination. “You,” Mother whispered, tears prickling in her vision. “My little Lidya. You could be the cure for all Winterian curses. The salvation of our people.” She sucked in a deep breath as her facial features began shifting again. The yellow faded from her skin and morphed into a fearful light blue as her eyebrows rose higher and impossibly higher. “Or the destruction of our kingdom as we know it.” ONE I AM A LIAR It is what I am. What I’ve always had to be. My blood lined the mountains of my knuckles before dipping into pools upon each divot. It flew across the floor as I flicked it from my hands, splattering to the ground as though it were worthless. I sent another hit to the padded sparring post that was before me, hoping that the sheer force would crunch my fingers to dust. I told lies to myself that it didn’t hurt—that if I kept watching the thick crimson liquid drip down my arms, then I would feel better. I no longer would feel like an incubator with the sole purpose of keeping the cure hot and ready for whoever wanted it. My blood is useless, I lied as it stained the mats beneath my feet. I punched and punched like I did every day, constantly reopening the wounds on my hands so that I could see the stuff that my mother coined “liquid gold.” I made myself bleed as a reminder that it was red, watching it dry on my skin and turn to nothingness before my eyes. It was all I could do to make myself feel normal and not like some twisted puzzle piece in the Winter prophecy. I am a liar. My blood is not the cure, and I am cursed just like everyone else. The practiced words that my parents drilled into my head over and over echoed throughout my mind. My mother would force me to walk past mirrors and shimmering creeks without batting an eye at my reflection, pretending I did not see my eyes staring back at me. I was meant to feign humility, telling everyone that I had seen the swirling smoke from my box take shape. Even the guards and family members who witnessed my ceremony with trepidation had been given a deal of hush money. Everyone played pretend. But I knew the truth. I knew I harbored the one thing that everybody wanted. I knew I was the key to someone else’s freedom. I knew I was born to die. I punched the post impossibly harder that time to ignore the bile churning in my stomach, and I hissed at the crackling fire that shot up my arm. A string of curse words spewed from my lips as I shook out the pain, tears pricking at my eyes. “How’d I know I’d find you here?” A silky voice interrupted the attention that my injury begged for, and Gwen appeared in my vision, her fiery hair tied up and out of her face. I started hiding down there after my mother took pints and pints of my blood, injecting it into her own veins and discovering that it would work for a few minutes. She would be cured for moments before returning to her emotional self. It was never permanent, not like it was in the history books when centuries ago, the original Winter King, Blaze, killed another curseless Winterian just like me. He drained her of every last drop of blood to cure his wife, Florence—and it worked. Every last drop of blood was what it would take to cure someone. My death for someone else’s life. How poetic. “Blazes, Liddy. What are you doing to yourself?” My sister was suddenly inches from me, gripping my hands in hers. She clucked her tongue as she examined my wounds, her fingers dousing themselves in my blood. “You wanna take a lick?” I teased, deflecting from the obvious answer. She didn’t even look up from my hands when she rolled her eyes. Her finger brushed back some of the blood to get a good look at the wounds and I watched her intently. I stifled the winces that squeezed my eyelids together, the sharp pain from my knuckles shooting up my entire arm. And the familiar pang of guilt struck my chest as it always did when she took care of me. My blood could have made her a mother like she had always wanted to be, but instead it was being strewn across the training room as I rammed my fists endlessly into destruction. I would have died for her if she'd have let me. If I wasn’t entirely too important to her and everyone else in the kingdom. “Have Bea look at these. They could get infected,” she muttered before tearing a strip of fabric from her simple, thin lounge dress and wrapping it tightly around my knuckles. Red seeped through the lilac strip and I could feel the injury throbbing beneath it, but the pain was something I began to grow used to—or, at least, became good at hiding. She put my hand down and scanned the room, noticing every blood splatter on every surface while rattling her head repeatedly. “Why?” One word. One syllable. I knew what she meant, but I did what I do best. “Ex,” I deflected. “Double-you. Vee. You. Tee—Come on, we both know I can recite the alphabet backwards. You try.” She glared at me. Not even a corner of her lip quirked up at my poor attempt at a joke. She had always hated when I dodged her questions, and she especially hated it when I tried to be funny while doing it. As if all of it were some sick antic. “You know what I mean, Lidya,” she scolded, and it reminded me so much of our mother that the hollowness in my chest grew heavier. “I’m training to fight off the scoundrels who want my blood. You know that.” A half-lie. In fact, the only reason our father let me use the guards’ training room was so that I could learn to defend myself—and I had. However, it had also doubled as a room to escape my negative thoughts and expel them onto the punching post rather than my bedroom wall. “Oh, come on—” “It was so great to see you, Sister, but I really should be on my way,” I said while picking up my glass of water from the floor near the wall. I was not having that conversation. The ‘self-harm’ conversation that she had with me every other day. “The King and Queen have big plans for me this week, in case you have forgotten.” I brushed past her without waiting to hear her response, knowing that week was a sensitive subject for both of us. Even if she refused to admit it. And I couldn’t handle any more pain in my already aching body. “Lidya,” she called after me, and normally I would have kept walking, but her tone struck against my heart, and I loved her too much to ignore such a pitiful sound. So, I turned to face her, her hazel eyes on mine layered with strands of guilty green and broken brown, and she sighed. “Happy birthday.” ————————— Every birthday since my twelfth had been much less eventful than the one prior. But that year proved the largest yet. It was the year of my courting ball. The one in which political figures from across Winter found themselves in my ballroom, each one of them scrambling at the opportunity to dance with me. A room filled with men who had been eagerly waiting for the Winter Princess to turn eighteen so they could marry her for her parents’ wealth and her royal womb. It was what Gwen never received and what she always wanted—though I never understood why. The idea of distinguished gentlemen practically tripping over their own boots so they could pretend to care and take my child had always made me nauseous. Anyone that desperate certainly did not belong in my life and certainly nowhere near enough to me to share my future child. Though my parents promised me they would take my opinion into consideration, I knew that in the end it was solely their decision. They only told me that so I would keep my mouth shut and quit complaining. My mouth was shut, but my stomach still twisted. It swirled into sickening knots, and though I pretended disgust was all I could feel—fear wove its way around my intestines all the same. My lady’s maid, Bea, had been patching up my wounds when the aching sigh escaped my lips. Her eyes fluttered up to mine, a promise as loyal as the sun's ascent that she would always appear for me. Calling her a maid felt impersonal and crooked. Rather, she was family. A second mother, perhaps. “Your dress is ready for tomorrow,” she nearly whispered, trying to regain my attention, likely to make sure I wasn’t going to pass out from the injuries. Clearly, I did not appear excited enough because she continued, “I made sure it was green like you wanted.” Light tickled my insides, fluttering my chest so immensely that if any more elation arose, I would start to glow. Every dress that I had ever worn had been gold, as demanded by my mother, not only to honor the Winter colors but also the “liquid gold” rushing through my veins. She insisted on parading me around like some token of hers. It fueled her to know I was the most precious prize on the island and that I belonged to her and my father. So, instead, I wanted green. The opposite of red, of blood. I did not wish to be reminded of my burden as I danced with men who wished to marry me. I did not wish to be reminded of what they would have done to me if they ever found out the truth. If I thought about it for too long, the world would spin around me until I was no longer breathing and the punching post would begin calling my name. Winterians had done the nastiest things when they believed the cure was within their clutches. They burned down stores in Delalind—the ones that falsely claimed to have the cure in a glass stoppered bottle. They assaulted the fortune-tellers in Isidor when their future was nothing like it had been predicted. They were all animals, and they would have torn me apart the moment they discovered what I was harboring in my arteries. “Thank you, Bea. I’m sure it’s beautiful,” I finally responded quietly as she released my freshly patched knuckles. “If only we could have convinced Mother to call the whole ball off.” Her laugh was small and barely audible. “Unfortunately, I am not that powerful, Miss Lidya. Though I am sure you will meet a nice man out there. A dreamy, fairy-tale man.” My eyes rolled against my will. “And then pigs shall fly, my beloved Bea.” I rose from the healing bed and landed a small kiss on the top of Bea’s head of dark hair peppered with grey strands. If I had the choice, I would have stayed with her in that room for all my remaining days. I would have crowned her as my mother, snuck Gwen in, and guarded the door from the rest of the castle. But I had non-negotiable duties. I exited the room to join my mother, where she waited for me in the ballroom, ready to remind me of my manners for the following day and to perfect each step. As I walked alone through my castle, a sinking weight tugged me down. The paintings that had watched me grow seemed darker, and the hallways began caving in. The walls kissed my arms with goodbyes, and the floorboards wept in mourning of the way I used to twirl upon them. The castle would miss the girl I used to be—the one who was unwed and not shackled down by an unwanted suitor. The castle would watch as men placed kisses upon my hand, but did not ask of my hobbies. As they danced with me at my ball, with their eyes on the King and Queen at the base of the grand stairs and their greedy hands on my waist. My home would be filled with men for the week to come as they called upon me each day—not to gain my favor but that of my parents’. I would not know what it was like to fall in love and create a home together. I would never know the freedom of living underneath a roof without the presence of my parents until they were deceased, and I became the queen. And even then, I would forget what it was like not to share a bed or a room or a life with someone else. The thought tugged at my already bubbling gut. “It is about time, Lidya. You’re late.” My mother stomped her foot relentlessly as I entered the ballroom from the gallery, the pit of nausea festering in my stomach growing worse upon her presence. Though the grand clock only read five minutes past our meeting time, Mother crossed her arms in a slouch as if she had been waiting for ages. As if my tardiness was the end of our lives as we knew them. “And yet the island still floats,” I muttered to myself. Mother pretended not to hear me. “Manners are very important for tomorrow,” she said through gritted teeth as I descended the stairs toward her. “No man will marry a young lady with poor manners.” Now, there was a thought. “If we’re lucky,” I sighed wistfully. She shot me a glare of Wrath’s impending arrival—an early indication to shut my mouth before her curse erupted in inhuman horrors. Then, her hands captured mine to guide me across the floor. She planted one hand on my waist as I draped mine around her neck, reminding me how a man would hold me and how I was expected to do the same. She walked me through the same steps that I had memorized when I was twelve, one last time, in a sickening reminder that after all those years, it would soon be real. There would be a real man in my arms, holding my waist with greed and interlocking our fingers with possession. My dress suddenly felt far too tight and my necklace circled around my neck like a constricting snake. As mother and I stepped through the waltz with my toes pointed at hers, she attempted to replenish my memory. “What do we say if a man asks of your curse?” I rolled my eyes. “ I do not tell just anyone this ,” I recited bitterly. “ But, as you are a special man, I shall share with you that I am forbidden from viewing my reflection. I know not what I look like, which makes me more adept at seeing how unworthy you are—” “Enough,” Mother interrupted the personal spin I added to our heavily studied script. She turned her nose up at me as we continued to prance around. “If you cannot prove you will behave at this ball, then there may be no ball at