CHAPTER THREE: THE FEELING'S FOR SERA
1526 Words
SERA didn't sleep.
She sat on the edge of the guest bed with her dress still on and her shoes still on and her bag still unpacked against the wall, and she looked at her arm where his hand had been.
The bruise was fading.
She watched it happen. That was the part she couldn't stop doing, just watching, fingers hovering over the skin, not touching, just watching the yellow creep in at the edges and then disappear, the way it always did, the way it had always done since she was small enough to think it was normal. The skin smoothing itself out.
She pressed two fingers to the spot. Nothing.
She had always healed fast. Since her childhood, before she understood that this was not something she can say out loud. At thirteen she had cut her palm on a broken glass in the kitchen and wrapped it in a dish towel and by the time Bianca found her an hour later the cut was sealed and the blood was dry and the look on Bianca's face had been something she'd spent years trying not to think about.
She had learned to be careful after that. To keep the healing quiet. To let bruises linger longer than they needed to.
She pressed her fingers to her shoulder.
To the mark.
She pulled her collar aside and turned toward the mirror on the wall, and she looked at it, and then she looked away, and then she looked back, because she needed to be sure of what she was seeing.
It was fading.
Not the way the bruise had faded, gradually, naturally, the body doing what bodies did. This was different. This was slower. Like something resisting. The edges going soft, the dark colour pulling back toward the centre, and Sera sat very still and watched it and thought, good. Good, it's going. Whatever it is, whatever he was, it's going.
And then it stopped.
She leaned closer to the mirror.
The mark sat there, half-gone, neither here nor there, suspended. She waited. A minute. Two. It didn't move.
And then, slowly, so slowly she thought at first she was imagining it, the colour came back. The edges sharpened. The shape reasserted itself, dark and deliberate and settled, like something that had considered leaving and decided against it.
Sera stared at it for a long time.
Everything on her body healed. Every cut, every bruise, every mark that had ever been put on her by accident or by intention, gone, eventually. Always. That was the one thing she had been able to count on. She thought that eventually the mark would disappear.
This one came back.
She pulled her collar up.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
She barely sleeps.
The light changed before she noticed morning had arrived.
One moment the window was dark and the next it was grey, and then gold was coming in at the edges, soft and unhurried.
Sera was still sitting on the bed. She hadn't moved in hours. Her back ached from it and she didn't care.
Her phone buzzed on the mattress beside her.
She picked it up.
Today, 10:00 AM, Wedding.
She stared at it.
She looked at the light coming through the window.
It was real.
Ten o'clock. The gold morning that was already building outside that window was the morning of her wedding day, and there was a dress hanging on the back of the wardrobe door that someone had brought in while she was staring at her own shoulder in the mirror, and somewhere in this house the man she was going to marry was probably sleeping without any trouble at all.
She set the phone down.
Picked it up again.
Set it down.
Twenty-two years, she thought. And this is it. This is the thing they kept me for.
She thought about her mother. Not Cassian's wife, she had died when Sera was four, and Sera barely remembered her face, only the smell of her perfume and the particular weight of her hand. She meant the other one. The one she had no memory of at all.
Whoever had left her on Cassian Cole's doorstep in a blanket with no name and no note and nothing but the fact of her own existence.
She thought about the archive Ember had mentioned.
She thought about what it would mean to finally have an answer.
Then she got up, because sitting wouldn't change anything, and she had learned that a very long time ago. She crossed to the wardrobe and took the dress off the hanger and started getting ready, and she kept her face very still and her hands very steady, and she did not let herself think about the mark on her shoulder or the man who had put it there or the fact that she was about to walk into a room and say words that couldn't be unsaid.
After preparing, she stood at the edge of the garden path and looked at the arch and did not move yet.
The guests were seated. The elders were in the front row in their formal grey, faces arranged in the particular expression of people presiding over something significant. The packhouse staff lined the back. Luca stood to one side with his hands clasped, watching her with an expression she couldn't read.
And at the arch, with his back straight and his hands clasped in front of him and his jaw set in that particular way she was already learning to recognise, was Damien.
He turned when she reached the halfway point of the path. His eyes moved over her once, the way they always did, not warm, not cold exactly, just taking inventory, and then fixed forward again. She reached the arch and stood beside him and looked at the priest and waited.
The ceremony was short. She was grateful for that. The priest spoke about bond and union and the sacred responsibilities of the Alpha and Luna, and Sera let the words wash past her and focused on her own breathing and the feel of the ground under her feet and the weight of her own hands at her sides. She was here. She was doing this. She would get through it and then she would get on with the actual work of surviving whatever came next.
Then the priest nodded at them, and they turned to face each other.
She looked at Damien and he looked at her. His expression was closed and controlled and utterly unreadable, and he said the words the priest gave him in the same tone he probably used to sign off on patrol reports, clean, precise, without a single syllable of feeling.
She was drawing breath to say her own when he leaned in. Just slightly. Just enough that it looked like nothing from three feet away.
"This changes nothing." His voice was barely sound at all, only enough to reach her. "You will have your own rooms. Your own schedule. I don't intend to pretend this is something it isn't, and I'd suggest you do the same."
She held his gaze.
She leaned in the same fraction he had.
"Funny," she said, at the same volume. "I was going to say exactly that. Word for word, almost." She kept her eyes level on his. "Except I was also going to mention that if you put your hand on my arm without asking again, the next thing I put on your face won't be a slap."
Something moved in his expression.
The priest looked between them with the mild patience.
"Do you take this woman?"
A beat. His eyes still on hers.
"I do," said Damien.
"Do you take this man?"
"I do," said Sera.
The priest smiled and said the words, and the elders made their sounds of approval.
You may now kiss your bride.
He turned to her with the expression of a man completing the final item on a list.
She knew what this was going to be. She had already prepared herself for it.
She tipped her chin up slightly and kept her face neutral and waited for it to be over.
He leaned in.
His lips touched her cheek.
The graze shifted. Slowed. His mouth found the corner of hers, and neither of them pulled back, and the world went very quiet in the way it goes quiet when something is happening that is bigger than the moment it's happening in.
Her hand closed around his lapel.
She didn't tell it to. It was already there.
His hand settled at her waist,
Like something recognising something.
She felt his breath change.
She felt her own.
And then they pulled apart, at the same moment, the way you pull your hand back from something hot, sudden and involuntary and already too late.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
His expression was doing something she had no framework for.
Then Vivienne appeared.
She came from the left side of the garden, moving toward the manor doors with the smooth unhurried ease of someone who had timed this precisely.
- Writer
