Promised to His Shadow

Chapter One

The Garden Has No Witnesses

Elianne’s POV

He found me in the dead garden.

I’d been sitting there for an hour, maybe more, on a stone bench that had soaked up the cold of a Valmonde winter and hadn’t given any of it back. Three hours after they’d buried Adrien. Three hours after I’d stood at the edge of the family vault in my best black dress and tried to feel the right kind of grief — the clean, expected kind. The kind a grieving fiancée was supposed to perform for a court watching every single thing her face did.

The footsteps stopped behind me. I didn’t turn around.

"If you’ve come to offer condolences," I said, "I’d rather you didn’t. I’ve had enough condolences today to last the rest of my life."

"I haven’t come to offer condolences."

That voice. I’d heard it exactly six times in three years, always across a dining table large enough to make conversation mercifully impossible. Low, unhurried, the kind of voice that expected to be listened to without having to raise itself. Gabriel de Valmonde had never once sought me out. Not in three years of perfectly civil invisibility.

He came around the bench and stood in front of me, and I finally looked up at him.

He looked terrible. That was my first thought, irreverent and sharp. His dress uniform was still immaculate, because Gabriel de Valmonde would never allow himself to look otherwise, but his jaw was clenched so hard the old scar along it had gone white, and his eyes were the eyes of a man holding something enormous behind them by pure discipline alone.

"My father means to announce a new betrothal before the week is out," he said. No greeting. No softening. Just the fact, delivered the way I imagined he delivered battlefield reports. "Yours and mine."

* * *

The dead roses around us said nothing. I envied them.

I’d expected this. Somewhere underneath the grief and the mud still on my knees from the clearing, I’d known the moment I’d seen the way the two kings looked at each other across the vault, calculating already. Adrien wasn’t cold yet and the alliance was already the priority. I was the alliance. I had always been the alliance.

"Of course he does," I said.

Gabriel was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, which was unusual. I was good at reading people. "I wanted you to hear it from me first."

"How considerate." I stood up, because I refused to have this conversation looking up at him. He was tall enough that it didn’t entirely help. "And you? Do you want this?"

Something shifted in his face. Fast, controlled, almost invisible. Almost.

"What I want is not the relevant consideration."

"That’s not an answer."

"No," he said. "It isn’t."

We stood there in the dead garden, three feet apart, with his brother between us like a ghost neither of us could name out loud, and I understood that Gabriel de Valmonde was not going to tell me the truth. Not today. Maybe not ever. And yet something in the way he’d come to find me himself, when a letter would have sufficed, made a small cold thing in my chest go quiet in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.

"I don’t want to marry you," I told him plainly. "I want you to know that before any of this becomes official."

"I know."

"Then why does it feel like you’re going to let it happen anyway?"

He held my gaze for a long, uncomfortable second. "Because the alternative is a war along a border that has already cost too many men their lives. And because you already know that, Elianne, which is why you’re still standing here instead of walking away."

He was right. I hated that he was right. I hated, more, that he’d said my name like that — low and careful, like it was something he’d been not saying for a long time.

"You should go," I said. "Before someone sees us and decides we’re already behaving like a betrothal."

He went. And I stood alone in the dead garden with the worst feeling that the man who’d just walked away from me had not, for a single second, looked like a man who didn’t want to stay.

* * *

I found the physician on my way back to the house.

He was standing near the east entrance, not quite coming in, not quite leaving, with the particular stillness of someone who had decided something and hadn’t yet found the courage to do it. He’d examined Adrien’s body at the clearing. I’d watched him leave faster than he should have, with his face arranged into careful nothing.

"Master Aldric." I stopped in front of him. "You look like a man who has something to say."

He glanced behind me, left and right. His hands weren’t steady.

"There were marks," he said, very quietly. "On His Highness’s arm. The kind a fall from a horse doesn’t leave."

The cold evening air felt suddenly colder.

"What kind of marks?"

"A puncture." He swallowed. "Something administered. My lady, I wrote none of this in my report. I was told the cause of death was already determined and that my role was simply to confirm it." He looked at me directly then, for the first time. "I have a family."

He walked inside before I could answer. I stood alone on the path and understood, in the space of a single breath, that Adrien had not died in an accident.

And that someone in this palace had made sure no one would ever officially say so.

* * *

I went back to my chambers and sat by a window that looked out over the dead garden, and I thought about Gabriel’s face when he’d said my name.

I thought about the way he’d stood there instead of delivering the news by letter, the way any sensible prince would have done. I thought about the scar on his jaw, the way it had gone white when he’d clenched his teeth, and how I’d never once noticed, in three years of perfectly civil dinners, that Gabriel de Valmonde had a tell.

He wanted to stay. He’d been standing in a dead garden at dusk trying not to show it, and he’d almost succeeded, and I’d noticed anyway.

That was the part I didn’t know what to do with.

I’d spent three years building something solid with Adrien. Not love, not the consuming kind the ballads were always going on about, but something real and warm and workable, a friendship dressed in the clothes of a betrothal. I’d told myself it was enough. Most days I’d believed it.

And now Adrien was dead with a mark on his arm that the court physician was too frightened to put in his report, and the man who’d come to tell me I was going to be handed from one Valmonde prince to the next like a contested piece of land was standing in front of me looking like he’d been not saying my name for considerably longer than today.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window.

Adrien. Someone had killed him. Deliberately, carefully, and with enough influence to ensure the physician who’d found the evidence had chosen silence over his own conscience.

I was going to marry the brother of a murdered man. I was going to live inside the walls where that murder had been decided. And whoever had done it was still here, still watching, still protected by whatever power had made Aldric’s hands shake.

The smart thing — the safe thing — would be to say nothing. To grieve properly, marry Gabriel, smile for the court, and let the past stay buried with the man it had already claimed.

I’d never been particularly good at the smart thing.

I pulled out paper and a pen, and I wrote to my father. Two lines, in the careful code we’d developed over years of careful negotiations. Something is wrong here. I am going to find out what it is.

Outside, the dead garden had gone fully dark. Somewhere in this palace, someone believed they’d gotten away with it.

They hadn’t met me yet. But they would. And I intended, when that moment finally came, to be considerably more dangerous than they were expecting a grieving fiancée to be.

End of Chapter One