Marriage to the Alpha

Chapter4

Seraphina had always liked other people’s secrets. They were so much more honest than their owners.

She had slipped away from the welcoming crowd. In the guest chamber of the Silver Moon estate she turned the locket over on her palm, while a king’s horns were still sounding at the gate. It was a poor thing: tarnished silver, no bigger than a thumbnail, a heron in flight stamped on the lid and worn almost smooth by years against skin. Inside lay a curl of dark hair, tied with thread. Whose, she neither knew nor cared.

She had been fourteen the winter the Vance family was banished. She remembered the heron. Every child in two kingdoms had learned that crest, the way you learn the shape of anything burned into wax beneath a death sentence.

“All these years I kept you,” Seraphina said softly, delighted, “and you were carrying a king’s grudge in your bodice.”

The door opened. Ilse, her maid, hurried in with her arms full of silk. “Your Highness, the King’s party is in the courtyard, and they are asking—”

Seraphina’s hand closed over the locket. With the other she smoothed Ilse’s collar, very gently.

“How is your sister, Ilse? The one in the palace scullery.”

“Well, Your Highness. Thank you.”

“She counts the silver for the steward, doesn’t she?” Seraphina straightened the girl’s apron with great tenderness. Something small and bright slid from her sleeve into the apron pocket, and neither of them looked at it. “Spoons go missing in big houses, and your sister would be the first to count. She would be so sorry to find one in your apron.”

Ilse had gone the color of milk. “I saw nothing in the Luna’s rooms, Your Highness. Nothing at all.”

“I know you didn’t, darling.” Seraphina patted her cheek. “That is what I love about you.”

She left the girl standing there with a stolen spoon in her pocket and a lifetime of obedience in her face.

King Aldric entered the great hall of the Silver Moon like a man inspecting a farm.

He was sixty, broad once and thinned now by something that was not age, with white hair and a mouth that had forgotten how to curve. He kissed his son on both cheeks the way one kisses a stranger at a funeral.

“Father.”

“Kael.” That was all.

“May I present my wife.”

Elara stepped forward in grey silk, chin high, the sapphire bright at her throat. Seraphina, watching from beside her own father, saw the exact moment the King’s eyes found the stone.

He stopped breathing. Seraphina had seen men do that before a kill.

“That,” said Aldric, “was Lysandra’s.”

“It was my mother’s,” Kael said evenly. “It suits my wife.”

“I thought it burned with her things.”

“I kept it.”

The hall did not breathe. Seraphina counted four heartbeats, five.

Then Aldric turned his gaze on Elara’s face and let it stay there, much too long. “You remind me of someone. Something about the jaw.”

“I have one of those faces, Majesty,” Elara said. Her voice did not shake.

“Do you.”

It was not a question. Seraphina watched Elara’s hand drift toward her collar, find cool silk and a sapphire where a cord should have been, and fall back to her side.

She could end it tonight. One word in the King’s ear, and the girl would hang by dawn. But the girl would die loved. Seraphina wanted her to be hated first.

Not tonight, she decided. Let Kael love her a little longer.

The feast was loud. Seraphina laughed in the right places and charmed the old wolf with one ear, who told her the same story about his dead husband, and she listened as if it were new. She was very good at listening. By the end of the story the old wolf had told her which elder he blamed for his husband’s death, and had no idea he had done it.

Across the hall, a serving girl stumbled under a heavy tray. Elara caught its edge without a word and walked it through the crowd herself. Three wolves watched her do it. Marek was one, and he did not look away. Seraphina noted it with pleasure. Let the pack love her too. A wolf who is loved falls so much further.

Later she passed Elara at the long table and touched the sapphire with one fingertip, as one touches a sleeping animal. “How brave,” she murmured, “to wear a dead woman’s jewel in front of her husband.” Elara’s smile did not move. “Kael wished it.”

“Of course he did.” Seraphina pressed her hand, warm and dry, and felt the pulse leap under her thumb. “You always do what you are wished, don’t you?”

She was reaching for a cup when a hand closed on her wrist.

King Aldric had not touched anyone all evening. His grip was dry and light and absolutely certain, and Seraphina, who permitted nobody to touch her uninvited, found she could not pull away. “The Luna,” he said, low enough for no one else. “Whose daughter is she?”

“A maid, Majesty. Mine, for eleven years.”

“A maid.” He weighed the word, as if the scale in his head would not settle. “Has she family?”

“None she speaks of. She came to my father’s gate a child, with a cloak and a cough.”

Aldric’s eyes were not on her. “There was a girl once with that jaw. She stood at my gate while the order was read, and looked at me as though I were already dead.” His grip tightened. “I have slept badly since.”

“Find out her name. The real one.”

“Of course, Majesty.”

Seraphina bowed her head to hide her smile.

She did not tell him she already had it.