The Rogue’s Stolen Bride

Chapter Eight: Stella’s Necklace

Chapter Eight: Stella’s Necklace

Kaida

The day after the dream was the longest day of my life.

I moved through it like a ghost, drifting from my chamber to the window and back again, watching the sun crawl across the sky with agonizing slowness. Maggie tried to feed me. I tried to eat. Neither of us succeeded particularly well. Riley caught my eye once across the great hall at supper, and the look on his face — fierce and frustrated and helpless all at once — nearly undid me completely. But Father was watching, so I looked away.

I went to bed early and lay awake even longer than the night before, turning the same thoughts over and over. What if Jace had taken the coins and moved on to the next job, the next tavern, the next desperate fool with a pocket full of gold? What if George Sherman meant nothing to him? What if I arrived at Vance’s keep because there was simply no one there to stop it?

I didn’t dreamwalk that night. Or if I did, I didn’t remember it.

Dawn had barely broken when they came to dress me.

I had not slept again after lying awake half the night. I had simply lain in the grey morning light, staring at the ceiling, listening to Maggie move quietly around the room and trying not to think about vampires or wolves or the fact that today was the day.

Today was the day.

Two maids I barely recognized arrived with a copper tub and hot water, and I was bathed and perfumed and dressed with the brisk efficiency of women who had been given a job to do and intended to do it. They didn’t meet my eyes. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have known what to say to me either.

Maggie stood in the corner with her arms folded, supervising with an expression that dared anyone to do anything wrong. When one of the maids pulled my hair too roughly she descended on her like a small furious storm. “She’s not a horse being groomed for market,” she snapped. “Gently!”

Despite everything, I almost smiled.

When they were done I stood before the looking glass and barely recognized myself. The dress was deep green, fine wool, simply cut but beautifully made, with a high collar and long sleeves that made me look older and more serious than I felt. My hair had been pinned and braided and coiled at the nape of my neck with more skill than I could ever manage myself.

I stared at my reflection for a long moment. The girl looking back at me seemed composed and dignified, which was either a very good sign or a very convincing lie. I had my mother’s cheekbones, I knew that much — I had studied her portrait enough times to be certain. But I hadn’t inherited her luminous beauty, the kind that seemed to glow from somewhere deep inside her, that made you feel warm just looking at it. Stella had been extraordinary. I was, at best, ordinary.

Average, as someone had recently pointed out.

I wondered if Lord Vance would look at this face and see a person. Or just a prize.

I touched my fingers briefly to the cold glass, as though saying goodbye to something I couldn’t name. Then I dropped my hand.

I looked, I thought, exactly like what I was supposed to be.

A bride being delivered.

Maggie walked beside me as we made our way through the manor, the two guards falling in behind us at a respectful distance. I had walked these corridors ten thousand times without ever really seeing them. Now I couldn’t stop looking.

The worn patch on the stone floor at the bottom of the east staircase where generations of Hawkins feet had smoothed it to a soft hollow. The crooked sconce on the third wall of the upper passage that had been crooked for as long as I could remember and would probably still be crooked long after I was gone. The narrow window at the end of the corridor that looked out over the kitchen garden, where I had spent countless stolen hours as a child watching the cook’s cat hunt mice with businesslike dedication.

Small things. Stupid things.

Mine.

Maggie’s hand found mine in the dim corridor and squeezed once, hard, and then let go before the guards could see.

I kept walking.

My father was waiting in the great hall.

He stood by the cold fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the door as I came in. He was dressed formally, as though this were a state occasion rather than the morning he was sending his daughter to her fate. In a way, I supposed it was both.

Ben stood to one side, straight and silent as a post. He looked up when I entered, and for just a moment something moved behind his eyes — guilt, perhaps, or something that wanted to be guilt but hadn’t quite gotten there. Then it was gone.

“You look well,” he said finally. The words were correct. The tone was not. He might have been commenting on the weather.

I looked at my eldest brother — his too-pointed nose, his sagging shoulders, the permanent furrow between his brows that made him look perpetually burdened — and felt something that surprised me. Not anger. Not anymore. Just a vast, tired sadness for both of us.

“Goodbye, Ben,” I said.

He cleared his throat and looked away. “Try to be good, Kaida.”

There it was. His answer to everything. His answer to nothing.

I let it go. I didn’t have the energy to be angry about it today, and besides, I had bigger things to think about. Like whether a certain rogue mercenary was currently positioned somewhere on the old merchant road, or whether he was three towns away spending my mother’s gold on ale and loose women.

My father looked me over slowly, the way he might inspect a horse before a sale. I held myself still under his gaze and thought of Jace’s dark corner in the Blue Pony, and the midnight blue eyes of a black wolf, and I breathed.

“You’ll do,” my father said finally.

High praise, from Alpha Hawkins.

He moved toward me then, and I saw that he had something in his hand. A small thing, catching the weak morning light. My breath snagged in my chest as he stopped in front of me and held it up.

It was a necklace. A delicate chain of pale gold, with a single teardrop pendant of deep amethyst that I had seen only once before, around the neck of a woman in a portrait that hung in the locked room at the end of the east corridor.

My mother’s room.

My father’s hands were not quite steady as he reached around my neck and fastened the clasp. He stood before me for a moment afterward, not quite meeting my eyes, his jaw working silently around words that never came.

I understood. I had spent twenty years learning to read my father’s silences.

I’m sorry, the necklace said. I know what I’ve done. I know what this cost. I know it isn’t enough.

It wasn’t enough. But it was all he had.

“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For Stella’s necklace.”

It was the first time I had ever spoken my mother’s name directly to him. He flinched as though I had struck him, just slightly, just for a moment, and then his face closed again like a door being shut.