Bound by Service, Made for love

Chapter2:ThePrice

The hall became dead silent.

We all stared at the fallen torch.

Then Arlo looked at me.

Then Gunnar looked at me.

I didn't dare look back so I looked at the torch.

"Interesting," Gunnar said quietly.

He stood his ground, chest heaving in a controlled, violent way, eyes locked on his brother with the patience of something that had already decided how this ended and was simply waiting for Arlo to figure it out.

"Fetch it,"

Gunnar commanded, his voice low and vibrating in a way that made the guards flinch before he'd finished the sentence.

"Go to my chambers. Bring me Shatter Steel. If my brother wishes to speak the language of kings, let us use the only tongue he respects."

The young servant didn't walk. He ran. Boots skidding on gravel, arms pumping.

By now, the palace already knew.

Not about the torch. Not the part the servants whispered about in clipped, careful sentences while pretending to do things. They knew about the girl, Arlo's slave girl; the one the Crown Prince had ripped right out of his brother's claim and declared his intention in front of the whole court.

That was the story circling the halls.

I was a story now. The tension in the courtyard was thick enough to choke the attendants.

Gunnar stepped into Arlo's space.

Not charging. Not rushing. Closing the distance the way a door closes.

"Let us be clear on the stakes, little brother."

A smile pulled at his mouth that had nothing to do with warmth.

"This is no longer about a bruised ego. When I win, and I will win, I don't just take the girl. I take half of everything. Your livestock. The gold in your vaults. Every acre of the southern inheritance you cling to like a frightened child with a blanket."

Arlo's face turned a sickly grey. The court held its breath.

This wasn't a duel anymore.

It was a stripping.

The great oak doors groaned open before the sword arrived.

Queen Lilith descended the outer stairs, her gaze cutting between her sons like a blade looking for the softest place to enter.

"Enough."

Not a scream. Just a word dropped with the full weight of a throne behind it.

"You stand amidst the bones of your ancestors. Gunnar! Halt your man. There will be no duel today."

"Fine," Gunnar said, eyes never leaving Arlo's face.

He signaled. The servant turned back. The sword stayed in the chamber.

"He keeps his gold today. But the debt is noted. The girl stays with me until it's settled in blood or…." His tone didn't have anger but finality.

The transition from Tylo's camp to the royal wing should have felt like waking from a nightmare.

It didn't.

It felt like walking into a prettier one.

Gunnar didn't loosen his grip on my wrist until we reached a set of massive dark wooden doors at the end of a corridor that seemed to go on forever. Gold everywhere. Velvet thick enough to sink into. The kind of beauty that doesn't care whether you're comfortable, it just exists, indifferent, like weather.

"Elle!"

He barked the name and a woman appeared from the shadows as if she'd been built into the wall and only needed the right word to release her. Silk dress. Straight spine. Eyes that had learned to reveal nothing.

Gunnar told her I was his intended.

That she was my handmaid now.

She looked at me, at my tattered, mud-crusted rags, the blood from the alchemists still dark at my hairline and then back at the Prince's unreadable face. Her jaw didn't drop. She was too trained for that. But I saw it behind her eyes.

The question.

What is she?

"Please don't,"

I said, as she began to sink into a bow.

I reached out to stop her, then caught sight of my own hand, soot dark fingers against her clean sleeve and yanked it back.

I was a slave. Being bowed to felt like being mocked by someone too polite to laugh.

Gunnar gave me one last look before he left. Heavy. Measuring. The look of a man turning a strange coin over in his fingers, trying to decide if it was currency or counterfeit.

Then he walked away, his footsteps like distant thunder, and left me standing in a room worth more than every year of my life combined.

The bathing room was a cathedral.

Mosaic tiles the color of sea glass. Steam rising from water that was the perfect temperature, as if the palace knew what warmth was supposed to feel like and had decided to demonstrate it.

I stood at the edge and almost laughed.

I would have slept on the floor of this room forever and called it a good life.

"I can take it from here,"

I said. My voice came out cracked, dry.

"You can go. Please."

"I am your handmaid,"

Elle replied with a warmth she hadn't shown before.

"It is my duty to bathe you."

She said it without cruelty. That was the disorienting part.

When her fingertips brushed the small of my back, pulling the sticky rags away. I bolted upright.

A shock ran through me. Not pain. Something stranger. A spark that moved from my spine to somewhere deeper, something I didn't have words for because no one had ever touched me like I was something worth handling carefully.

"Is something wrong?"

Her voice had dropped, lower, softer.

"No," I managed.

She continued. Every place where Arlo had left a bruise, every puncture from the alchemists' needles, when the warm cloth passed over them, there was that pulse again. Not pain. Almost the opposite of pain. Like something beneath the surface of my skin recognizing being seen.

My cheeks burned.

A sound caught in my throat that I swallowed before it could become anything, a sound I didn't know I was capable of making. Somewhere in the steam and the warmth and the impossible gentleness of being handled like I wasn't disposable, the fear of the palace loosened its grip.

Just for a moment.

I stood up abruptly. Water hit the tiles. I grabbed a towel and pulled it around myself, my heart hammering, needing the distance.

Needing to remember what I was.

I caught my reflection by accident.

Full length silver mirror in the corner. I had been avoiding it. I always avoided my reflection. Muddy puddles Polished boot leather. Every surface I had ever seen myself on had shown me the same thing: a ghost. A girl made of marks and hunger. A body that existed to be used up.

I looked.

And the woman in the glass looked back.

She was a stranger.

The steam curled around her like it was drawn to her. Her eyes were darker than I remembered. Holding something in them that had no name I could reach for.

She didn't look like a maid.

She didn't look entirely human.

I stood very still.

And the woman in the mirror didn't blink when I did.