Bound by Service, Made for love

Chapter3 :A slave I remain

I had spent my whole life invisible.

In the camps, invisibility was survival. You learned to shrink, to take up less space, make less noise, breathe quieter than the person beside you. The ones who were seen were the ones who got chosen for the worst errands. The plague villages. The mine shafts. The alchemists' tables.

I was very good at not being seen.

But the woman in the silver mirror was impossible to look away from.

Beneath everything they had buried me under, the soot, the dried mud, years of Tylo's camps, still her skin was the color of honey and cream. It glowed in the candlelight like it had been waiting.

I pressed two fingers on my own cheek, just to be sure the reflection was mine.

It pressed back.

I had always assumed my darkness was permanent. A stain of status, ground in too deep to ever come out. I had never had time to wonder differently. When you are being sold from camp to camp, sent across minefields and through plague villages and into rooms you are not meant to survive, you don't dream of what you look like.

You dream of bread.

You dream of a night that ends without the sound of a whip.

So I stood there, in a dress of midnight blue silk that felt like cool water against my scarred back, and looked at a stranger who had apparently been living inside my skin this entire time.

I wasn't sure whether to grieve for her or be afraid of her.

Elle moved behind me quietly, working through the last of the tangles in my hair until it fell over my shoulders in dark waves. Every few passes of the comb, that strange electric warmth moved through my scalp, that same current from the bath. I was beginning to think it wasn't her.

I was beginning to think it was me.

"The Prince has a keen eye for what is hidden," she said softly, her gaze meeting mine in the mirror.

I didn't answer. I was still deciding what that meant, whether it was a compliment, a warning, or both.

The main chamber was too much.

The mattress alone was wider than the entire corner of the camp I had shared with four other girls. I sat on the very edge of it, not trusting myself to sink in, not trusting the softness. It felt like a trap designed for someone who had forgotten what traps felt like.

My mind kept circling back to the alchemists.

The needles. The way they had spoken about my blood felt like it was a resource. Like I was a mine, they were trying to locate the entrance to. Arlo's voice in the hall, “Is that why you're stealing my scraps? it was not the voice of a man angry about losing property.

It had been the voice of a man afraid of losing something valuable.

What did they find?

What did I have that made princes fight over a girl they'd never once looked at as a person?

I pressed my palm flat against the silk coverlet, feeling the cool threads beneath my fingers, and filed the question away in the back of my mind where I kept all the things I couldn't afford to feel yet.

The outer door didn't open.

It exploded.

I was on my feet before the sound finished echoing, heart slamming into my ribs, body already braced for whatever was coming through. Old instinct. Camp instinct. The kind that doesn't ask questions first.

She came in like weather.

Brilliant blue silk. Sharp lavender perfume that arrived before she did and stayed after she moved. Beautiful in the way that very dangerous things are beautiful, cold, designed to be looked at while it's too late to run.

Seraphina.

I didn't know her name yet. But I knew the look on her face. I had seen it on the faces of overseers, on buyers who found fault with the merchandise, on every person who had ever walked into a room and immediately started calculating how to take it apart.

"Who is this?"

Her voice hit the stone walls and ricocheted back, twice as sharp.

"A slave? In here?" Her eyes moved over me, over the silk dress, the clean hair, the room and her face cracked open. Rage. The particular rage of a person who has just realized something they considered theirs has been touched.

She crossed the room faster than I expected.

I didn't move. I should have stepped back. Every instinct I had built in the camps said step back, make yourself smaller, give them what they need to feel powerful, and they'll take it and leave.

I didn't move.

The slap was still a shock.

Crack.

My head snapped to the side. The familiar hot sting bloomed across my cheek, familiar, because I had been hit by heavier hands than hers, in darker rooms than this, for smaller reasons. I didn't cry out. I had learned a long time ago that crying out only told them where it hurt.

But my jaw tightened.

Something in my chest went very, very still.

"Get out!" Seraphina's face was inches from mine, her breath sharp with wine and fury. "Common maid, near the Prince's bed? Wearing the Princess's regalia?" She grabbed my sleeve, nails finding the skin of my arm beneath the silk. "I will have you whipped until your skin matches the dirt you came from!"

I looked at her hand on my arm.

I looked at it for a long moment.

And then I looked up at her face, really looked, the way I had learned to look at dangerous things in the camps and I saw it. Beneath the fury. Beneath the performance of it.

She was terrified.

Not of me. Of what I represented. Of what it meant that Gunnar had brought me here and dressed me like this and put me in a room that used to be hers to occupy in her imagination.

I almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

The temperature in the room dropped.

I felt it before I heard the door. A shift in the air, like the moment before a storm, decides to stop being polite. Seraphina felt it too. I saw her spine straighten, saw the calculation flicker across her face as she arranged her expression into something softer, something that could produce tears on demand.