Sold To a Corpse, Claimed By a King

CHAPTER SIX:The First Word

She didn't bring it up again for four days. She wasn't sure what she was waiting for. Proof, maybe. Or nerve.

It was Marcus who forced the issue, in the end, without meaning to. He came to find her in the garden on the fifth morning, his usual composure fraying at the edges in a way she hadn't seen from him before, and told her, too fast, that there had been a security breach overnight, a car that had idled too long outside the front gate, that she should stay inside the house for the next several days and not, under any circumstances, discuss the household's security arrangements with anyone outside it. He was gone again before she could ask a single question.

She went straight to Julian's room.

"A car," she said, closing the door behind her, not bothering anymore to pretend she was talking to an empty room. "Outside the gate. Marcus looked like he'd seen a ghost. I want to know why."

Silence. The same careful, practiced stillness.

"I know you can hear me," she said, and something in her voice cracked, not from fear exactly, but from the sheer exhaustion of performing a conversation alone for the fourth day running. "I'm your wife. Legally, on paper, in every way that matters to the people watching us. If something dangerous is happening in this house, I have a right to know what I actually married into."

Nothing.

"Fine," she said, and stood, and walked to the door, and put her hand on the handle, and said, without turning around, in a voice gone flat and cold in the specific way she'd perfected over a lifetime of being ignored by people who owed her better, "Then I'll ask Marcus myself. I'm sure he'll tell your father I've been asking questions. I'm sure that'll go over well."

"Don't."

The word landed in the quiet room like something breaking.

She turned around slowly. Julian Cross's eyes were open, dark and sharp and entirely, unmistakably awake, fixed on her with an intensity that made the breath catch in her throat. He was sitting up now, the careful stillness gone completely, and without it he looked like an entirely different man: coiled, alert, dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the tabloids' version of a broken heir.

"How long," she managed, "have you been able to talk?"

"The whole time." His voice was rougher than she'd expected, unused, but steady. "Every word you've ever said to me in this room, I've heard."

She should have felt betrayed. Manipulated. Instead, standing there in the low lamplight with her heart slamming against her ribs, what she actually felt, underneath the shock, was something far more dangerous.

Relief. She wasn't the only one in this house who'd been lying about who she really was.

"Then you'd better start explaining," she said, "before I decide you're not worth the risk."

Julian looked at her for a long moment, something calculating and careful moving behind his eyes, the look of a man deciding, finally, whether to trust the one person in his fabricated life he hadn't chosen.

"Sit down," he said. "This is going to take a while."