BLOOD BEFORE THE BOND

CHAPTER 5

Liora's POV

The courtyard steps weren't going to scrub themselves.

I had been on my knees for the better part of an hour, working at a stubborn patch of dirt near the bottom stair, when the sound of an engine pulled my attention up before I could stop it.

A sleek black car rolled through the gate and came to a stop just outside the main entrance.

My hands went still.

I knew that car.

The driver stepped out and opened the rear door, and Selene emerged first, smoothing the front of her dress with the practiced ease of someone accustomed to arriving places. Then Kaius stepped out behind her.

His eyes found me immediately.

I don't know how, across a full courtyard with staff moving in every direction — but they did, like something in him already knew exactly where I was before he looked. We held each other's gaze for a moment that lasted longer than either of us probably intended, something moving across his face that I couldn't name before he looked away, clearing his throat, redirecting his attention to something Selene was saying.

I went back to scrubbing.

I told myself not to look up again. I looked up again.

They were saying their goodbyes near the car, and something about it stopped me. The hug looked wrong. Not cold exactly, but performed two people going through the motions of affection with the careful precision of people who had rehearsed it. Kaius's hand rested on her back lightly, almost hesitant, and when they separated his expression did not look like a man reluctant to let go.

It looked like relief.

I pressed the brush back against the step before I could think too hard about what that meant. He got back into the car without glancing my way again, and it pulled out through the gate and disappeared down the road, leaving dust and silence behind it.

The head maid had assigned me to serve Selene for the day, which she delivered as a straightforward instruction and which I accepted with a straight face that cost me considerably more effort than it probably looked.

The chambers buzzed with the particular energy of people trying to impress someone. Everyone moved a little faster, spoke a little more carefully, arranged things with more precision than the situation required. Selene sat at the center of it all with a composure that I was beginning to recognize as something she wore rather than something she felt.

I brought tea. I arranged flowers in the room she had been given. I fetched the small things that were requested and kept my expression neutral and my movements efficient, because drawing attention to myself today was the last thing I could afford.

By midday, I was carrying a food tray into the small dining area when the smell hit me.

It was nothing specific, just the warm combination of whatever had been prepared, something with herbs, something rich and my stomach turned so violently and so suddenly that I barely had time to register what was happening. I got the tray onto the table before my body made the decision for me, food sliding sideways across the surface as I pressed my hand over my mouth and moved for the door.

I made it to the bathroom.

I gripped the edges of the sink while my body heaved, trembling from the effort of it, sweat breaking out across my forehead despite the cold of the room. When it finally stopped, I stood there breathing carefully, staring at my own reflection in the small mirror above the sink wide eyes, pale face, the expression of someone whose body has just told them something their mind isn't ready to hear.

I had been tired for days. The kind of tiredness that sleep didn't touch. I had told myself it was grief, stress, the accumulated weight of everything that had happened in the past week piling up at once.

I was running out of ways to keep telling myself that.

I heard the head maid's voice outside, sharp and impatient, asking one of the other girls where I had disappeared to. I splashed water on my face, smoothed my apron, and slipped out through the side door before she rounded the corner, moving back toward the staff corridor with my head down and my thoughts louder than everything around me.

I waited until the chambers went quiet for the evening.

The small shop a few streets from the quarters sold basic supplies to the women who lived there practical things, necessary things, the kind of things that nobody asked questions about because questions were inconvenient for everyone involved. I kept my hood up and my eyes down the entire walk there, paid quickly, and pushed the small box to the bottom of my bag before I stepped back out into the cold.

Back in my room, door locked, Wren still out on evening chores, I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time without moving.

The box sat in my lap.

I turned it over once. Set it down. Picked it up again. Put it on the bed beside me. Stood up, walked the three steps to the window, walked back. Sat down again.

I was stalling, and I knew I was stalling, and it didn't help.

Eventually, I made myself do it, because not knowing was its own kind of slow destruction and I had spent enough of my life in that particular darkness already.

The wait was the longest few minutes I had ever sat through. I kept my eyes on the far wall and counted my own breaths and tried not to let my mind run too far ahead of what I actually knew yet.

When enough time had passed, I stood up.

Crossed the room.

Picked it up with a hand that was shaking badly enough that the small strip of plastic trembled visibly between my fingers.

I looked down.

Two lines. Perfectly clear. No ambiguity, no squinting, no telling myself it might be something else.

The room didn't spin. I didn't collapse. I just stood there in the middle of the small cold room holding the test in my shaking hands while everything rearranged itself around this single fixed point this thing that was true now whether I was ready for it or not.

Kaius didn't know.

Elder Mauve didn't know.

And somewhere across this territory, a man had already been selected for me, an arrangement already approved, a future already decided and none of the people who decided it had any idea what I was holding in my hands right now.

I had one advantage. Just one.

I needed to figure out how to use it before it disappeared.