vows written in BLOOD

A Bride Before the Altar

Selene's POV

The mirror showed me someone I didn't recognize.

She was wrapped in white silk, sitting very still in a chair that wasn't hers, in a room that smelled like cut flowers and hair product and something underneath both of those, something sharp and chemical that I couldn't name but that sat at the back of my throat and refused to leave. Her shoulders were bare. Her hair was being lifted and pinned and arranged by hands that moved around her like she was furniture.

She looked soft.

She looked almost beautiful.

She looked like a bride.

I looked away.

The room was full of people who were not speaking to me. Women in neat clothing moving with quiet efficiency, brushes, pins, and a curling iron hissing softly on the table beside the mirror. They spoke to each other in low voices, professional and distant, the way people talk around a task rather than a person. No one asked how I was. No one looked at my face for long enough to see what was in it.

This day had been decided without me.

Everything about it had been decided without me.

The lights above were too bright and too warm and made the room feel sealed, like we were inside something rather than simply inside a room. My skin felt exposed in a way I wasn't used to—bare shoulders, bare back, the cool air finding every part of me that the silk didn't cover. I had never been prepared like this before. Arranged like this. Presented.

I sat very still and let them work and thought about nothing.

Thinking was dangerous.

Thinking led to Tristan. To the ring on my finger. To the words he had said in the dark, I will wreck you, and the way he had said them. Not angry. Not threatening.

Certain.

I pressed my nails into my palm under the edge of the silk and focused on the sensation.

Don't think.

"Selene."

I found her in the mirror before I turned.

Genevieve stood near the far wall, arms crossed loosely over her chest, hands gripping her own elbows. She was wearing a simple, plain, cream-colored dress, and her hair was loose around her shoulders the way she always wore it when nobody had told her otherwise. She looked young. She was young. Eighteen years old and standing in a room full of strangers, watching her sister be prepared for a wedding to a man who scared everyone who knew his name.

Her eyes hadn't left me since I'd arrived.

They were doing that thing now, moving over every detail, cataloguing, the way she did when she was trying to decide whether something was as bad as she thought it was. I could see her landing on :yes. It is.

She crossed the room quietly. The women parted for her without looking up.

Her hand came down on my shoulder.

Warm. Familiar. The specific warmth of someone who has been your person since before you knew what that meant.

I kept my eyes on the mirror.

If I looked at her directly, I would fall apart, and I didn't have time to fall apart today.

"You don't have to do this," she said.

Her voice was low. Just for me. It cracked slightly on the last word, and she pressed her lips together after, her chin lifting the way it did when she was trying not to cry.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

"There's another way." She leaned slightly forward, her hand pressing a little firmer on my shoulder. "There's always another way. We could go. Tonight, before any of this"

"Go where, Genevieve?" I kept my voice gentle. "With what? To what?"

She didn't answer. Because she knew. We had nowhere. We had nothing that Lenora didn't control, no money that wasn't in accounts with Lenora's name on them, and no relatives who hadn't already been made to understand that involving themselves would be expensive.

We had each other.

That was the whole inventory.

"You deserve to be happy," she said. Her voice was very quiet now. "You deserve someone who—who chooses you. Who"

"Look at me."

She did. Her eyes were bright and wet and furious on my behalf in the way only someone who loves you can be furious not for themselves, not for the principle of it, but specifically, personally, because it is you this is happening to.

"I would rather marry him," I said, "than let you be the one standing in this room."

Her breath hitched.

"I have been protecting you since I was twelve years old." I held her gaze. "That is not going to stop because someone put a ring on my finger. Do you understand me?"

She shook her head, not disagreeing. Just unable to accept it.

"I'm supposed to protect you," she said.

"You protect me by living your life." I turned back to the mirror before either of us could say anything that would break us both. "That's all I need from you. Just live it."

Silence sat between us for a moment. Heavy and full of everything neither of us said.

Then her hand squeezed my shoulder once, tight, and brief, saying what words couldn't, and she stepped back.

I breathed.

And then someone behind me moved, and something pulled across my skin, hot and sudden and wrong, and the breath I'd just taken came back out as a scream.

The sound ripped from my throat before I could catch it. My hands flew to the arms of the chair, gripping hard, my whole body lurching forward as fire spread across my back.

"What are you" I gasped. "Stop. Stop"

The woman behind me said something smooth and rehearsed about technique and preparation and that it would be over quickly, and none of the words reached me through the shock of it. My eyes were burning. My back felt like something had been peeled away from it.

"I didn't agree to this," I said, louder, my voice breaking at the edges. "No one asked me"

The door opened.

Lenora walked in.

She moved through the doorway the way she moved through every room she entered, like the room had been waiting for her and was simply glad she'd finally arrived. She was dressed already, fully composed, a glass of something pale in one hand. Her eyes swept over me in the chair—flushed, shaking, tears threatening at the corners of my eyes—and she laughed.

Softly. Like, this was charming.

"Oh, darling." She set her glass down on the table by the door. "It's just preparation. Relax."

"I didn't agree to"

"Your husband will expect perfection." She said it the way she said most things—with a finality that didn't leave space for the conversation to continue. She picked up her glass again and turned toward the window.

Done. Handled. Next topic.

I stared at her back and said nothing.

Because there was nothing to say. There never was, with Lenora. The words existed; they simply had no effect. She had made her calculations long before I arrived in any room, and my feelings were not among the variables.

"Do you really think it will be enough?"

The new voice came from the doorway.

Lenora's daughter Skye, though she had never once asked me to call her anything, leaned against the frame with the particular ease of someone who has never had to earn her comfort anywhere. She was beautiful. She knew it the way a weapon knows what it's for. Dark hair, perfect posture, eyes that moved over me slowly and came to a conclusion that she didn't bother to hide.

"I mean," she tilted her head. "It's Tristan." She said his name like it tasted good. "He's had everything. Every kind of woman. Women who actually know what they're doing." A small, pleasant smile. "Women like you don't usually last very long."

I looked at my reflection instead of at her.

"He gets bored," she continued. Conversational. Like we were discussing the weather. "Very fast. You'll figure that out soon enough."

The room felt smaller.

The air is thicker.

I closed my eyes and found the place behind my ribs where I stored the things I refused to let reach my face. Put her words there. Closed the door on them.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter what she says.

Get through today. Just today.

The air in the room changed.

I felt it before I heard anything—a shift, like a pressure adjustment, like the room had quietly rearranged its priorities. The low sounds of preparation stopped. The woman behind me stilled.

The door opened.

I didn't turn around.

I didn't need to. My body had already done the thing it apparently did now in response to his pulse spiking, breath going shallow, and every nerve ending pulling toward the source of the disturbance.

"I want a word with my wife."

Low. Unhurried. Filling the room without effort, the way certain sounds fill space simply by existing in it.

Nobody moved.

"I wasn't asking."

The room emptied in under ten seconds. I heard the soft shuffle of feet, the careful closing of equipment cases, and the door opening and closing in quick succession. Genevieve was the last. I felt her hesitate. I felt the moment she decided she had no choice.

The door clicked shut.

Silence.

I became very aware of myself. Of how little the silk covered. Of the fact that my back was bare from the preparation and the room was cool and he was standing behind me and I could not see his face in the mirror from this angle, only the edge of his dark jacket and dark shirt, still.

I stood.

Too fast. My chair scraped. I grabbed the nearest thing, a long dressing robe draped over the back of the chair, and pulled it around my shoulders, wrapping it closed with both hands pressed flat against my sternum.

My heart was loud.

I turned.

He was closer than I expected. He had moved while I was reaching for the robe, not dramatically, just the quiet repositioning of a man who takes the space available to him. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching me with an expression that was impossible to read. Dark eyes. Still face. No urgency.

His gaze dropped briefly to my hands, white-knuckled against the fabric.

"Why," he said, "are you always half undressed when I find you?"

No amusement. No taunt.

Just an observation. Delivered as fact.

"I didn't know you were coming." My voice was steadier than it had any right to be. "No one told me."

He said nothing.

He crossed the distance between us in a few unhurried steps and stopped close enough that I had to hold myself very still not to step back. His hand came up slowly—giving me time to see it, to understand what was happening, and his fingers touched my jaw. The lightest contact. Tilting my face up.

His eyes moved over my face. Something shifted in them.

"You look beautiful," he said.

The words landed differently than they had the night before. Not the flat assessment of a deal being confirmed. Something quieter than that. Something that sat a little uncomfortably close to genuine.

Then he kissed me.

Gently.

That was the part I hadn't prepared for. Not the kiss I had been bracing for since last night, since the taste of blood and the sting of his teeth. I had built the armor for that version of him.

Not this one.

This was slow. Careful. His hand stayed at my jaw, not gripping, just holding. His mouth was warm, and the pressure was deliberate but not demanding, and there was something in it that I had no language for, something that asked rather than took.

I didn't know what to do with that.

I didn't move. I didn't kiss him back. I stood inside it, frozen and off-balance and furious at the fact that my heart was doing something complicated.

He pulled back.

His thumb traced once along my jaw before his hand dropped.

"I can't wait," he said quietly, "to have you."

A pause.

"I'll see you at the altar."

He turned and walked to the door. Opened it. Didn't look back.

The door closed.

I stood in the middle of the room with his words sitting in my chest, the warmth of his hand still on my face, and the robe clutched tight in both fists, staring at the space he had been.

In the mirror behind me, the girl looked back.

She still looked soft.

She still looked almost beautiful.

But something in her eyes had changed.

Something had gone in that room before Tristan had put it there.

And I did not yet know whether it was going to save me or ruin me.

Both, maybe.

I was starting to think it might be both.

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