The Enemy's Vow

chapter 3

The Treaty

(Lyra)

My father does not raise his voice. That is the thing people never understand about Alessandro Valdez until they have been on the receiving end of his quiet, which is somehow worse than shouting could ever be.

"You failed," he says, standing at the head of the long table in the Ashford estate's council room, a room built for exactly this kind of ceremony, dark wood and darker portraits of men who have all, at one point or another, tried to kill each other. "Twenty years, Lyra. Twenty years I waited for the right moment, and you handed him his life back on a silver platter."

"I hit him," I say, because it is the only defense I have and it is a weak one. "He's alive because I let him live."

"You expect me to believe that."

"I don't expect you to believe anything. You never have."

His jaw tightens, and for a moment I think he might actually strike me here, in front of the council, in front of the Blackwood men seated across the table like a wall of black suits and colder faces. He does not. He has never hit me where people could see. That is not his way. His way is quieter, and it lasts longer.

Damien sits at the opposite end of the table, his shoulder bandaged beneath a crisp shirt, looking at me the way you might look at something you found on the bottom of your shoe. I have been looked at with hatred before. My whole life has been an education in the many faces hatred can wear. But there is something almost clinical in the way he does it, like he is deciding exactly how much of it to let show and rationing the rest for later.

I hold his gaze anyway. I have learned, if nothing else in twenty-three years, how to hold a gaze I want to look away from.

"The treaty has been on the table for six years," says one of the council elders, a thin, papery man named Reyes who has represented the Blackwood interests since before I was born. "Both families agreed to the terms in principle. What happened last night simply accelerates the timeline."

"My daughter tried to kill him," my father says. "That is not an acceleration. That is an act of war."

"Your daughter failed to kill him," Damien says, the first words he has spoken since I entered the room, and his voice is low and even and somehow louder than my father's anger. "Which means, as I see it, you owe me considerably more than an apology."

"You want my daughter as recompense."

"I want the war to end," Damien says, and something flickers behind his grey eyes that I cannot name, gone before I can study it. "And I want the woman who put a bullet in my shoulder under my roof, where I can watch her, rather than loose in the world planning a second attempt with better aim."

The room is silent. I look between the two men who have decided, between them, exactly what the rest of my life will look like, and I think about how many times this has happened before. My schooling, decided without me. My friendships, vetted and approved or forbidden outright. Even the color of my dress last night was chosen by my father, down to the cut that would hide a holster. I have never once, in twenty-three years, been asked what I want.

I am not being asked now either.

"The terms," Reyes says, sliding a folder down the table, "are as they were originally drafted. One year of marriage. An heir to bind the two families and formally end hostilities. At the end of the year, should both parties wish it, the marriage may be dissolved without further obligation."

"And if there's no heir within the year?" my father asks.

"Then the war resumes," Damien says simply, "and I imagine, Alessandro, you will find yourself with considerably less patience from the council than you've enjoyed so far."

My father's hands flatten on the table, and I watch him do the math he has always done, weighing loss against loss, deciding which humiliation costs him less. He looks at me for the first time since I sat down, and there is no apology in it, no softness, only calculation.

"She'll do it," he says, as if I am not sitting three feet away with a mouth of my own. "Draw up the papers."

Nobody asks me if I agree. I suppose the marriage itself is the answer they already extracted from me, in the study on the fourth floor, at the point of a threat I chose over a bullet.

I look down the table at Damien, and something in me, some small stubborn ember that twenty-three years of being managed and moved and married off has not managed to smother, decides it will not let him see me flinch. I sit up straighter. I let a smile touch my mouth, slow and deliberate, the kind of smile I have watched other women use like a blade at parties my father dragged me to, the kind that says you can own my future but you will never own my face.

He does not smile back.

If anything, something in his expression hardens further, like my smile is an insult rather than a defense, like he expected me to come to this table broken and is irritated to find I have not yet arrived there.

Good, I think. Let him wonder. Let him spend the next year trying to find the c***k in me, because I intend to make him work for it.

"One year," Reyes says, and slides two pens across the table, one toward my father's side, one toward Damien's, as though this is a business acquisition rather than the sale of a woman neither man has bothered to ask a single question.

Damien signs first, his handwriting sharp and economical, no hesitation in it at all. Then the folder comes to me, and I am struck, absurdly, by the fact that this is the first document in my entire life I am being permitted to sign myself, rather than having my father's assistant forge my signature on some form I never saw.

I pick up the pen.

Across the table, Damien watches me the way a man watches a storm gathering on the horizon, calculating how much damage it will do before it passes.

I sign my name, and somewhere behind my ribs, quietly, the girl who has spent her whole life as a pawn decides that whatever happens in that house, she will not spend the next year as one.