035

035
|||YASMIN|||

The dance ended and Zeirik's hand left the small of my back and the cold that rushed in to replace it was immediate and unreasonable. I smoothed my expression before anyone could read it and turned back to the room.

The reception had reached that particular pitch where the wine had been flowing long enough that people stopped being careful. Laughter too loud, conversations too close, the kind of honesty that only came out when people forgot they were being watched. What I read now was a court quietly taking sides.

Eyes found me and slid away. Found Zeirik and held a beat longer. Found Hana at the center of a cluster of women and warmed considerably. She was holding court with the ease of someone who'd been practicing for it, that soft smile doing exactly what it was designed to do. I watched two of Melbourne's senior council members' wives lean toward her in the same breath and felt something cold and practical settle in my chest.

She was good at this. I hadn't expected that.

I accepted a glass of wine from a passing servant and kept moving, nodding at the right faces, smiling at the right moments, saying the right nothing to the right people. Lord Fenwick's wife stopped me near the far wall to offer congratulations on my own marriage with a warmth that was almost genuine, and I thanked her with my full attention and asked after her youngest son and watched her face open up the way faces did when you remembered the things people assumed you'd forget.

Zeirik had been drawn into conversation with Marcus somewhere behind me. I could feel the distance growing between us the way you feel a draft, gradual and then suddenly very present.

I was nearly at the far end of the room when a hand closed around my elbow.

Not rough. But not gentle either.

"Walk with me."

Cassien's voice, low and close to my ear. I went very still for exactly one second before I turned to face him.

He looked like the wedding hadn't touched him at all. Composed, golden, the picture of a prince who'd just married a beautiful woman carrying his child. His eyes told a different story. They always had, for anyone who knew how to look. I'd spent four years knowing how to look.

"Cassien." I kept my voice light. "Congratulations."

"Don't." His jaw tightened. "Not you."

"Then what would you like from me?"

He glanced around the room once then guided me through a side door and into the quieter corridor beyond it before I'd decided whether to resist. The noise of the reception dimmed behind us. Cold stone underfoot, wall sconces throwing long shadows, the kind of private that felt deliberate.

I turned to face him and pulled my elbow free. "What is this?"

"I needed to talk to you without an audience."

"We don't have anything to talk about." I kept my voice even. "That was your choice."

"You know why I did it."

"I do. And I respected it." I held his gaze. "Respect mine."

He exhaled sharply, a short frustrated sound that had once made me soften and reach for him. My hands stayed at my sides. "You're standing there like I'm a stranger," he said. "Like four years meant nothing to you."

"They meant everything to me." The words came out quiet but they didn't waver. "That's why what you did hurt as badly as it did."

Grief crossed his face. Genuine and fleeting and too late. "I made a mistake."

"You made a choice," I said. "There's a difference. You said that to me once, actually. Do you remember?"

He didn't answer.

"I stood there and watched and I didn't break, and I'm asking you to extend me the same courtesy." I took one step back. "Let me go, Cassien."

"He doesn't deserve you." The words came out fast, like he'd been holding them back all evening. "Zeirik. You don't know him, Yasmin. You don't know what he is."

"And whose fault is that?" I asked. "You had four years to be the person I thought you were."

His face changed then. The grief shuttered and something harder moved in underneath it, something that looked almost like the face he'd worn the night he'd called me a barren whore in a hallway and walked away. My pulse picked up. Not from love. Not anymore.

"You're making a mistake," he said quietly. "You think he married you because he wanted to help you? He married you because it was the most efficient way to take what he's always felt was owed to him. You're a means to an end."

"As opposed to what you made me?" I held his gaze. "At least I know exactly what this is."

He had nothing to say to that. I could see it — the words forming and dissolving, the argument finding no purchase. His mouth opened. Closed. His jaw worked on something he couldn't swallow and couldn't spit out, and I watched him struggle with it and felt nothing that resembled sympathy.

"Goodbye, Cassien." I turned toward the door.

"This isn't finished." His voice followed me. Low and certain in a way that prickled the back of my neck. "You walking away doesn't make it finished."

I pushed through the door and back into the warmth and noise of the reception without looking back, my heart beating fast and high in my chest, my face already composed before I'd fully crossed the threshold.

Victoria was waiting on the other side.

Not accidentally. She stood just far enough from the door to seem like coincidence and close enough that I knew she'd been listening. Her eyes found mine immediately and stayed there, cold and patient and completely unsurprised, like she'd arranged the whole evening around this moment.

She fell into step beside me without asking. "You handled that well." She didn't look at me when she said it. "Better than I expected."

I said nothing.

"You're clever, Yasmin." Her voice was quiet, almost pleasant, the kind of voice that didn't need volume to land. "Which is why I'm going to be very direct with you."

She stopped walking. I stopped with her and we stood in the middle of the reception with a hundred people around us and the very specific privacy of two women who both knew how to hold a conversation without their faces moving.

"You have nothing here." She said it the way you'd state the weather. Flat. Certain. Final. "No blood claim, no pack, no family name that means anything within these borders. Everything you're standing on right now — this position, this marriage, this access — exists because my husband permits it. And my husband's permission is not a permanent thing." Her eyes didn't leave mine. Not once. "Zeirik is a bastard who got lucky on a battlefield. You are a foreign woman who got lucky with her timing. Neither of those things hold up under real pressure."

"I'm the General's wife—"

"You're tolerated." The word dropped between us like a stone into still water. "And if you're as clever as I've always believed, you already know that." She tilted her head, the movement slow and deliberate. "The next time you decide to sharpen your tongue at my daughter-in-law in front of this court, I will make sure everyone in this room understands precisely what you are and exactly how quickly that can change. I have been doing this for thirty years, Yasmin. I have buried women with sharper minds than yours and better positions than the one you're currently clinging to." She smiled then, slow and deliberate, the smile of someone who had already decided the outcome. "Enjoy the rest of your evening."

She walked away and the crowd swallowed her whole and I stood there with my hands loose at my sides and my face completely still and the back of my throat burning.

I breathed. Once. Twice.

Then I scanned the room for Zeirik.

He wasn't where I'd left him. I moved to where Marcus had been standing — gone. I crossed to the far side of the room. Empty. I checked near the doors, near the musicians, near the food table where I'd watched him graze earlier with the focused contentment of a man who'd grown up never sure of his next meal.

Nothing.

The room was full of people and he wasn't in it.

I set my wine glass down on the nearest surface and kept my face pleasant and my movements unhurried and told myself very firmly that the cold spreading through my chest was not panic. He'd stepped out. He was with Marcus. He was somewhere obvious and close and I was going to feel foolish in five minutes when I found him.

I pushed through the nearest doors into the corridor.

Empty.

I tried the next. And the next. The palace stretched out around me in both directions, torchlit and quiet and completely, utterly still.

Zeirik was gone.