Chapter 122 The Studio
Chapter 122 The Wedding
POV: Carly
Friday arrived with the specific quality of a day that knew it was significant.
The house had a different energy from the moment she woke up. She could feel it before she was fully conscious, that particular charged stillness of a place where something important is about to happen and everyone in it knows it. She lay in bed for a moment and listened to it.
Then she got up and went to the window.
The grounds had been transformed overnight.
White chairs in long rows across the main lawn, an aisle between them leading to an arch of winter-bare branches woven with white flowers she did not know the name of. Candelabras at intervals along the aisle. A string quartet already setting up at the far edge of the seating. The whole arrangement designed to work with the grey sky rather than against it, the white and the bare wood and the cold light all pulling in the same direction.
She stood at the window in her pajamas and looked at it.
It was extraordinary.
She heard the knock at the adjoining door.
"Come in." She said.
Niko appeared in the doorway. He was already partially dressed, the white shirt from the suit open at the collar, his curls slightly more deliberate than usual.
He looked at her at the window.
She looked at him in the doorway.
"Good morning." He said.
"Good morning." She said. "It looks incredible out there."
He came to stand beside her and looked at the grounds.
"Isabel spent two years planning this." He said. "Whatever else."
"It shows." She said.
They stood at the window together for a moment.
"How are you." She said.
He considered it. "Ask me again after." He said.
She remembered saying that to him in the doorway on the first day.
She took his hand.
He held it.
They stood at the window until Reba knocked on the outer door and told Carly that the getting ready situation was happening in Freida's room in twenty minutes and her attendance was not optional.
Freida's room was on the south side overlooking the rose garden, exactly as Niko had described. It was significantly larger than the guest rooms and had the specific quality of a space that had been someone's for a very long time, accumulated and personal in a way the formal rooms of the house were not.
The wedding dress was on the wardrobe door.
Carly stopped when she saw it.
Simple. Long. The kind of dress that looked as though it had been made for exactly this one person and no one else. Ivory with a long train and no embellishment except at the cuffs, where something delicate ran along the edge in a way that caught the light.
Freida was sitting at the dressing table letting a woman Carly had not met work on her hair and watching the proceedings in the mirror with the specific expression of someone who was genuinely happy and was not performing it.
Reba appeared at Carly's elbow. "You're next." She said. "Sit down. I found you something."
"You found me—" Carly started.
"The navy dress is perfect but your hair needs help." Reba said. "Sit."
Carly sat.
Reba's hands in her hair were surprisingly competent for someone who claimed she had no patience for this kind of thing. She worked quickly and with purpose and Carly watched in the mirror as something emerged that was significantly more polished than anything she had managed on her own this week.
Freida caught her eye in the mirror.
"Thank you." Freida said. "For being here."
"Thank you for having me." Carly said.
"I mean it." Freida said. "Not as a pleasantry. I mean actually thank you." She held Carly's gaze in the mirror. "Having him here today means more than I know how to say. And he's here because of you."
Carly shook her head.
"He's here because he chose to be." She said.
Freida smiled. "You two are going to be insufferable about this forever, aren't you."
Reba snorted.
Carly pressed her lips together to keep the laugh in and felt the room shift into something warm and easy that she had not expected to find in this house and was not going to take for granted.
The ceremony was at two.
She sat in the white chairs between Niko and Harrison, the navy dress doing what Katy had promised it would do, and watched Freida walk down the aisle on Victor's arm with the specific quality of someone who had been waiting their entire life for this specific day and was arriving at it exactly as they had imagined.
Victor's face when he walked her.
She had not expected that.
It was the first crack in the sealed expression, the first thing that had come through the wall without being permitted to. He looked at his daughter and something in his face was simply a father walking his daughter down the aisle and the complexity of everything else he was fell away for those sixty seconds and what was underneath it was just that.
She felt Niko see it too.
She felt it in the quality of his stillness beside her.
She reached over and put her hand on his knee without looking at him.
He put his hand over hers.
Lucien at the end of the aisle was looking at Freida the way Carly had been told people looked when they meant it, with the full weight of a person who had decided and was not going to undecide. She believed it completely.
The officiant began.
She listened.
She was aware of the family arranged around her. Isabel on the other side of Niko, her composure intact but her hands folded too tightly in her lap. Deacon on Harrison's other side, quieter than she had seen him all week. Reba with her jaw slightly set and her eyes bright. The extended family and Lucien's family filling the chairs behind them.
And in the middle of all of it, Freida in her extraordinary dress saying things she meant to a person who meant them back.
The officiant produced a small wooden box.
She opened it.
And Carly saw the dagger for the first time.
It was smaller than she expected. The handle was dark wood worn smooth with age, the blade short and narrow, the whole thing looking less like a weapon and more like something ceremonial from a distance. The officiant held it toward Freida, who took it with both hands, and then toward Lucien, who did the same.
She looked at Niko.
His face was completely still.
She looked at Harrison.
Harrison was watching the dagger with the expression of someone who knew what it was and what it meant and was managing that knowledge with great care.
She looked back at the dagger.
Something in her chest was telling her this was significant in a way she did not yet have the full vocabulary for.
She filed it.
She watched Freida and Lucien hold the dagger between them while the officiant spoke words she was now only half hearing, and she thought that she was going to ask Niko about this afterward and he was going to tell her everything and that was how this worked now.
The officiant concluded.
Lucien kissed Freida.
The family around her responded and she responded with them and through it all the dagger sat in the small wooden box that had been closed again and carried carefully back to wherever it was kept and the ceremony moved into the celebration and she held the question about it quietly until she could ask it properly.
POV: Niko
He had not thought about the dagger in years.
He had known it would be part of the ceremony. It was always part of the ceremony. Every Monroeson wedding for four hundred years had included it. The presentation of the one thing that could end them, offered between the joining parties as a statement of trust. I give you the means of my destruction and I trust you not to use it. That is how much this means.
He had known it was coming and he had prepared for it and he had still felt the specific cold of it when the box opened.
He had felt Carly go still beside him.
She had looked at him. He had kept his eyes forward because if he looked at her face right now he would have to explain it and this was not the moment for that explanation.
She had not pushed.
She had put her hand back in her lap and watched the rest of the ceremony with the composed attention she brought to things she was filing for later and he had felt the question sitting in her quietly and had been grateful she was who she was.
Now the ceremony was over and the reception was beginning on the east terrace and he needed to find a moment that was not surrounded by family to tell her what the dagger was.
He needed to tell her.
Not because she would be afraid. He knew she would not be afraid. Because she deserved to know what she had watched and what it meant and what this family had handed her trust enough to allow her to witness.
He found a moment between the end of the ceremony seating and the beginning of the terrace reception when the family was still moving and rearranging and greeting Lucien's family.
He pulled her gently to the side of the path.
She looked at him with the expression that said she had been waiting.
"The dagger." He said.
"Yes." She said.
He told her.
He watched her face as he said it. The specific object that could kill a Monroeson. The only one. The history of it. The ceremony. What it meant that it was placed between the couple as an act of trust.
She was quiet for a moment.
She looked at the house.
She looked back at him.
"They let me see it." She said.
"Yes." He said.
"The whole family let me sit there and see it." She said. "Knowing what it is."
"Yes." He said.
She held his gaze.
"That means something." She said.
"It means a great deal." He said.
She pressed her lips together.
She looked at the terrace where the family was assembling. At Freida and Lucien receiving the first of many congratulations. At Reba wiping her eye with the back of her hand and then denying it to Deacon when he noticed. At Harrison standing with two of Lucien's family, animated in a way he rarely was in the main house, some ease that came from being with people who did not have the full history.
At Victor, at the edge of the terrace, looking at his daughter.
She looked back at Niko.
"I'm glad I was here." She said. Quietly. Completely.
He felt it land.
"So am I." He said.
She took his hand.
They walked toward the terrace together and the reception opened up around them and the grey afternoon had the specific quality of a day that had been what it was supposed to be.
He held her hand.
He thought about the dagger in its box.
He thought about trust.
He thought that he understood something about his family in this moment that he had not understood before leaving and had not been able to understand until he had come back as someone different.
He understood that they were capable of it.
Trust. The real kind. The kind that required giving someone the means to hurt you.
He had given Carly that in a courtyard months ago.
She had given it back.
He kept walking.
Author's Note:
The dagger being presented at the ceremony as an act of trust between the couple and the whole family letting Carly see it and her immediately understanding what that meant. She always understands. And Victor's face when he walked Freida down the aisle, that one crack in the sealed expression, Niko seeing it and Carly feeling him see it and putting her hand on his knee without saying a word. Drop a like and tell me how you are feeling after this wedding because I have a lot of feelings.