Chapter 2

Elena's POV

The tears I'd been holding back spilled over. My eyes went red, and as I lowered my head, a single drop struck the hem of my dress.

My throat closed. I started to tell him that the brooch was all I had left of my mother.

But Adrian had already looked away, impatient.

"Whatever it is, it can wait until I'm back. Stop making a scene."

My mouth opened, but all I could do was watch the car window glide slowly up.

Adrian turned and struck up a conversation with a female vampire inside, another of the royal line.

The woman watched me out of the corner of her eye. There was pity in her look, and above it, a cool, lofty distaste.

The cars rolled past me one after another, throwing up water from the road. I realized they were doing it on purpose, aiming the wheels at me, and I stepped back, but I couldn't dodge them all.

The silk was ruined.

Clutching what was in my pocket, head down, I made my way back to my room, quietly wiping my eyes the whole way.

I took the rain-soaked bills out and smoothed them flat, one by one, counting and counting again.

A full year of secret work for the gardener and the kitchen staff, and this was all I'd saved. Nowhere near thirty million.

I sat on the edge of the bed, looked around the cramped little servant's room, and could only manage a bitter smile.

When I first came to the Prince's domain, Adrian had just survived a hunters' ambush. He was badly wounded and prone to hallucinations.

Back then, he would grip my hand and swear the hunters were still there, hidden in the corners.

He wouldn't let me leave his side for a second.

He was terrified of seeing those silver guns again, and terrified I'd be killed somewhere he couldn't see.

At that banquet, the old butler he'd trusted most had handed him over to the hunters. After that, he couldn't trust anyone but me.

Because I was the one who'd taken his hand, amid my mother's screams, and led him out of that hell.

When the Prince and Princess came to see him, he would hold my hand and ask me to stay.

Fifteen years ago, I ate and slept beside him.

Even as a vampire, who needed no sleep, no rest, he could close his eyes and lie quiet for hours with his head on my knee.

My care healed him quickly, yet it sent my own life into free fall.

The Princess moved me into a servant's room in a far corner.

Adrian, it seemed, found those recovering days too shameful to remember, so he avoided me, and hated it most of all when I mentioned my mother.

At first, everyone assumed I'd been brought into the Prince's domain as the heir's young bride. They thought my widowed father would dote on me, his only daughter, and that the Prince would treat his future daughter-in-law like his own.

They called me the treasure of two great houses, the royal line and the Valerie family.

But before long, my father had a new wife and a new daughter.

Adrian got better, and started to find me an eyesore.

And now, I had no home left at all.

I ran my thumb over my empty pocket, still turning the problem over.

I'd only found the brooch by chance, passing an antique shop and spotting it in the window.

The owner had meant to keep it for his collection. I begged him for a long time before he agreed to sell it to me.

But thirty million isn't easy to come by, and he'd told me he could only hold it for a year.

And if someone else bought it while I was still scraping the money together, I would lose it forever.

My mother used to say that every daughter of the Valemont family carried an antique ruby brooch on her wedding day.

Her grandmother had loved her best of all, so she'd left her the most precious, most beautiful one in the family.

If I hadn't begged to go to that banquet to play, my mother wouldn't have died, and the brooch wouldn't have been lost.

I closed my eyes, wondering whether to find some way to beg Adrian again, when the phone rang.

It was my father.

He hadn't contacted me in close to nine years.

Not until last year, when an old marriage contract surfaced between the Valerie family and the vampire North.

Rumor said the Lord of the North was a monster who ate humans alive.

Years ago, he'd lost a power struggle with the current Prince and withdrawn to the North of his own accord.

The cold there was endless. No ordinary human could survive it.

For years, no vampire noble and no human had been willing to marry into it, and the Northern Lord remained unwed, so he'd dug out that old contract, only to give his people some kind of answer.

My father and his wife could never bear to send away Vicky, the daughter my stepmother had borne him.

So they turned their eyes to me.

For nine years after my mother died, my father hadn't spared me a thought.

Now there was a disaster that needed someone to absorb it, and suddenly he remembered that I, too, was a daughter of the Valerie family.

When I didn't answer, my father sighed.

"This is for your own good. No matter how long you wait, young Master Adrian will never marry you."

"Why don’t you take your stepsister's place. Marry into the North. You'll have an easier life of it."

Once, words like that would have had me choking out a protest.

I would have forced myself to say that Adrian loved me, that he treated me well.

I would have dredged up our childhood, over and over, and sometimes I'd even lied to make it sound true.

But sitting there clutching the wet, mud-streaked hem of my dress, I suddenly didn't want to lie anymore.

My chest felt tight. I couldn't get out a single lie about Adrian still loving me.

I'd seen the disgust in his eyes too clearly, all these years.

I knew Adrian was no longer the boy who couldn't live without me.

He didn't need me anymore. He resented that a human still clung to the place meant for his well-matched wife.

Adrian was always avoiding me. He never once walked to the end of the hall, to this cramped little servant's room.

Maybe he didn't even know his mother had banished me here long ago.

The servants here teased and mocked me without end.

The roof leaked. And for all my title as his fiancée, I still went to bed hungry most nights.

Whenever I looked at the scars on my hands, left from a year of work for the gardener, something in my chest turned bitter.

My mother had loved me, when she was alive.

If she could see me now, it would break her heart.

I'd nearly forgotten it myself, that I was the daughter of human nobility.

At that thought, I unclenched my fist and gave a small nod.

"Fine. I'll do it."

It was the first time my father had heard me agree so easily.

He'd probably braced himself to sit through my stammering lies, my tearful refusals.

For a second he was speechless, then he asked again, not quite sure.

"Really?"

I heard the delight in his voice. And in the background, my stepmother and Vicky, weeping with joy, holding each other, murmuring comfort.

What a happy family.

I laughed softly and closed my eyes.

The royal line didn't want me. Adrian found me repulsive. And the Valerie family was only too glad to send me north to die in Vicky's place.

If that was how it was, I had no reason left to stay.

But before I left, there was one thing I needed to do.

"I have one condition, though."

"I want thirty million in return."

"Transfer it now, and I'll marry into the North in Vicky's place."