The Last Night I Was Myself

"Tessa… if you send me one more report tonight I will move your desk to the parking lot."

I could hear her laughing on the other end of the line as I pushed through the glass doors of Weston Headquarters, heels clicking against marble, left hand pressed to the small of my back because everything below my ribs had been aching since noon.

"You say that every Thursday, Mrs. Weston." Tessa's voice was warm, unbothered.

"One day I will mean it." I shifted my bag on my shoulder, stepping out into the cool night air. "I am going to the clinic then straight home. Do not call me unless the building is literally burning."

"And if it is only figuratively burning?"

"Then send an email." I hung up, smiling despite myself.

Seven months pregnant, three mergers approved in one afternoon, ankles that had stopped being ankles sometime around week twenty-four — still I felt good. Tired the way you feel good, if that makes any sense. The kind of tired that means something.

I pressed my palm to my belly as the car pulled up.

"Just the clinic then home, baby girl," I murmured. "Daddy is probably already cooking."

✦

Dr. Cila had the warmest office in the city — cream walls, soft lamps, the kind of quiet that made you feel like nothing outside could reach you.

"Absolutely perfect." She turned the monitor toward me, pointing at the flicker on the screen. "Strong heartbeat. Measuring right on track. You have one very healthy little girl, Mrs. Weston."

My throat did that thing it always did at this part. Tight, then loose, then I was blinking too fast.

"She gets that from her father." I laughed at myself, pressing my fingers to my lips.

"Speaking of…" Dr. Cila said, scribbling on her notepad, "...your husband called again this week checking on the vitamin dosage. He is very thorough."

"Is he?" I smiled, reaching for the small paper bag on the table, the new bottle of prenatals sitting inside. "That is so like him."

I tucked them into my handbag without a second thought.

I know. I know now. But that night I just tucked them in and said thank you and walked back to my car thinking about what Soren might be making for dinner.

✦

"Soren?" I pushed open the front door, kicking off my heels in the entryway. The house was quiet but not empty — lights on upstairs, music playing faintly. "Baby I am home, my back is absolutely…"

I heard something.

Stopped.

The kind of sound you hear and understand immediately even when every part of your brain is screaming at you not to.

My hand found the bedroom door. I pushed it open.

Soren was there. So was Bianca.

In my bed. In my sheets. In the room I had decorated myself with the photographs still on the nightstand.

Bianca looked at me the way you look at someone who has knocked on a door you did not lock. Unbothered. Faintly amused. She did not even sit up.

"Oh good," she said, examining the ends of her hair. "You are finally home."

My hand gripped the doorframe.

"Soren." My voice came out wrong — too quiet, too careful. "What is this."

He reached for his phone on the nightstand. Checked something. Put it back down.

"Close the door and sit down, Mia. We need to talk."

Like I was late for a meeting. Like I was an employee who had misread a memo. Like I was not standing in the doorway of our bedroom with one hand wrapped around my pregnant stomach because my legs had stopped working properly.

I sat down.

God help me, I sat down.

✦

Bianca dressed slowly, the way people move when they have nothing to fear. Soren sat on the edge of the bed, forearms on his knees, looking at me the way a person looks at a problem they have finally decided to solve.

"I never loved you," he said. Just like that. No preamble, no softening. "I want you to know that before we get into the rest of this."

"The rest of this?" I repeated.

"The company is already in Bianca's name. Has been for three months. You signed the transfer documents yourself… you just did not read them carefully enough." He tilted his head slightly. "You never do read carefully enough, Mia."

The room tilted a little. Or maybe that was me.

"You were a means to an end, sweetheart." Bianca was standing at the mirror now, fixing her hair with my comb. "Do you think a man like Soren falls in love with someone like you? You were convenient. A name, a signature, a womb."

"A womb," I said softly.

"The vitamins." I looked at my bag on the floor where I had dropped it. The paper bag from Dr. Cila still inside. "What did you put in my vitamins, Soren."

He smiled. Small, private, the smile I had thought once meant he was thinking about me.

"Nothing that will hurt immediately."

"I am pregnant." I stood up and my legs were shaking. "I am seven months pregnant with your child…"

"That was never part of the plan." Bianca's voice was flat, final, like she was closing a tab on her laptop. She did not even look at me in the mirror.

Something cold moved through my chest then, slow and terrible, the way cold water fills a room… and I understood. All of it. All at once.

✦

I do not remember deciding to back away. My body just did it on its own, some ancient instinct taking over, moving me toward the door.

Then the dizziness hit.

Not gradual. Not polite. It crashed through me like a wave and I grabbed the wall, missed, stumbled — and Soren shoved me. Hard. The way you shove something you have already decided is in your way.

The corner of the wall caught the back of my head.

I slid down slowly, back against the wall, floor cold through my dress. Warmth spreading up the back of my neck. I pressed one hand there, looked at my fingers. Red.

"Please." My voice was very small. "Please call someone… something is wrong with me, something is wrong, please… it is not just me, the baby, please just call — "

"The ambulance is not coming, Mia." Soren was already at the door, jacket in hand.

"Please." I was not talking to him anymore. I was talking to the room, to whoever might be listening, to nothing. "Please she is not… please she did nothing… please… "

Bianca reached over and turned the light off.

"Goodbye, Mia," she said.

The door clicked shut.

Dark. Quiet. The sound of my own breathing getting slower, heavier.

I had a name for her already. I had not told anyone yet. I was waiting for the right moment.

I thought her name once, there in the dark.

Then nothing.

✦

Warmth.

Soft light moving behind my eyelids. Something that smelled like lavender. Birds outside a window, singing like they had never heard of anything terrible.

"My Lady." A gentle hand on my shoulder, shaking carefully. "My Lady please… Lord Ashveil will not wait much longer, please wake up."

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling above me had paintings on it. Gold and deep blue, figures I did not recognize moving through clouds, a sky that was not any sky I had ever seen.

"What?" I sat up slowly.

The room was enormous. Stone walls draped in heavy velvet, candles burning in iron brackets, a window taller than any window in any building I had ever been in, arched at the top, open, real wind coming through it.

A girl stood beside the bed in a silk uniform, young, wide-eyed, wringing her hands like she had been trying to wake me for a very long time.

"Where is my phone," I said.

"Your… my Lady, your what?"

"My phone. Small, black, rectangle, it makes calls." I looked around the room. Stone. Candles. A vanity with an actual mirror in a gold frame. "Where am I… what hospital is this."

"This is the Ashveil estate, my Lady." The girl blinked at me. "You are home."

"I am not home. My home has central air conditioning and a Nespresso machine." I pressed my hand to the back of my head. No wound. No blood. Nothing. I pressed harder. Nothing. "I hit my head. I was bleeding, why am I not bleeding anymore."

"My Lady you have been perfectly well, you only slept very late and…"

"Okay." I held up one hand. "Okay. I hit my head, I passed out, clearly I am in a coma and this is one of those very vivid coma dreams. That is fine. That is completely fine. I will play along." I swung my legs off the bed. "Where exactly are we going?"

The girl stared at me for a long moment, lips pressed together, clearly fighting something.

"Are you laughing," I said.

"No my Lady."

"You are absolutely laughing."

"I would never, my Lady." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.

"Unbelievable." I stood up, bare feet on cold stone. "Fine, lead the way. Let us go find out what my very dramatic unconscious mind has cooked up for me today."

✦

The corridors were long, wide, lit with torches that were somehow not setting anything on fire. I walked behind the girl Cecilia, she had told me her name was Cecilia… and I kept touching the walls.

Cold. Real. The grain of the stone under my fingertips was too specific for a dream.

"Cecilia," I said.

"Yes my Lady?"

"What year is it."

She glanced back at me, uncertain. "It is the fourth year of King Zyren's reign, my Lady."

"That is not a year. That is a sentence." I stopped walking. "King who?"

Cecilia opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. "My Lady I think perhaps you should speak to Lord Ashveil." She said it very carefully, the way people say things when they have decided the information is above their pay grade.

The hall opened into a grand room and I stopped in the doorway.

Two people sat in carved chairs at the far end, elevated slightly, the way people sit when they have spent their whole lives being looked up to. The man was broad, grey at his temples, serious in the way stone is serious. The woman beside him was beautiful, fine-boned, staring at her own hands like they had done something she could not forgive.

They both looked at me when I walked in.

The man stood.

"Mia." His voice was low, measured. "There is no gentle way to say this so I will say it plainly."

"Okay," I said, still looking at the chandeliers. Real candles. Every single one.

"You have been given to King Zyren of the Draconis Throne. The agreement is already signed. His envoy arrives tomorrow at first light and you will leave with them."

Silence.

I looked at him.

"I am sorry?" My voice was very level. "I have been given to a what?"

"The Dragon King," the woman… my mother, apparently — whispered without lifting her eyes. "It is done, my daughter. You belong to him."

I stood there in the doorway of a grand hall in a palace that should not exist, in a body that had no wound where there should have been one, in a world that smelled like candle smoke and old stone.

The Dragon King.

"Let me make sure I understand this correctly," I said slowly. "I died. And I woke up here. Where they sell daughters to Dragon Kings."

Lord Ashveil did not flinch. "You did not die, Mia. You were always…"

"Of course," I said, cutting him off very quietly. I looked at the ceiling. At the candles. At the woman who would not look at me.

Of course.

One life was not enough apparently. The universe had decided to give me another one, in a place I did not know, in a body that was not mine, with a family that had already sold me before I had even opened my eyes.

"When you say Dragon King," I said carefully, "you mean that literally. You mean an actual dragon."

Nobody answered.

Which was, honestly, answer enough.

Oh my Goddess.