Chapter 5

Elena's POV

I waited.

Vivienne's color had been climbing through the speech, and when it broke, it broke beautifully. Her hands flew to her cheeks. Her eyes filled. Her mouth opened on a small, terrible *oh*.

"No," she whispered. "No, no. No. My wedding has to be perfect. Everyone needs to witness my happiness. I won't have everyone running off to Elena's."

"Elena!" Cecilia said, in a voice that had gone needle-sharp. "How cruel of you. You know what this means to your kind sister."

"I know," I said. "I know what it means to her because I heard what it meant to me twenty minutes ago, when it was the other way around. You told me a girl had Derek, and love, and that was what mattered. I am taking your advice."

Cecilia opened her mouth. She closed it.

Then Derek, of all people, spoke.

"Vivienne, sweet, don't cry — it's only a date. We can move it. We can absolutely move it. The venue cost is the venue cost, but the date can be moved."

The same hand, in another life, pat my hair while he told me, with great kindness, that the venue had already been paid for and we couldn't just cancel it.

For Vivienne, he would burn the deposit.

For me, he had counted pennies.

It still hurt me deep down. But I swallowed the bitterness quickly.

Derek was going to be Vivienne's problem.

Derek's father held his purse strings tight. Vivienne had a year, at most, before she learned what no sounded like in a small pack Alpha's house.

Saturday came in like an ordinary morning, and it was not ordinary at all.

The dress they sent over from the royal pack was heavier than I had expected. White silk, the kind that did not crease when you held it. Gold embroidery at the cuffs and the hem in the pattern of the royal seal. A long train. Veils of three weights. A small fortune in pearl buttons down the back.

Magot's hands shook as she pinned me into it.

"Hold still, Miss." Her eyes were wet. "Hold still or I will stick you with a pin and you will go to your wedding bleeding."

"Magot."

"I'm fine. Hold still."

She steadied my shoulders and worked the buttons up my spine, one at a time. Then she stopped at the small of my back, and her hands stilled, and she said it slowly, like a thing she had been holding for years:

"You look like her. You look like your mother."

The room went very quiet.

I had not been allowed to talk about my mother for as long as I could remember. Marcus had buried her name with her body. I only knew that the pack had been told she was a homeless wolf my father had taken in. My father kept her in the room most of the time and never allowed people to get close to her.

"You met her before?"

"Once. Before you were born." Magot's hands moved again, gently. "She came into the kitchen yard barefoot. Looking for a knife to peel an apple. Your father came in and saw her standing on the cold flagstones with no shoes on, and he picked her up and carried her back inside. She had your hair, Miss. She had your eyes."

I had to put a hand against the bedpost.

"Magot," I said. "You are coming with me."

"Miss?"

"To the palace. As my Prime Servant. I am not negotiating."

Her eyes spilled. She did not say yes. She did not have to.

"Vivienne saw your dress this morning, Miss," Magot added, smoothing my sleeve. "Derek read the price tag and admitted that he couldn't pay for this."

Below us, the sound of an argument was coming through the floorboards.

"Look at the prince, Viv, please —"

"You said you would burn the deposit for the venue, Derek, why are you suddenly —"

A door slammed. Then another door.

Somewhere down the hall, Vivienne began to scream into a pillow.

Magot pulled the veil down over my face.

"Don't think about them, Miss. Today is your big day."

A footman's voice from the hall. The royal carriage had arrived.

Adrian did not come to fetch me as the werewolf wedding tradition. The carriage was empty except for the driver and two outriders.

Vivienne emerged from her bedroom at the head of the stairs as I came down, her face still had tears on it, and the sight of me dressed clearly surprised her.

Realizing that I noticed her tears, she got almost angry. “You think seeing me cry means you’ve won, don’t you?"

"I didn't say anything."

“Let me guess, Adrian didn't come here to pick you up right? You know what? It's just a start. He won't attend the wedding at all! Only our guests will be at the wedding. Derek and I have countless happy days ahead of us while you will live in royal hell every day for the rest of your life....."

"Vivienne." I stopped her. "I would mind your tongue about the royal house, especially after we arrived there."

She started to say something else.

I had already opened the carriage door.

The ride was quiet. The driver did not speak. The wheels rolled over cobblestones and then over gravel and then over flagstones, and the sun moved up the sky as we went. I sat with my hands in my lap and tried not to think about whether he would be at the steps when we arrived, because he would not.

I've heard about this wedding in my last life. Though almost every guest we can invite went there with Vivienne, the Prince never showed up with the royal guests. They waited until the sunset, had a quick dinner and politely asked to leave. Vivienne spent all night crying without seeing her groom.

The footmen handed me down. The palace rose pale and enormous in front of me. The air was full of the smell of stone and lilies and old smoke.

And as I looked up, something looked back.

The shape was small at this distance. A man's outline behind a window on the second floor.

I could not have seen his face from where I stood.

Something deep inside of me suddenly stirred.

If I was not convinced that I was wolfless, I would say that it felt like my wolf just turned its head inside me.