Chapter Two: The Man I Should Have Forgotten

LUCY'S POV

The money was real.

That was the first thing I checked when I woke.

I sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed with the thick bundle of notes in my lap, counting them for the third time. My fingers kept slipping, not from carelessness but from a tremor I couldn't quite master. Two hundred thousand. Exactly as promised.

For a long moment, I couldn't move.

Molly would get her treatment.

That was all that mattered. That was the only thing that was ever going to matter.

Pale morning light slid through the gap in the heavy curtains and laid a thin gold line across the sheets. I dressed quickly, in the careful, mechanical way of someone who has decided not to feel anything yet, and I refused to look at the empty side of the bed. The man who had paid me was gone. He had left behind the faint scent of expensive cologne, and a glass of water on the bedside table, placed there as though someone had thought about what I might need when I woke.

I didn't even know his name.

I knew he had dark hair and a sharp jaw, and eyes that turned almost golden whenever the light caught them. I remembered the way he had watched me, steady and unreadable, as if he were trying to solve a puzzle that didn't fit together. A girl like me, sitting in a room like that, saying yes.

He hadn't asked about my family.

He hadn't asked why I needed the money.

And strangely, he hadn't laughed at me.

That should have made leaving easier.

Instead, I found myself standing there with my bag half-closed, staring at the dent in the pillow where his head had rested.

"Forget him, Lucy," I muttered.

My voice sounded small in that vast, silent room.

I had been paid. The arrangement was over. There was no reason to take one desperate night and try to turn it into something it had never been. People like me didn't get stories. We got transactions, and we were lucky when they were honest ones.

I tucked the money deep into my bag, held it against my ribs, and left without looking back.

By noon, Molly's treatment had been paid for.

I watched the nurse stamp the receipt, and I think I stopped breathing until the ink dried. Then I walked down the corridor, past the glass, and into my sister's room, where the smell of antiseptic hung thick in the air. She was propped against the pillows, thinner than she'd been a month ago, her eyes too large for her face. When I sat beside her bed, she reached for my hand.

Her fingers were cold.

"Are we going to be okay now?"

I forced a smile and squeezed her hand.

"We're going to be okay."

It was the first time in weeks I had said those words without feeling like a liar.

For the next few days, I poured myself into Molly. I scrubbed our house until the wood of the floor showed pale through the dirt. I cooked whatever I could afford, carried warm meals to the hospital in a battered tin, and sat beside her bed reading the same worn storybook until she fell asleep mid-sentence. I tried to put the stranger out of my mind.

It worked, mostly, in the daytime.

Nights were harder. Nights belonged to golden eyes and a glass of water on a bedside table.

Then the royal announcement arrived.

I was standing at the basin, washing a plate, when trumpets sounded somewhere beyond the rooftops. The sound rolled through the streets like thunder, and doors began banging open all along our lane. People poured out of their houses, laughing and calling to one another, rushing toward the public square as though someone had lit a fire there.

I stayed where I was.

I followed them only because Mrs. Whitmore came running to our door, breathless, waving a folded notice above her head like a flag.

"Lucy! You need to see this!"

I dried my hands slowly. "What's happened?"

"The prince is choosing a bride!"

I stared at her.

"So?"

"So every eligible woman in the kingdom has been invited to present herself at the palace." She pressed the notice into my hands, her eyes shining. "There will be trials, and the Moon Goddess herself will determine which women are worthy of the royal selection."

I handed the paper back and returned to my plate.

"Good luck to them."

"Lucy, listen to me." She caught my wrist, and I looked up, startled. Mrs. Whitmore never grabbed anyone. "The palace is offering a reward to the families of the selected contestants."

My hands stopped moving.

Water dripped from the plate and ran down my wrists.

"How much?"

She told me.

I nearly dropped the plate.

It was enough to cover Molly's future treatment, pay every debt our family owed, and keep us from begging anyone for help for a very long time. It was the kind of number that made a person's chest ache. The kind of number that changed the shape of a life.

But I wasn't a fool, and I could hear the silence behind her smile. Nothing in my life had ever come without a catch.

I took the notice back and read it properly this time, line by line.

The royal decree stated that only women who met the ancient requirements of the Moon Goddess could proceed through the trials. Those who failed would be dismissed. Those found to have deceived the court would face punishment.

And the prince himself would choose his final candidates.

I lowered the paper and looked down at my hands. They were rough from scrubbing, red at the knuckles, ordinary in every way.

I didn't want a prince.

I didn't want a palace.

I didn't want gowns, or crowns, or a goddess watching me from the sky.

I wanted my sister to grow up without having to wonder whether she would receive treatment the following morning.

That was all. That was everything.

"When do I leave?" I asked.

Mrs. Whitmore smiled, slow and satisfied, the way a woman smiles when she's been certain of the answer all along.

"Tomorrow."

I should have known, then, that my life was about to become a disaster.

I should have heard it in the trumpets, felt it in the cold weight of the paper in my hand.

But I had no idea that the man whose face I was trying so hard to forget was waiting inside that palace.

Or that he had already begun searching for me.