Chapter 2

Cynthia

The study door closed behind us, and the house went very quiet.

My father did not sit down. He stood by the window with his hands clasped behind his back. I waited in the middle of the room in my shawl, shaking cold from the night.

"Your mother's family," he said, "had a contract." He said it to the glass. "With his family. You were betrothed before you were born."

I did not understand. "A contract, Father?"

"A marriage contract." He turned around. His face looked wrong, drawn tight around the mouth. "There were complications the year you were born. I took you and brought you here to keep you away from him."

His voice broke. "I thought if I hid you far enough, he would never find us."

I wanted to ask who he was. But my throat was already closing.

"You will marry him," my father said.

And the floor tilted.

The words did not make sense. I had been raised to be a devout believer. It was my father himself who had told me, from the first words I could understand, that the Goddess was the only one who could wash the sin from my blood. He had sent me to the monastery. He had known that I had sworn myself to Her service.

Every day since I could hold a thought, I had belonged to Her. I did not know who I was if I was not hers.

"You broke your promise," I whispered. "You made a contract and you broke it. And now you want me to break the one I made to Her. To marry someone when I've pledged—"

"It's not someone!" My father shouted it, and the sound was so sudden, so unlike him, that I flinched. He crossed the room, and for a moment I thought he would strike me. "That is not a man. That is Dorian Valenti. Dorian Valenti!"

The name went into my chest like a piece of ice.

I knew it. Everyone knew it.

Dorian Valenti.

The brutal lord of an ancient vampire family. They called him the king of everything lawless in the underworld. They said he had killed his own father and his own brother to rise. They said there was no crime under the moon he had not committed, no line he had not crossed. To ordinary people, his name was a legend you did not speak.

The girls at the monastery would whisper it sometimes, and then they would look at one another and stop, and close their mouths, because even saying the sound of it felt like a blasphemy against the Goddess.

Vampires did not marry outside their kind anymore. Not really. I had heard the stories—the humans, the werewolves who married into vampire families and ended up as blood slaves, used until there was nothing left of them, then discarded.

I looked at my father. "How am I supposed to live, married to him?"

"Because fighting him is the one thing you cannot survive." My father's hands were shaking. "I have known what he is for eighteen years. There is no army, no hiding place, no town far enough."

"The only way we live is to give him what he's owed."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say something that would make him be my father again. But I looked at his face, at the jaw set tight and the eyes gone wet, and I did not recognize him.

The man who had told me I was born guilty, who had sent me to the monastery to learn to be good, was looking at me not with fear for me but with fear for himself.

I had never in my life thought of my father that way.

*

I went back to my room, knelt before the statue of the Goddess.

I could still feel him.

His eyes. I could feel them on me, like a weight, even though he had gone. The skin of my neck prickled above my shawl, and I pressed my hand to it, but the feeling would not go.

No. That belonged to the demon, not to Her. I knelt in my own room, before my own altar, and I would not let him sit in the place that belonged to my prayers.

I closed my eyes and did what I had always done when the world grew too loud. I prayed. Goddess protect me. Goddess forgive me. Goddess protect me. The words came without my telling them, one after another.

I kept the prayer going until my body stilled, and the prickling on my neck faded, and the only thing left in the room belonged to Her.

And then, in the middle of the rhythm, I understood something.

There was no one in this world who could protect me from Dorian Valenti. My father was right about that. But my father was not the Moon Goddess.

She had heard me before. I had felt it, on the full moon, in the hush of the chapel. Her presence settling over me, warm and steady. She had wanted nothing from me but what I freely gave. She would not abandon me now.

The Crescent Sisters were the Goddess's most devoted servants. They swore to keep themselves for Her, all their lives. They lived with curses and with death, and they used the purest souls to guide the dead into the Goddess's kingdom, and the whole world knew it. Which was why the whole world left them alone. Every creature, human or werewolf or vampire, agreed never to touch them.

If I completed the rite, he could not touch me.

He would not target a small-town girl. Why would he? A nobody with nothing to offer.

I pressed my forehead to the cold stone feet of the statue.

I would go back to giving Her everything, as I had always done. Goddess, forgive me. I know I am running to You now because I am afraid of him, not only because I love You. Forgive the bargain hidden inside my prayer. I give myself to You. I have always given myself to You.

I stayed on my knees until the candle was ash. I prayed all night. I felt Her gaze on me too — and that one did not make me tremble. It held me up.

When the sky turned gray, I changed into the white robes of the crescent that I had kept pressed and ready. I picked up my prayer book and crossed the room to leave, the way I had left every morning of my life.

The door would not open.

I tried the handle again. Locked. And not from my side.