The curse between us

Seraphine's POV

"Hey! Come back here, you little cunt!"

My boots hit the marble floor hard as I ran, my hair flying behind me, my heart pumping with the kind of joy that only came from doing something I wasn't supposed to do. 

The Vale Manor hallways were long and cold and lit by torches that threw orange shadows on the stone walls, but I knew every single turn in this place. I had memorized them years ago.

There were four guards behind me. I could hear their boots, heavy and clumsy compared to mine. Guards. They were my father's guards. Big men in dark uniforms who thought that because they were large, they were fast.

They were not fast.

I turned a sharp corner, cut through the side passage, and came out near the east staircase. I was almost at the servant's door that led to the outer garden. Twenty more steps and I would be outside. 

My friends were waiting on the other side of the garden wall. Lena had promised wine and Dara had promised gossip and for one evening I just wanted my freedom.

I just wanted to be a normal girl for a few hours.

I heard breathing right behind my left ear.

I spun around and drove my fist straight into the guard's jaw before he could grab me. His head snapped sideways and he stumbled into the wall with a grunt. I didn't wait to see if he was okay. I turned and ran faster.

But there were three more of them and they had spread out, cutting off the passage ahead of me. I skidded to a stop. They closed in from both sides, and before I could think of another way out, two pairs of hands grabbed my arms and yanked me backward.

"Let go of me!" I twisted hard, pulling against their grip. "Get your hands off me right now!"

"Lord Vale's orders," the one on my left said. He was breathing hard, his face red from the chase. "You don't leave the manor."

"I wasn't leaving," I said through my teeth, still struggling. "I was taking a walk."

"A walk toward the outer wall with a bag over your shoulder," the one on my right said flatly.

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it. Fair point.

They held me firmly, one on each arm, and the other two stood in front of me like a wall. 

I looked at them one by one. Big, bored men who had probably drawn the short straw to get assigned to watch me today. I almost felt sorry for them.

I went still. Just long enough for them to relax slightly, for the grip on my right arm to loosen just a little. The guard on that side turned his head to say something to the one behind him and then I moved fast.

I slipped my right hand free and yanked my glove off in one quick pull, tucking it into my pocket before anyone saw. Then I went back to struggling, making enough noise and movement that nobody noticed what I had just done.

The guard on my left tightened his grip. The one on my right reached out to grab me again.

His fingers closed around my wrist.

Just the side of my pinky finger touched the back of his hand. That was all. One small point of contact, barely a second long.

He let go immediately.

At first nothing happened, and I thought maybe I had been too careful, too quick. 

Then he made a strange sound, a short, choked noise, and his hand moved to his chest. His face changed. He took one step back and then his knees just folded under him and he went down to the floor, gasping, his mouth opening and closing like he was trying to find air that wasn't there.

The other guards stared at him.

I pulled my other arm free in the confusion and stepped back, holding both hands up, gloves off, palms facing them.

"It seems you have a fast body metabolism," I said, looking down at the man on the floor. "Because usually the effect takes a few minutes to show up." I tilted my head. 

"Damn. Lucky you."

I turned to the remaining three.

"Who wants to be next?"

They all began to move backward, pressing themselves against the walls, eyes locked on my bare hands like I was holding two loaded weapons. Which, to be fair, I was.

I took one step toward them, then another.

They shuffled further back, one of them making a sound that was embarrassingly close to a whimper.

I would have kept going. I was enjoying myself more than I probably should have been. But then a voice came from the far end of the hallway.

"Enough of this nonsense."

A figure stepped out of the shadows into the light and every guard in that hallway dropped into a bow so fast it would have been funny under different circumstances.

Lord Aldric Vale looked exactly the way he always looked. Tall, gray at the temples, dressed in dark colors, his face carrying that permanent expression of a man who had been disappointed by the world for so long that disappointment had become his natural resting state. 

He walked past the bowing guards like they were furniture and stopped in front of me.

He looked at my bare hands.

Then he looked at the guard on the floor, still gasping, being dragged to the side by two of his colleagues.

Then he looked at me.

"I gave an order," he said. His voice was quiet. "And you tried to disobey me."

I put my gloves back on slowly, smoothing each finger down with the kind of careful attention I usually reserved for things that actually mattered. Then I looked at the crumpled guard being pulled off the floor and shook my head with what I hoped looked like genuine regret.

"I just wanted to see my friends," I said. "The guards are the ones who decided to make it into a whole event." I glanced at the man who had grabbed my wrist. He was upright now but leaning heavily against the wall, his skin the color of old ash. 

"Look at him. The excitement was so much it nearly killed him."

My father's expression did not change. Not even slightly.

I dropped my eyes to the floor and let out a slow breath.

"I'm sorry for causing trouble, My Lord," I said, and I made sure my voice was flat and quiet and exactly the way he liked it.

"During dinner tonight," my father said finally, "I have something very important to discuss with you. Something that cannot wait." He paused. "Make sure you are there this time."

He didn't wait for my answer. He turned and walked back down the hallway, and the guards who were still standing scrambled to clear a path for him. His footsteps faded. A door somewhere opened and closed.

I stood alone in the corridor.

The body of the guard, probably not dead yet, had been carried off. The others had melted away the moment my father left, wanting nothing more to do with me or this hallway or this evening.

It was just me and the torches and the cold stone walls.

I pulled my glove off again and looked at my bare hand in the flickering light. The skin looked completely normal. No mark, no glow, nothing that would tell you what it could do to a person in less than a second. 

I had been looking at this hand my whole life, trying to find the thing that made it wrong, and I had never found it.

I put the glove back on.

Important discussion at dinner. That was never good. The last time my father had called a formal dinner to discuss something important, my mother's last remaining jewelry had been sold to pay for a border dispute with the Ashford family. 

The time before that, two of our servants had been dismissed on suspicion of disloyalty.

My father did not call dinners for good news. He called them to deliver things that he knew you would object to, in a setting formal enough that objecting was difficult.

I started walking back toward my rooms, my footsteps echoing in the empty hall.