Chapter 2

Seraphine's POV

Dinner at the Vale Manor was never a warm affair.

It had never been warm, not even when my mother was alive. But back then there had at least been the sound of her voice filling the silence, her laugh bouncing off the stone walls, her habit of sneaking extra bread onto my plate when my father wasn't looking. 

Now it was just the two of us, sitting at opposite ends of a table that was far too long for two people, eating food that was far too good for a family that had lost almost everything, while the candles burned low and nobody said a word.

I liked the silence well enough. It meant I could eat in peace.

I stabbed a piece of steak and chewed it properly, the way I always did, and stared at the candle flame at the center of the table while I thought about Lena and Dara sitting on the other side of the garden wall this evening, probably finishing the wine without me and complaining about it.

"A lady should never chew so loudly."

I looked up. My father was watching me from the far end of the table, his fork resting at the edge of his plate, his expression carrying that familiar mixture of disappointment and exhaustion that he seemed to save specifically for mealtimes with me.

"Noted," I said, and cut another piece of steak.

He watched me for a moment longer, then picked up his fork again. 

"You are going to get married someday, Seraphine. You need to present yourself as a suitable wife. You cannot eat like a soldier at a camp fire and expect a man to take you seriously." He paused. "It might even be sooner than you think."

I stopped chewing.

Not because of the word married. I had heard that word thrown at me since I was sixteen, usually as a threat or a reminder of what I was supposed to become eventually. I had ignored it every single time.

I stopped because of the way he said sooner than you think.

I looked at him properly for the first time since we sat down.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

He set his knife down. He folded his hands on the table. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when he was about to say something I wouldn't like, directly, without apology, because Lord Aldric Vale had never once softened a single piece of bad news in his entire life.

"You are going to marry Caelum Ashford," he said.

The dining room went very quiet.

I stared at him. I waited for the part where he said he was joking, or testing me. That part did not come. He just held my gaze and waited.

"Marriage," I said slowly. "To an Ashford." I put my fork down. "Father, have you completely lost your mind?"

"Do not speak to the Lord of the Vale in that manner," he said. His voice didn't rise. 

I pushed back from the table slightly, pressing my hands flat on the surface to keep them still. "The idea of getting married already makes me want to crawl out of my own skin," I said, keeping my voice as even as I could manage. "And now you want me to marry one of them. The Ashfords. Our enemies. The people who took everything from this family. That is who you are sending me to?"

"It was discussed by the council," he said, like that settled it. Like gave a fuck about what the council discussed.

"I don't care what the council discussed."

"Seraphine."

"You are not sending me there to get married," I said, and I heard my own voice go flat and clear, the way it went when I stopped being the difficult daughter and started being something closer to what I actually was. 

"You are planting me inside their home to destroy them. That is what this is. The marriage is just the excuse to get me through the door."

He didn't answer.

Which was a good answer enough.

"So that's it then," I said quietly. "I'm your weapon of mass destruction."

"You are the strongest weapon this family has," he said, and he did not say it cruelly. He said it the way he said everything, like a fact. "Your powers are unlike anything this family has produced in three generations. I have seen what you can do when you are pushed. You cleared out an entire wing of soldiers the night the eastern border was breached. You were seventeen years old."

"I know what I did," I said.

"Then you know what you are capable of." He picked up his fork again. 

"We are running out of time, Seraphine. Destroying the Ashfords may be the only real chance we have to break this curse completely. The longer it sits on this bloodline, the worse it gets. You know that."

I didn't say anything.

"Sienna doesn't have much time," he said. "You know that too."

The candlelight flickered.

I looked down at my plate. The steak was getting cold. The wine in my glass was untouched. Outside the long narrow windows of the dining room, the night was black and perfectly still.

I didn't say anything else for the rest of dinner.

My father didn't either. We ate in the same silence we always ate in, and when the meal was done he folded his napkin, stood up, and left the room without looking back. 

No goodnight. Just the sound of his footsteps fading down the corridor and then nothing.

I sat at the table alone for a few minutes.

Then I got up and went to find my sister.

Sienna's room was at the end of the east corridor, the warmest part of the manor because my father had made sure of it, one of the very few soft things he had ever done without being asked. I knocked once and pushed the door open.

She was lying in bed, propped up against her pillows, her dark hair spread out around her, her skin that pale color it had been for months now. The kind of pale that made my chest hurt every time I saw it, because I could remember when she used to run through the manor gardens faster than any of the stable boys and come in with mud on her elbows and grass in her hair and absolutely no apology for either.

The moment she saw me, she sat up.

"Sera," she said, and her whole face changed. She smiled the way she always smiled at me, like I was the best thing that had walked through that door in days. 

I crossed the room and pulled her into a hug. I held her carefully. She hugged me back hard, the way she always did.

I blinked a few times and pulled back before she could see the tear rolling down my cheeks.

"How are you feeling?" I asked, sitting on the edge of her bed.

"I'm fine," she said, which was what she always said. "The doctor came this morning actually. He said some of the numbers are improving." She tilted her head. "I'm not sure I believe him, but I appreciated the effort."

I rubbed her hair back from her forehead the way I used to do when she was small and couldn't sleep.

"Dad told me something at dinner," I said.

"Good something or bad something?"

"I'm getting married to Caelum Ashford."

Sienna went completely still.

"What?" she said. "An Ashford?"

"That was my exact reaction."

"Sera." She sat up straighter, her eyes wide. "That's insane. You can't just walk into their house, they'll know who you are, they'll know what you can do, it's a trap, it has to be a trap—"

"He said the Ashfords accepted the proposal without hesitating," I said. "Not a single pushback. Which means they either don't know what I am, or they do know and they think they can handle it." I paused. "Either way, I'm going."

"You already decided?"

I looked at her. At the pale skin and the tired eyes.

"If there's any chance this breaks the curse," I said, "then yes. I already decided."

Sienna was quiet for a moment. Then she said, very softly, "What if it's a trap?"

I smiled. 

"Then I suppose I'll be holding a very large burial for the entire Ashford family. Sooner than any of them expect."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind that reached her eyes, and it did something good to the tight feeling that had been sitting in my chest since dinner. I held onto the sound of it for a second.

Then I reached into my jacket and placed a dagger on the bedside table between us. Short blade, good grip, light enough for her hand.

"I won't be here to watch out for you," I said. "So you need to start watching out for yourself. Roen in the guard house will teach you the basics if you tell him I sent you. He owes me a favor."

Sienna looked at the dagger. Then she looked at me. She didn't argue, which meant she understood more about what was coming than she was letting on.

I squeezed her hand once through my glove, stood up, and left before either of us could say something that would make it harder.

The corridor outside her room was dark and empty. My own room was two floors up, and I walked slowly, not ready to get there yet.

I was halfway up the back staircase when the feeling crept up on me.

That particular prickling at the back of my neck that meant someone was watching me.

I stopped walking and turned around slowly but saw nothing, just the empty staircase.

I turned at the corner into the upper corridor and came face to face with a figure in a black robe standing directly in my path.

I didn't scream. I took one sharp step back and put my hand to the glove on my right hand, ready to pull it off.

Then the figure pushed back their hood.

I dropped my hand.

"Hello, Sera," he said.

I stared at him. 

"What are you doing inside the manor?" I looked him over, then looked at the corridor behind him. "How did you even get in?"

He smiled, unbothered, the way he always was. 

"I heard you're going to marry Caelum Ashford."

"You seem to be picking up a lot of information about this family very quickly," I said, narrowing my eyes.

"Here." He reached into his robe and held something out. A necklace, thin chain, a gold pendant hanging from it that caught the torchlight in a way that didn't look entirely natural. 

"Take it. You'll need it when you get there."

I looked at it without touching it. 

"Need it for what?"

He was already pulling his hood back up.

"Wait," I said. "What is it for? What does it—"

But he was gone. 

I stood alone in the corridor holding the necklace, staring at the empty space where he had just been.

"Damn that man," I muttered, turning it over in my fingers. "Why does he always do that?”