Signature on a Treaty

Chapter 4: Signature on a Treaty

Maren POV

Judith came into my room at seven with a garment bag over her arm and a cup of tea in her other hand.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my robe. For five days I had said almost nothing in that house. I had packed nothing. I had eaten when someone put food in front of me. I had spent one entire night standing at the window of my room looking at the drive, waiting for a black car that did not come.

She unzipped the bag. White silk. High neck, long sleeves, covered buttons down the spine. It had been cut for Sloane. The shoulders were an inch too wide and the waist was an inch too tight, and Judith pinned the difference with quick, practiced hands while I stood on a stool and looked at the wall.

"The high collar is a good choice," she said. "Modest. The Crown will appreciate it."

"I asked for it."

"I know you did." She slid a pin through the silk at my hip. "You've been very sensible this week. I told your father you would be."

The tea sat on the nightstand, steaming. Chamomile and a green edge underneath.

"Drink, please. For your nerves."

I picked up the cup. I raised it to my mouth, and I held it there while she turned to retrieve her scissors. When her back was to me I tipped the whole cup into the potted fern by the window.

I was sitting calmly with the empty cup when she turned around.

"Good girl," she said.

Her eyes stopped on the chain at my throat. The thin silver ring rested against my collarbone, where it had rested every day since I was twelve.

"Take that off."

"It was my mother's."

"The Crown will find it plain." She held out her palm. "Give it to me."

I closed my hand over the ring. The silence in the room went very thin.

Judith lowered her hand. "Fine. Keep it under the collar." She turned away. "Where nobody can see it."

She finished with perfume. Her own, a heavy jasmine that coated my throat. She sprayed my neck, my wrists, the air in front of me, and had me walk through it. Then she stepped back and examined me with her head tilted, checking for flaws.

"Be quiet, Maren," she said. "Be good. It's what you do best."

I looked at her. I did not say anything. That was the closest I had ever come to an answer.

* * *

Penn collected me at nine.

The black SUV was waiting at the curb. A broad man in a charcoal suit stood beside the rear door with his hands folded. Close-cropped beard. The stillness of someone who has spent a great deal of time outside other people's doors.

"Miss Hale. Declan Penn." He did not offer his hand. "I'll take your bag."

"I was told to bring nothing."

The corner of his mouth moved. "Then I'll take nothing."

My father stood on the porch in his navy suit. He did not come down the steps. I climbed into the back, and he lifted one hand, and I looked at the hand and then at the road.

We drove east for three hours. The city fell away behind us, and then the suburbs, and then the highway narrowed to two lanes and climbed into the pines. Penn said nothing for the first hour. He drove with both hands on the wheel and checked the mirrors every thirty seconds. Twice he changed lanes without signaling, and a second black car behind us did the same.

Somewhere past the pass, when the first snow lay thin on the shoulders of the road, I asked, "How long have you worked for him?"

"Since I was eleven."

"What's he like?"

He took a moment. "He doesn't sleep. He hasn't properly since the Summit." His eyes met mine in the mirror, steady and unreadable. "He eats nothing he hasn't watched prepared. He'll be polite to you. He's polite to everyone. Don't take it for more than it is."

"The two women before me." I kept my eyes on the road. "What happened to them?"

"I was in that house for both. Neither of them died by his hand." He said it flatly, and I understood he had said it many times to people who did not believe him. "I would stake my life on that."

"And if I do take it for more?"

"Then you'll be disappointed." He said it without cruelty. "I'd rather you weren't."

I turned my face to the window. The back of my shoulder pulsed in slow beats, and the beats came faster the farther up the mountain we went.

* * *

Duskhollow stood on a granite shelf above the valley, and I saw it a long time before the road reached it.

Black stone walls. Towers rising out of the cliff face, each one wired with floodlights that were already burning in the gray midday. A glass atrium had been built into the oldest wing, and behind the glass I could see hundreds of people moving. The gates were steel. A guard in black looked at the SUV, looked at Penn, and the gates rolled open without a word.

We stopped in a courtyard of wet flagstones. Penn opened my door. A woman with a silver braid pinned at her neck waited beside him, hands folded in front of a gray dress.

"Mrs. Marsh," Penn said. "Miss Hale."

She looked at me. Not at my face. At the collar of the white dress, at the place where it covered my shoulder. Her eyes stayed there for exactly one breath.

Then she smiled, very slightly.

"Welcome to Duskhollow, Your Grace," she said. "If you need anything today, you ring for me. Anything at all."

She did not say what she had seen. I did not ask.

* * *

They gave me ten minutes in a small stone room with a mirror and a window. I stood in front of the mirror in a stranger's wedding gown and could not make myself look at my face.

A knock. My father's voice. "It's time."

He took my arm in the corridor outside the Great Hall. His fingers were cold. I felt them shaking against my elbow, and I thought, now. Ask me now. Say my name. Ask if I'm all right.

He fixed his eyes on the doors.

"Walk," he said.

The doors opened.

Two hundred people stood in the hall, tall and silent, almost all of them in black. Torches burned in iron brackets along the walls, and above them modern lights had been fitted into the old stone so the room glowed gold. Stone pillars lined the aisle. At the far end, at the foot of a raised stone dais, a man waited with his back to me.

My breath stopped.

My mark woke. A slow pulse. Deliberate. Hot. My knees buckled, just slightly, and my father's fingers tightened until it hurt.

"Walk."

I walked.

Guards in black stood along the walls with earpieces and their hands folded. One of them lifted a scanner over my wrist as I passed, and it chirped, and he nodded me through.

I saw faces. Sloane in the second row, cream silk, perfect hair, a small smile pressed flat. Grant beside her, looking at his shoes. A silver-haired man in a charcoal suit near the front, who inclined his head to me with a warm, welcoming smile as I passed. He was the only person in the hall who smiled at me. I would remember that.

Then the man at the front turned around.

I had braced for it. I had told myself in the car, in the mirror, on the stool with Judith's pins in my hip, that I would be steady. That I would see his face and keep my own face still.

I was not steady.

He was taller than I remembered. The black coat was cut across his shoulders in silver thread. His hair had been swept back from his forehead. The scar ran pale along his jaw. And his eyes were cool and silver, edged with gold at the rim, and they were looking at me with no expression at all.

Not recognition. Not curiosity. Not even contempt.

He looked at me and saw a signature.

Something in my chest went quiet and cold. I had known. I had known on the sidewalk with his card in my hand. But there is a difference between knowing and standing in front of him and watching him not know.

My father let go of my arm.

"Who gives this woman?" the priestess asked.

"I do." His voice cracked on it.

I climbed the steps. Cassian held out his hand, palm up. I laid mine in it.

The mark ignited.

Heat tore across my shoulder blade so hard I nearly cried out. Under the lace, the skin burned and pulled. His fingers twitched around mine. For one half second he went still. His nostrils flared. A line formed between his brows, and his eyes dropped to my hand, my wrist, my throat, searching.

I stopped breathing.

Judith's jasmine hung thick around my head. Moonveil had hidden my own scent for five days and would hide it for weeks more. I knew that. Sloane had told me. It was the only reason I had agreed to stand here and not run.

His face smoothed over. Whatever he had caught, he put it away.

"Do you, Maren Hale, daughter of Cedar Ridge, take Cassian Vale, King of the Lycans, as your husband, to stand at his side through every darkness?"

Every darkness. I nearly laughed.

"I do." My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.

"Do you, Cassian Vale, take Maren Hale as your Luna, to protect her and honor her until the Moon Goddess calls you home?"

He did not answer right away. The silence stretched. Behind him, Penn shifted his weight, watching his King with open concern.

"I do," Cassian said. Flat. Final.

In the second row, Sloane's smile had not moved. But her eyes were on my husband's hand over mine, and her knuckles were white around her program.

The priestess bound our wrists with a silver cord. Cold metal against my pulse. "By the Goddess's grace, you are wed."

The hall exploded. Boots hit stone. A deep chorus rose, two hundred voices at once, and it rolled through the room and shook the glass in the atrium. Through all of it my husband did not smile. He did not blink. He did not squeeze my hand.

He lifted my veil himself, quickly and efficiently. He looked at my face for exactly as long as protocol required.

Then he bent as if to kiss my cheek for the crowd, and his mouth stopped beside my ear.

"Listen carefully, Luna." His voice was low. Meant for me alone. "I already have a mate."

The sound in the hall drained away.

"She is out there. I will find her." His breath moved across my ear, and the mark on my back burned so fiercely that my eyes watered. "You are a signature on a treaty. Nothing more. Don't mistake this ring for anything else."

He drew back. The crowd was cheering. He turned me toward them with one hand at the small of my back, and I lifted my chin and smiled.

He had described her in four sentences. A woman he had marked and lost. A woman he meant to find.

For six days I had been that woman, in a bathroom mirror, in a hotel lobby, on a wet sidewalk, and nobody had gone looking for me. Not once. Not for six hours.

He was looking for her now, and he had me by the hand. The words were all in my mouth. I swallowed every one of them.

I smiled until my face hurt, and I did not tell him.