Chapter 7: The Memory Problem

Elena's POV

I dropped into curtisies first.

Marcus and Cecilia followed me down a beat late. Then the guests we had brought followed us.

Vivienne did not follow.

She could not. Adrian's hand was still wrapped around her wrist, holding her on her knees. Her face was tilted up at him, hopeful and not yet aware.

Adrian let out a small dry breath that was not quite a laugh. "Tell me, sister-in-law. Did I need to clear my arrival with you?"

He did not look at her when he said it.

Cecilia twisted on the marble. "Your Highness — Your Highness, please — she has been unwell — she has been having terrible dreams, you cannot imagine — we have been trying to stop her —"

"You have been trying to," Adrian said.

"Yes."

"Tell me," he said, very calm but stern. "Have you been standing here listening to your daughter call my wife a stray dog and me nasty. Or only the parts you found funny."

Marcus had been a man who shouted at his servants every dinner of my childhood. He had not been a man, in my memory, who had ever once been at a loss for what to say. He was at a loss now. He opened his mouth and closed it.

I could feel Adrian’s eyes on me the whole time.

I had spent my whole childhood ignored and criticized at home, always as an oursider, with no one to defend me. Now, to hear Adrian speak up for me — maybe more for himself — felt completely new.

I did not look up.

"You are all dismissed," Adrian said. "To the western gatehouse. The guards will see you home from there."

Adrian then let go of Vivienne. She dropped to the floor, rubbing her wrist. "And you. The palace cells," Adrian said. "Until I decide otherwise."

Magot’s eyes widened in panic. I quickly spoke up, my voice firm. “Please let Magot stay, your highness. She is the chosen prime servant I brought for myself.”

Adrian gave me a slight nod and turned to the room "Where is Magot?"

"I'm here your highness," Magot immediately answered and ran to my side.

"Your Highness —" Marcus also tried.

"You can stay. The rest may go," Adrian didn't even let him finish his sentence.

Two guards I had not noticed had come up from somewhere along the corridor. They were enormous and very neat. They took my father by the elbows and lifted him the way a footman lifts a chair.

Cecilia went up under her own power, weeping into her sleeve. She did not look at me as she passed.

Marcus did. He looked at me with a kind of slow uncertain attention I had not seen him aim in my direction since I could remember.

Vivienne began to understand only as the same guard who had lifted Marcus closed a hand on her arm.

"Wait — wait, no — Father — Father —"

"Why is this different? Why is this different from before? I remember it was different — I remember it was different —"

The guards did not pause.

"This time you came to the wrong wedding, Vivienne," I said.

She turned her head all the way around as they walked her past me. She kept her eyes on my face until the corridor angle took her out of sight. I had not heard the end of her.

The door closed.

The room emptied of bodies that wanted me to be smaller.

It did not empty of bodies.

The boy had not moved. He had stood at his father's hip through the entire dismissal with his fist in the man's coat, and he had watched me. He was still watching me.

Adrian, I realized, had not moved either.

He was, in fact, looking at the side of my face with the same flat green attention he had used on Vivienne, and I could not tell if he was deciding I had been useful or deciding I was the next problem.

The boy let go of the coat and stepped toward me.

"Miss."

He came up to my hip. He was the most royal thing in the room and he was four feet tall.

"Yes."

"Your hair," he said "I've never seen hair like this before. Why your family also looks different from you?"

"My mother had hair like this," I said. "And eyes like this. She died when I was young. I am told she was an orphan, so I don't know if there are others."

He nodded, businesslike, as if I had answered a quiz.

"I had a mommy too," he said. "She left. We are the same I guess."

That was, apparently, my interview. He made a small unsmiling face I would later learn was the face he made when he had decided something he did not intend to discuss.

The servants finally rushed inside after seeing all the guests taken away.

The chief of them stepped forward — pale-haired, very thin, a man with hands so clean they looked unused. "Your Highness. For the formal wedding ceremony - shall we —"

"No. No ceremony. No marking. Just as planned." He paused for the next breath.

The man bowed and stepped back, but only one step. The rest of the servants also stayed there.

Then Adrian turned to face me. He did not come closer. He did not need to. "Some things for the bride to hear, while we are all in one room."

I knew what was coming. I had heard it in my last life.

"I have no preference about who the royal calls my Luna Princess. You can wear the title for as long as you don’t cause trouble and treat my son Lucas respectfully. But I have Lucas already. So we will not have children. I will not mark you either. Are we understood?"

The servants were no longer pretending not to listen.

I had been an Alpha's wife. I had had a wedding night. By the end, the man on my pillow had been measuring me for a coffin.

I had no fantasy left about love and marriage.

"Yes, Your Highness," I said respectfully.

The chief servant made a small sound, somewhere between a swallow and an actual cough.

The boy looked up at his father with bright interest.

Everyone in this room probably expected me to argue or to cry. To do whatever a wolfless small pack girl was, in their heads, supposed to do when a Prince told her she would never be touched.

"You understand that even if you object to —"

He stopped.

His eyes did not narrow. They sharpened.

"What," he said, "did you say?"