3. Leah
Leah
Arift has opened beneath my feet, and I’m suddenly falling through the air.
“What?” I gape. “No, Evie. Please be joking.” My voice drops to a frantic whisper as I check the kitchen door, making sure we’re really alone. “I taught you about the herbs. I explained to that you had to take them every time if you were going to be with a man…how could you let this happen?”
She winces. “It’s my fault. Jeremy said he didn’t mind waiting, but I wanted to. And I thought it would be safe. I remembered your instructions, I swear. There was just one day I was sick, and I guess they didn’t take…”
She straightens, releasing a deep breath, and wipes the tears from her face with a delicate gesture.
When she speaks again, her voice is steadier.
“I know the situation isn’t ideal, but I do love him, Leah, and we’re going to make this work.
” She grabs my arms, gripping me tight. “Jer is already making preparations. He’ll have his license soon—a real one—and then we can get married. The only thing is—”
“No,” I shake my head, hoping to somehow wipe the last few minutes away from existence.
Still, my mind is already whirring, trying to find a way out of this.
“You can’t rely on him. You barely know the man.
I have enough saved for a single counterfeit license—they don’t cost as much as the family ones.
You can take that, and that’ll keep you out of the workhouse until I can get together enough money to join you.
I’ll find a room for you. Maybe Hodges…”
It’s Evie’s turn to shake her head now. “It’s not your job to fix everything.
Jer and I have talked this over, and this is what we want.
Jer can take care of me. I don’t want you to keep giving everything up for me.
” Her voice softens. “I see what it costs you, Leah. The bruises and scratched arms you think I don’t notice, the way you’ve started scanning a room whenever you walk into it, looking for danger.
Your room is right above mine—do you think I don’t hear you waking up shouting from your nightmares? ”
I stare at her. “I thought I was being a bit more discreet than that.”
She sighs. “I never asked you to be discreet—or to risk your life to look after me. I don’t need to be protected, Leah.
Not from your work, not from the truth, and not from the consequences of my own choices.
Frankly, I never asked you to do any of that for me, even though I know you felt you had to. ”
Something inside me bucks aggressively at her words. Of course I had to. She doesn’t understand. She’s too young and too sheltered to realize how much danger she’s in.
“She’ll be so furious, Eves,” I say, my voice low.
Evie pulls a face. “She’ll survive.”
“Yes, but will you?” I ask. “Will the baby? When Ada finds out you’ve jeopardized her precious reputation like this, she’ll do something terrible, I know it.”
Not murder, not directly—Ada’s too self-interested to risk landing herself in jail.
But we both know how cruel she can be. Evie might be her daughter, but her standing in society will always be more important.
I have visions of Evie being locked away in the attic room until her due date, then the baby being whisked away.
Or worse, Ada making sure Evie never has the baby at all.
Ada wouldn’t hesitate to break Evie’s heart, ruin her health, destroy her spirit.
And she’d do it all with a smile on her face if she thought she was saving her family from a worse fate.
“That’s why I need your help,” Evie says, clasping my hand. At least she seems to have taken my words of warning seriously.
“Anything,” I say. Even if I’m blindsided by all of this, I don’t hesitate. I will always show up for Evie.
“I just need you to buy us some time. A few weeks. You know I’m terrible at standing up to Mother, but I can feel she’s brewing something.
She keeps saying things that frighten me.
Help me find ways to put her off making any plans with suitors until Jeremy has his license.
Then, like you said, we won’t need her or father’s permission to marry, and Leah, we can both be free. ”
“Both of us?” I frown.
“Yes,” Evie says eagerly. “When I’ve left home, you’ll have no reason to stay. You can get a real guild job, or you could use the money like you said to buy yourself a single license.”
I try to process this, rearranging the carefully laid future I’d planned out.
If I’m honest, I’ve had the means to leave my father’s house for the last year, if I was willing to go alone.
It’s Evie I’ve stayed for. But it’s hard to pivot from that.
I’ve been working toward the same goal for so long I feel lost now the posts are moving.
“I can try,” I say.
I don’t actually see much of Ada at all over the next few days, except for when she’s doling out chores, unusually concerned with making sure I do the spring clean thoroughly.
The work is mindless enough that I can devote all my thoughts to trying to come up with some—any—option that saves Evie without her having to rely on this Jeremy.
Sure, she loves him, but she’s naive, and that means she can be easily led.
I’m not about to trust my sister’s fate to a man I’ve never even had a conversation with.
As I scrub the floors and beat the carpets, I turn our options over in my head. I know Evie won’t take my scavenging money for herself, not when it leaves me stuck in this house. To be honest, I don’t like the idea of her being pregnant and living alone in the city anyway.
There’s the medicine woman at the Three Bridges, Martha.
Evie told me she thinks she’s maybe two months along, so there might still be something she could take to change her condition.
It’s a fleeting thought, though—quickly discarded.
I only have to think back to the way Eves has talked about starting a family to know she would never choose that.
So that leaves coming up with enough money for us both to leave home before she starts showing.
Simple. Not sure why I didn’t just try that to begin with.
Except I have no idea when the next battle will be or what kind of spoils I might be able to get my hands on.
As I scrub the flagstones on the back porch one sunny morning, it occurs to me it’s possible I could make a deal with Lindon’s gang.
Maybe he’d be willing to make a loan in exchange for my agreement to scavenge for him for the next year.
It’s a risky option—making a deal with Lindon feels almost as stupidly dangerous as signing a demon pact—but I decide I’ll talk to Hodges about it the next time I get a chance to slip out of the house.
I pause from scrubbing to wipe the sweat from my brow and notice a pair of shoes on the back step. I look up to see Evie standing there, offering me a sad smile.
“Let me help with that,” she says, holding out her hand for the brush. I shake my head, not returning the smile.
“No, you’ll ruin your dress.”
She shields her face from the morning sun with a hand. “You’re allowed to be angry with me, Leah,” she says. “In fact, I think I’d prefer it. I realize I messed up all your plans.”
She’s wrong. I can’t stay mad at her. Not when I’ve done so much worse than just fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time.
“I’m not cross,” I say. “I’m just trying to figure out—”
“Evie! Darling, where are you?”
Ada’s shrill voice makes us both jump, and Evie turns from the doorway. “Yes, Mother?”
“What are you doing out there?” Ada calls from the kitchen, her voice sharp with disapproval. “Come into the drawing room at once. Your father and I have wonderful news to share with you.”
Evie offers me a frightened glance, and my instinct has me hustling to my feet to follow after her.
My father is barely around the house these days.
He rises late and by noon has usually escaped Ada’s overbearing presence by slinking off to his club, happily abandoning both his daughters to her talons.
I don’t hate my father, but I can’t say I love or respect him, either.
For the last fifteen years, Nathaniel Polaris hasn’t been in my life enough for me to think much of him at all.
“I don’t recall inviting you in here,” Ada sniffs at me as I trail after Evie into the drawing room.
My father coughs from an armchair by the fireplace, lacing and unlacing his hands absentmindedly.
Sometimes I see him and feel shocked by how gray his hair is, unable to believe the father I remember from when I was small and Mother was alive has become someone I barely recognize.
“Let her stay, my dear,” he says to Ada.
“No reason why she shouldn’t join us in celebrating her sister’s good fortune. ”
I don’t say anything, not even giving him a nod of thanks. I’m too focused on the letter in Ada’s hand.
“What’s that?” I ask, dread mounting.
“It’s a letter of proposal,” Ada says, her painted lips stretched in a hungry grin. “For you, Evie darling.” She walks over to clasp my sister’s hand. Evie’s gone white as a sheet, and she looks like she might be sick.
“For me?” she squeaks. “But who—”
“Oh, don’t worry, my dear. We’ve made a wonderful match for you. He’s young and handsome and his family’s definitely going up in the world. But you’ll find all that out for yourself when you meet him tomorrow.”
“So soon?” Evie asks. She casts wide, panicked eyes at me, but I’m lost for words. I shoot a look at my father only to get the sense he’s deliberately avoiding my gaze.
“Well, yes,” Ada continues. “You see, he was very eager to make things official, my dear. Very eager.” She laughs, the sound like shattering glass. “In fact, we agreed to put a rush on the wedding. Darling, in three days’ time, you’ll be a wife.”