Behind a Locked Door
? Ivy ?
The suite lock turns with a heavy click, and I keep my fingers on the iron after the sound fades, waiting for someone to test the handle or demand an explanation for why I’ve shut myself away. The hall remains quiet.
After a few seconds, I realize the door is still closed because I chose it to be.
My breath leaves me slowly. I hadn’t known how much strength it took to stand upright while I waited for that choice to be taken from me, but now that no one has come to take it, some of that strength goes with the air leaving my lungs.
Roman had called these rooms mine, not ours.
The distinction follows me as I turn from the door and take in the sitting room.
Morning light reaches through the open inner doorway, softening the dark stone walls and the heavy bed beyond it, made with gray wool and black furs.
The window overlooks pine trees and a pale strip of sky.
A draft moves along the floor and brushes the oversized boots still on my feet.
They look ridiculous beneath my ruined wedding gown, although I don’t look much better.
Roman’s coat hangs over white silk that isn’t white anymore. Blood darkens the hem, dirt smears one side, and the skirt is creased from the long carriage ride north. My bandaged palm throbs in steady little beats, while the vow mark beneath my sleeve burns cold enough that I can’t forget it’s there.
The rooms are plain in ways that make me uneasy at first.
The bed is too large, the hearth is too warm, and a wardrobe of dark wood and iron stands against the far wall, built for winter instead of display.
Near the window, someone has set a washstand with a full pitcher, a basin, folded towels, a comb, and a small block of plain soap.
There aren’t any perfume bottles. No silver-backed brushes arranged to catch the light. No glass jars waiting for Marissa to warn me not to break them.
A soft knock sounds at the suite door, and I freeze.
It isn’t loud or impatient. There are only two taps, followed by silence. I don’t answer.
After a moment, a man speaks through the wood. “I’ve left food outside, Luna.”
The title catches somewhere behind my ribs.
Footsteps retreat down the hall, and I wait until they fade before I unlock the suite door and open it only wide enough to reach through.
A tray waits on the floor.
There isn’t a servant standing beside it or a guard watching to see whether I’m grateful enough. I crouch awkwardly in the gown and boots, drag the tray inside with my uninjured hand, then close and lock the door again.
This time, the click doesn’t make me flinch.
The tray holds warm bread beneath a cloth, broth still steaming in its bowl, cheese, honey, tea, clean water, a folded napkin, and a spoon. It’s food meant to keep someone alive, not court food arranged so carefully that it looks afraid of hunger.
My stomach twists at the smell of the broth. I tell myself I’m not hungry, but the first sip proves my body has been waiting for permission to disagree.
Warmth moves through me slowly. I take another spoonful, then tear bread with shaking fingers and dip it into the broth because no one’s here to correct me. Halfway through the bowl, I understand that I’m starving.
Marissa would hate this meal. She’d hate the heavy spoon, the rough bread, the dark table, and the way I’m eating without anyone watching whether I look graceful while I do it.
The thought almost makes me laugh.
When I can’t manage another bite, I push the tray away. I don’t feel safe or steady, but I feel present again, as if my body has finally remembered it belongs to me.
I carry the tea into the bedroom and set it beside the washstand. Then I unwrap my palm.
The linen is clean on the outside, but blood has dried along the edges. Nora’s salve smells sharp and green. I wash around the cut carefully, and pink swirls through the basin.
The water holds altar blood and vow blood, mine and Roman’s somewhere beneath his own bandage.
The mark at my wrist pulses once.
I freeze with my hand half-submerged in the water.
No voice follows it, and no borrowed emotion presses through my mind. There’s only a cold awareness under my skin, a thread pulled taut across distance, as though something has noticed where I am and doesn’t intend to let me forget it.
I cover the mark with my sleeve. “No,” I whisper.
The word isn’t for the vow. It’s for me.
I need one impossible thing to wait until I’ve learned how to breathe in these rooms.
After I wash the rest of the blood from my fingers, I reach for the pins in my hair.
The first catches, and I hiss as it pulls at my scalp.
Pearls still sit woven through the pale twists and loosened braids Marissa arranged that morning.
I free one pin, then another, and the pearls click softly onto the washstand.
One falls into the basin and disappears beneath the pink water.
The mirror above the stand is plain, framed in dark wood with no gilding or flowers to soften what it shows me.
A girl in a ruined white gown stares back, wrapped in a black coat too large for her shoulders.
Her hair is half fallen. Her cheeks are colorless from cold and shock.
One hand is bandaged. A dark crescent hides beneath her sleeve.
I look like one life failed to keep me and another hasn’t decided what to do with me yet.
My mouth trembles, and I grip the washstand until my fingers hurt. Don’t cry.
The rule arrives before I can stop it. Don’t cry where anyone can hear. Don’t give them anything they can turn into proof that you’re too much trouble to keep.
I take one breath, then another. A knock sounds again.
I stiffen, but a woman’s voice follows before I can decide whether to answer.
“It’s Nora. May I come in?”
The question reaches the same raw place the lock did.
I wipe my face, though nothing has fallen, and cross the sitting room. My hand pauses over the latch. I can say no.
The thought makes me dizzy. My palm hurts, my wrist burns, and Nora’s eyes were sharp when she looked at me yesterday, but they weren’t cruel. I unlock the suite door.
Nora stands in the hall with a satchel over one shoulder and a folded bundle of dark fabric under one arm. Her braid is neater than mine by a merciless degree, and there’s fresh ink along one finger. Her eyes move to the tray on the table, then back to me.
“You ate.”
“A little.”
“Good. Eat more when you can.”
I step aside, and she enters only after I make room. She closes the door behind her without locking it.
Her gaze flicks to the iron lock.
“I have the healer’s key,” she says. “I use it only if you call, stop answering, or I see blood under the door.”
Despite myself, my mouth almost curves.
“You started removing the wedding paste?” she asks.
“Some of it.”
“Did the mark change?”
“I stopped before I got to it.”
“Smart.”
That single word lands harder than it should.
I’ve been called obedient, useful, quiet, pretty enough in the right light, and delicate whenever someone wanted to make me sound breakable. Smart is rarer.
Nora sets her satchel on the table. “Let me see your palm first.”
I sit, and she unwraps the bandage with quick, careful hands. The cut looks cleaner than I expected and angrier than I hoped.
“Not bad,” she says.
“It feels bad.”
“Then say so.”
I glance at her, but she doesn’t look up. “Pain doesn’t need permission.”
The words settle too close to places I can’t bandage.
Nora cleans the cut, applies fresh salve, and wraps it in new linen. When she tells me to move my fingers, I do.
“You’ll keep use of it,” she says. “Try not to strain the cut.”
Her attention shifts to my wrist.
“May I?”
I push back my sleeve before I can lose my nerve.
The crescent curves around my wrist in blackened silver, with fine branching lines slipping beneath my skin. Dried moonflower paste clings to the edges, and Nora stops breathing for a second when she sees it clearly.
She takes a damp cloth from her satchel. “I’m going to clear the rest of this. Tell me if it hurts more than it has.”
The cloth is warm. The paste softens beneath her touch and flakes away bit by bit until the mark looks less ceremonial and more like something that belongs beneath my skin. It doesn’t look painted. It looks rooted.
Nora’s fingers pause near the inside of my wrist. “Describe it.”
“The mark?”
“The feeling.”
I almost say it’s fine, but she looks at me before the lie can leave my mouth.
“Cold,” I say. “Mostly. It burns, but cold. Sometimes it pulses.”
“When?”
“When Roman is near.”
Nora doesn’t react, which means she expected it.
“Anything else?”
I look toward the suite door Roman hasn’t entered. “It isn’t thoughts. I don’t hear him, and I don’t know what he’s feeling.”
“But?”
“Awareness.” I swallow. “Like there’s a thread under my skin. I knew he was outside the carriage before he came back. When his hand hurt, mine stung.”
Nora’s gaze sharpens. “Can you feel him now?”
Heat moves through my face. Roman isn’t in the room, but somewhere in the fortress, he exists, and the mark knows the direction of him better than I know these halls.
“A little,” I admit.
Nora sits back. “I’m not naming it yet.”
I look at her. “You’re worried.”
“Yes.”
She studies the mark. “A legal vow binds status and obligation. Yours is reaching farther. I don’t know yet whether it’s settling or under strain.”
My mouth goes dry. “Is that dangerous?”
“It can be, if you ignore it.”
I look down at my wrist. “So I watch it.”
“And you tell me the truth.”
Despite myself, a small laugh slips out of me.
Nora’s expression softens briefly. “Roman knows enough to worry. Not enough to help.”
I look at the mark again. It’s ugly and beautiful in the worst way, a thing I didn’t understand when I chose it and still chose because going back would’ve meant letting everyone else decide what I was worth.
“What do I do?”
“Tell me if it changes. Cold spells, dizziness, headaches, nosebleeds, shaking, exhaustion, or anything that doesn’t feel like yours.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I may not know until you fall.”
That isn’t the answer I expect.
Nora leans forward. “Stop making pain easy to miss. That habit will get you hurt.”
“The north already has wounded wolves, missing supplies, winter, and trouble at the border,” I say. “They don’t need me becoming another problem.”
Nora closes her satchel. “Then don’t hide until you collapse.”
“I don’t know how to do this without failing them.”
“That’s honest.”
The answer comes so quickly that a startled breath catches in my throat.
Nora gives me a look. “You watch rooms. You notice who’s ignored and what people hide. Start there.”
The fire shifts in the hearth.
“It doesn’t feel like enough,” I whisper.
“It won’t at first.”
There’s comfort in how little she tries to make me feel better.
Nora lifts the folded bundle from the table. “Clean robe, nightdress, stockings. Plain and warm. A seamstress can come later if you want one.”
This time I smile. It’s small and tired, but real, and Nora notices before pretending she doesn’t.
At the door, she pauses. “Sleep if you can. Eat when food comes. Call if the mark changes.”
“And Ivy?”
“If you say no to visitors, that includes Roman.”
The mark pulses once beneath my sleeve. Nora’s eyes drop to my wrist, but she doesn’t comment.
“Rest,” she says.
Then she leaves. I lock the suite door after her, and the sound is less frightening now.
The robe is dark gray wool, soft from washing. The nightdress beneath is plain and warm. Nothing clings, pinches, or asks my body to become a decoration.
It takes too long to remove the wedding gown. The buttons fight me, the sleeves catch, and the skirt drags over the floor as if it wants to keep some claim over me. At one point, I nearly call for help.
Then I remember Marissa’s hands at my back that morning, tightening every pearl, smoothing every fold, dressing me for a prince who’d already decided not to choose me.
So I keep going, button by button and breath by breath.
When the gown finally falls, it pools around the borrowed boots in a heap of white silk, blood, and dirt. I step out of it, and without the gown, I look smaller, but I also look less like theirs.
I pull on the nightdress, the robe, and the stockings. I leave the boots beside the bed because, ugly or not, they’ve earned a place near me. The gown stays on the floor.
I carry Roman’s coat into the sitting room. I don’t know where to put it. Dropping it over a chair feels careless, while hanging it like any ordinary coat feels wrong.
In the end, I fold it over the chair nearest the fire.
The rooms look colder without it around my shoulders, and I hate that.
Later, footsteps stop outside the suite door.
The mark at my wrist pulls once.
I know who it is before anyone speaks.
A guard murmurs something too low for me to catch. Roman answers quietly, and although I can’t make out the words, the mark reacts to the sound of his voice.
He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t try the latch. For a moment, he simply stands outside the door.
Then a folded note slips beneath it. His footsteps move away.
I stare at the paper on the floor until the room seems to tilt around it. Slowly, I stand, cross to the door, and pick it up.
The note is folded once. There’s no seal, crest, title, or demand, only thick paper and firm handwriting.
No one enters unless you say so.
He doesn’t ask for an answer. He doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t remind me that the world would hand him every legal right to cross this threshold if he chose to.
He writes the promise down and leaves it with me.
My knees weaken so quickly that I have to sit on the floor.
No one’s watching him be careful with me.
That’s what breaks me. Not the altar alone, not Jace’s refusal, and not Sloane’s smile, Marissa’s voice, or Wade’s silence.
It’s this locked suite, this plain note, and a man with every legal right to cross the threshold choosing to remain on the other side of it.
The first sob slips out before I can stop it. I press my bandaged hand over my mouth, but another follows, then another. They bend my shoulders and pull air from my chest in uneven pieces, and I fold around the note as if it’s something living.
I cry for the girl beneath the arch, for the daughter who was never fully a daughter, for the mother whose name I still don’t know, and for every locked door that taught me obedience.
I also cry for the first one that doesn’t.
When the worst of it passes, I unpack the one thing I chose for myself: a worn book of old trade routes I used to read in the Brooks library when no one needed me. I set it beside the bed where I can reach it without asking.
No one comes to tell me to quiet down. The fire burns, the rooms hold, and the suite door stays closed.
Eventually, the sobs weaken into shaking breaths. I wipe my face with the sleeve of the robe and let out one small, broken laugh because Marissa would faint if she saw me using wool as a handkerchief.
Then I press the note to my chest.
For the first time since the altar, I’m not afraid of the man waiting on the other side of the door.