5. A Delicate Alliance
W hen Dorian woke again, it was to Soren’s angry face.
“You went back for the girl?” he hissed.
“Oh, you’re back too, jolly good.”
“Jolly good?” Soren hit him through the covers. “You could have died!”
“Technically, I did die—”
“Permanently. Away from the goddess grotto. I’ve been sitting here for several hours wondering whether or not you’d remember—”
“I couldn’t leave her,” Dorian remarked, which was foolish but true, too.
Soren rolled his eyes .
“You don’t like Selene, do you?”
“I don’t like how obsessed you are with a girl you barely know,” Soren explained. “I don’t like how much of a fool you act because of her.”
Dorian understood Soren’s logic, but it was different with Selene.
There was something in her, a softness, a sharpness, a light.
Something. He’d died in her arms twice now.
She’d tried to save his life, relative strangers though they were.
That meant something even when she couldn’t remember.
He’d seen her at her bravest, and her most terrified.
His soul had slipped out of the world under her fingertips. Of course it would be altered by it.
Sometimes, he wondered if that was true—that her touch had left something palpable on his soul as it folded back through time, like fingerprints. It felt like it had.
“One day, you’ll understand,” he told Soren.
“I bloody hope not.”
There was no reasoning with him, so Dorian let it lie. “What day is it?” he asked.
“The 3rd day of Springrise,” Soren responded.
Selene’s engagement day.
“Ready my horse.”
Dorian arrived at Roselune Abbey ahead of the rest of the rest of the guests and wore a hole in the parlour floor pacing around, waiting for the others to arrive and for Selene to descend.
All the long ride over, he’d been struggling to find a way to get her alone, to explain everything to her.
He hadn’t yet come up with a solution. How did you explain to someone that you had been sent back in time and were desperately trying to save them from a terrible marriage without sounding like a lunatic?
He didn’t think that there was a way, come to think of it .
Finally, enough guests arrived that it was easy enough for him to slip away unnoticed.
He hovered in an alcove not far from Selene’s room.
He knew the layout of the house well; in one of his past cycles, he’d investigated Selene’s father.
He hadn’t found any evidence tying him to the Duke, though, which was just as well.
He wasn’t sure how well Selene would handle his betrayal as well as her husband’s.
He isn’t her husband, yet. Not in this lifetime.
There was still time to save her.
Selene’s door opened. She skipped out wearing the same dress as she always seemed to wear on this day—soft lavender and roses. She looked like a meadow.
He didn’t want to step on her, to squash out that lightness. But the Duke would crush it beneath his boot if Dorian didn’t try to intervene.
“Lady Selene,” he began, stepping out of the shadows.
Selene jumped. “Gods above, Lord Nightbloom, you startled me!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I need to speak to you.”
“Can’t it wait?” she asked him. “The Duke—”
“The Duke is only marrying you because he wants Nocturne Hall,” Dorian rushed.
Selene paled. “I… I think that’s unlikely, Lord Nightbloom. An estate like Nocturne Hall will mean nothing to a man like the Duke.”
“It’s not the estate he’s after,” Dorian rattled on.
It occurred to him that he didn’t need to tell her about the time travel.
He just needed to keep her away from the Duke however he could.
“It’s the mines. I know they’re empty, but that doesn’t matter to him.
He’s allied with Ashvold. He’s creating a tunnel underneath the mountains.
If he succeeds, he’ll invade the country in a single day. ”
Selene’s eyes widened, her face as white as porcelain. “I… I think you might not be feeling well, Lord Nightbloom. The Duke… the Duke would never…”
“He will,” Dorian told her. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but he will. As soon as your grandmother dies—”
“What do you know of my grandmother’s health?”
“I know she’ll be dead by the end of autumn,” he said.
Selene looked ready to cry. He cursed himself for not being more gentle. He moved forward, trying to grab her hand, but she jerked away from him.
“Lord Nightbloom, you are forgetting yourself,” she told him. “I beg you to leave me be.”
She turned and marched away from him. “Send for me,” Dorian pleaded with her. “As soon as you realise what he is, send for me, and I will come.”
She made no notion of having heard him.
Selene married the Duke as she always did, and Dorian watched.
He watched as her gaze passed over him in the temple, how she laughed at the reception, oblivious to all that would follow.
He watched as she dimmed in the following weeks and months, how the mirth dribbled out of her.
It happened faster, this time, or perhaps he was just more attuned to it.
Perhaps she was, after he planted a seed of doubt.
After the death of Selene’s grandmother, people gathered at Roselune Abbey to offer their condolences to the family.
No one except the Duskbriars and the Drakefells would be making the journey north for the funeral, but nevertheless society was honour-bound to publicly offer their support in this manner.
Dorian went too. He rarely ever passed up a chance to see Selene, no matter how it hurt.
For the first time in months, Selene didn’t look away when he sought her gaze. Instead, she politely excused herself from the rest of the group and stepped into a secluded alcove, gesturing for him to follow .
Dorian didn’t hesitate. She closed a curtain behind them.
“You were right,” she said, her voice quiet. “The minute we received the news of her death, he already started making plans to go to her estate. He didn’t… he didn’t even seek to console me. He… he really doesn’t love me, does he?”
“No,” said Dorian. “I’m sorry.”
Selene began to cry in earnest. He offered her his handkerchief and stood by her side as she wept.
“How did you know?” she asked him. “And if you knew, why did you come to me? Why didn’t you go to the King?”
“I don’t have any evidence. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“No evidence?”
“It’s… complicated.”
Selene’s tears vanished. “Dorian Nightbloom, I am married to the man who seeks to destroy the country. You will tell me everything you know, and you will tell me now. ”
So Dorian told her. He told her everything he could—halting at first, watching her face for signs of disbelief—but the words tumbled out faster than he meant them to.
About the time loops. About the decisions he’d made and remade.
About the Duke’s carefully disguised cruelty, and how he’d orchestrated the death of Dorian’s father.
About the many different versions of this conversation they’d almost had, about the one where she’d encouraged him to tell her in the next life… right before he died in her arms.
He didn’t expect her to believe him. He doubted he would have, in her place.
But she did.
She didn’t laugh, didn’t scoff. She swayed where she stood, the blood draining from her face, her lips parted like she couldn’t quite catch her breath.
Her knees buckled, and Dorian caught her without thinking, an arm steadying her waist as he gently steered her into the nearest seat.
She clung to the armrest like the world was tilting beneath her.
He crouched in front of her, uncertain, his hands twitching at his sides. “Selene…”
She didn’t answer. She just stared ahead, her eyes glassy .
“I’ll get you something,” he said, and hurried from the alcove. He found a decanter of brandy in a nearby study. His fingers trembled as he poured, sloshing some over the rim. When he returned, she hadn’t moved. He pressed the glass into her hands and watched her blink back to life.
She drank, coughed, then drank again.
She started to cry again. Soft at first—quiet little gasps that grew louder, rougher, until they shook her shoulders.
Dorian sat beside her on the edge of the settee, silent and unmoving, keeping an eye on the curtain.
Married or not, it would stir all sorts of rumours if she was discovered here with him, but he could not imagine any power on soil or sand removing him from her side.
Finally, her tears subsided. “Let me help,” she said.
Dorian blinked. “Come again?”
“Let me help you discover what you need to. I have better social standing than you and quite the ear for gossip. People are more likely to tell me things.”
“It could be dangerous.”
This didn’t seem to bother Selene. “No one tends to suspect a woman of doing anything nefarious,” she told him. “I’m a lot safer than you are, shadow-man.”
“Shadow-man?” He laughed. “You have a way with words.”
A smile passed between them. Selene sipped her drink, then her expression sobered.
“I have to ask… You and I… we weren’t… involved in some way in your past life, were we?”
“Of course not!” Dorian said, though his cheeks flushed. “You’re a married woman.”
Selene went quiet for a while, staring down at her nearly empty glass. “I don’t feel very married,” she admitted. “Does a prisoner feel affection for the bars of his cage?”
It was such a raw confession that Dorian wasn’t sure how to reply. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually.
“It isn’t your fault. You tried to stop me.”
“Do you think there’s anything I can do next time that might work?”
Selene looked down, clearly thinking. “On that day, I can’t think of anything that would have stopped me from accepting his suit other than the King himself dragging him away.
I was so enamoured with him, and the idea of being the Duchess.
It was everything I wanted. But if you ever came back earlier… ”
“Yes?” Dorian asked, learning forward.