Chapter One
PENDANT EARRINGS OR hoops?
Hair up or down?
Black silk or white velvet?
Half an hour’s already passed, the clock is ticking, and no way did I ever imagine that there would come a day I’d be this...this indecisive.
I thought I’d be different, given the chance. But now that it’s happening, it’s painfully humbling, knowing that I still have some of my old-self-pride left, and that I’m just like any other girl in the world.
For the sake of true love—
I’m like all the other ordinary in the girls in the world, with no choice but to accept a one-week unpaid leave. It was that or lose my job in the accounting firm, and I have no regrets.
When you’re up against a man like Arkane, you have to grab any opportunity that comes your way.
And this...
This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me to make him see...
Im just a girl, who’s about to stand in front of a boy, with the plans to ask him to love her again...
Actually, scratch that.
First, he needs to forgive me.
And only if he does can I ask him to love me again.
So yeah, that’s the plan.
I look at my reflection on the gilded full-length mirror in my room.
It’s the most basic accommodation offered by the most basic inn in Foxtown’s most basic section—a narrow third-floor room at a place called Ms. Drum’s Lodgings for Gentlewomen in Reduced Circumstances, which is Holborn’s way of saying this is where you go when you have manners but no money.
The room agrees. Single iron bedframe, coverlet fraying at the corners.
Washstand with a chipped pitcher. A dressing table that’s actually a plank of wood under a cloth, with one candle and a silver-backed hairbrush that came with me from San Antonio.
The only grand thing in here is the mirror.
Huge, ornate, gilded, wildly out of proportion with the rest.
Which is Foxtown for you. Even the poor quarter has to look the part.
Outside, through the open window, the lamplighter is doing his rounds. The tap of his ladder against each post. The soft flare of gas catching. The shuffle of his boots as he moves on. Second lamp. Third. He’s been at it since I started getting ready, and he’s almost at the end of the street.
Like any good friend, Icelle offered to upgrade my room. But I declined. Naturally. How am I going to prove my undying love if this early on, I’m going to let my fairy best friend wave her magic wand and pay all my troubles away?
I’m tougher than that, duh.
Smarter, too.
But most of all—
I love him so much more than that.
And after six long years, I finally have the chance to prove it.
I look back at my reflection.
So let’s be strategic, I remind myself. Just because we’re talking about feelings doesn’t mean we can’t be strategic.
First, the dress: black silk can bring back memories, but what kind? Too risky. I toss it aside and go for the white velvet.
Next, the hair—
Oh.
A memory slips in.
It’s one of those rare mornings when I wake up in bed, and Arkane is still there.
I feel him before I see him. Warmth along my back, one of his arms heavy across my waist, his breathing slow and steady behind me. The room is dim, the curtains still drawn, and the light coming through them has that pale, early-morning quality that means it’s just past dawn.
I don’t move. I don’t want to. If I move, he might wake up, and if he wakes up, this might end.
But then his hand shifts at my waist, and I realize my mistake.
He’s already awake.
He’s been awake.
Watching me sleep.
I roll over slowly, and there he is, propped up on one elbow, looking down at me with those dark eyes. His hair is loose, falling forward. He’s shirtless. He hasn’t moved the whole time he’s been watching me, and somehow I know this.
“Are you obsessed with me?” I say it sleepily, teasingly. The day before was the day he had used the same line on me.
But Arkane being the enigma he is, he only smiles, and I end up asking, rather self-consciously, “What?”
“You dazzle me.”
“Ha.” Very mature, I know. But what can I say? Nineteen, allergy to beautiful men, and unprocessed childhood trauma don’t exactly make the ideal recipe for gracious acceptance of compliments.
He doesn’t laugh.
His eyes just go darker, and then his hand is moving—slow, from my waist up along my ribs, and somewhere low in me something remembers last night and lights up again—and his mouth is lowering to mine before I can make another joke.
"Arkane—”
It’s barely a word. More a breath with his name in it.
His mouth covers mine before the rest can come out.
Oh.
Oh no.
Oh—
It’s that slow kiss of his. The one he’s been teaching me all summer.
The one that starts unhurried and gets to my bones before I’ve noticed it’s arrived.
His hand slides from my ribs down along the bare curve of my hip, and my own hand is already in his hair, already pulling him closer, because apparently that’s what I do now.
I pull him closer. My body learned this weeks ago and hasn’t unlearned it since.
A sound catches in my throat.
His palm presses flat against me, low, and another sound escapes before I can stop it, louder this time, and I remember, wait, the house, his family—
His hand lifts from my hip and settles gently over my mouth.
"Silent, princess."
Whispered, so low against my ear I feel it more than hear it.
My eyes squeeze shut.
Because of course he’d do this. Of course he’d silence me with his own hand just so he can keep doing what he’s doing, and of course my body doesn’t care about his family one floor away or the servants or the early hour, because my body doesn’t take instructions from me. My body takes instructions from him.
His mouth moves to the side of my neck.
I whimper against his palm.
He doesn’t stop.
By the time he’s done with me, I’m shaking, the sheets are twisted around us, and somewhere in the middle of it I lost track of which sounds I made and which ones I swallowed, and I don’t care. He’s lifted his hand from my mouth and moved it back up into my hair, and he’s just looking at me.
Just looking.
I’m still trying to catch my breath when his fingers find a long lock and lift it.
“Your hair...”
His eyes lock with mine as he brings it to his lips, and my heart latches to my throat.
“I love the silkiness of it as I thread my fingers through them. If I ask you to keep your hair long for me, will you?”
“No.” Like I said, maturity wasn’t one of my strongest points that time, but Arkane...
His eyes only gleam.
“I know you will.”
“Why?”
Because you love me.
The memory fades, but the feelings it came with linger, and I find my hands shaking as I reach for the brush.
Hair down, for sure.
I drag it through one stroke at a time. My hair falls past my shoulders, past my collarbones, almost to my waist. I never cut it. Not once in six years, not even when the ends went rough and the stylist tried to talk me into a trim.
Outside, the last lamp catches. The street below goes quiet. The lamplighter’s done.
My hands are still shaking when I reach for my earrings, and this time it’s a lot easier to choose.
Turquoise.
Because I remember another memory—Arkane telling me that’s what my eyes remind him of.
I fasten one, then the other. They swing against the sides of my neck, cool and small.
From somewhere toward the fancier end of Holborn, a string quartet has started up. Faint, muffled through walls and distance, the kind of music that doesn’t play on streets like this one. Somewhere closer, a woman is calling her children in for the night. A cart rattles past on the cobbles.
The candle on the dressing table gutters once and holds.
And now, we’re done.
Hair down. Turquoise pendant earrings. White velvet. I stare at my reflection, but instead of seeing a dolled-up version of me—
It’s like looking into a magic mirror, and all I can see is the two of us from six years ago, and oh God—
Because you love me.
There are times, just so many times like this that my heart hurts because I just had to be so, so stupid that it’s only when it was too late—
I just had to be so, so stupid that I had to lose everything to realize I already had everything.
Because every time his eyes said those words—
Because you love me.
He would slowly run his knuckles down my cheek—
And I love you.
That was what it meant.
That was what he said.
Every time he did those things.
A look.
Because you love me.
A touch.
And I love you.