Chapter 8 #3
Vaasa slowed to a stop, and the music screeched to silence. Their conversation was no longer meant for only their ears. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, don’t play dumb, Vaasalisa,” Lord Vlacik crooned.
Every pair of eyes and ears focused on them, stares like hot iron on her back.
“Heiress,” she corrected. This level of disrespect was an inexcusable choice on his part, and no matter how unthreatening she needed to seem, she had been born to the continent’s most ruthless conqueror.
It would only be expected that she correct him.
She tried to pull away.
Lord Vlacik sneered, still holding her hand and her waist firmly. He turned to the rest of the room and lifted his arm, displaying her for the crowd to perceive, practically crushing her hand within his. “It will take more than dinner and dancing to convince me of this woman’s intentions.”
Lord Karev pulled himself from the wall, and Ozik lifted his chin, watching the interaction closely. A guard at the edge of the room started forward, hand on his sword, eyes moving between where Lord Karev approached and where Lord Vlacik touched her.
Vaasa ripped her hand from Vlacik’s, stepping back from him as if she’d been burned.
“Ungrateful,” one of the other Old Asteryan lords hissed from his position on the side of the room. The man’s eyes met Lord Vlacik’s, seeking approval.
This display of outrage was fabricated, she realized. Vlacik meant to gain favor, to look strong and immovable in the face of all these families. Perception was the only thing that really fueled them; the truth had always come second to the way they could tell it.
Vlacik looked down his nose at her. “Tell us, why should any of our men be forced to marry you for a throne we could take for ourselves? A woman who has already been ruined by an Icrurian?”
Ozik stood from his chair abruptly, insult carved into the lines of his face.
As she peered around the room, it seemed that plenty in the crowd agreed—to them, it was blasphemous to have to work so hard for a woman.
In their eyes, the throne should go to one of their men by default, regardless of the law. Regardless of who deserved it.
Vaasa took note of their faces. She categorized each one, considered their threat levels and where their territories lie.
She had escaped this. She had fought for a life worth living.
Yet in the absence of anything else, this instinct was as natural as breathing.
Every expression painted a picture in her mind—of what they thought, what they felt, what they were capable of.
She could practically feel every single thing in the room, some innate instinct.
Anger.
Fear.
Pride.
Lust.
Ambition.
Her eyes met Ozik’s for the briefest of moments, and the cords in her body tangled and tightened. Do something, he seemed to say. Icruria had shown her a new path, but as she gazed around the room, she found herself entirely capable of becoming what Reid had once called her.
The most insincere woman he’d ever met.
They were trying to put her in a cage, and she was going to make them pay.
So, despite it all, Vaasa fought a smile. This was familiar. This was a landscape she had been raised in.
Each of these men was about to be ruined, too.
Her eyes met Lord Vlacik’s with the most ridiculous sadness, false tears springing at her command.
One slipped down her cheek. She visibly swallowed.
He wanted to make himself seem powerful, but in that moment, she knew he was being perceived as cruel.
Impolite. Asteryans were nothing if not politically correct, and Ozik had already sold them a story of some desperate rescue, their heiress saved from the clutches of a violent warmonger.
They already believed her a victim.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said flatly, not bothering to snap back. Let them think her meek. Easily offended. That was their mistake to make. She always had been a snake in the grass.
Vaasa fled the room through double doors, stumbling into the stone hallway beyond. She didn’t look back at the dining hall. She slammed into a body, stumbling backward, and forced her eyes up.
Vaasa gasped.
Before her stood a phantom. She stared into the face of a boy who had grown into a man—hair that had once been golden but had darkened into a burnt honey, a sparse beard that had filled to frame a sharper, wiser mouth.
And though he had grown taller and certainly more handsome than the young soldier she’d known, his eyes remained exactly the same.
Like the sharpest edges of a cliff, a brown so layered with yellow it had seared itself into her mind the first time she’d seen him.
She had memorized him. There was a time when she could have drawn his every last feature with her eyes closed.
And now those phantom eyes flashed with fear.
“Heiress,” a voice called, and warning bells chimed in her head.
Vaasa spun back toward the ballroom, contorting her features into the overwhelmed, insulted heiress she had just pretended to be. Her heart was still pounding hard in her chest as she looked upon Lord Karev, his handsome face soft and concerned.
Vaasa looked back over her shoulder to find the hallway empty. No one was there where the phantom had been.
“Heiress?” came Karev’s voice again, closer now.
Vaasa pivoted. She lowered her eyes, playing the embarrassed lamb, and pretended to wipe a tear. The moment of covering her face allowed her to contort her expression back into what she needed it to be.
Lord Karev took a few steps toward her but stopped at a healthy distance. “He never should have spoken to you like that.”
“He is impolite,” Vaasa said, her voice cracking just a touch.
Lord Karev stepped closer. “You have not been ruined,” he said.
Something conspiratorial marked the way he smiled, the way he lowered his voice to secrets whispered just between them.
“I would argue you know more about our enemy than any of them could dare guess. Given the right partner, you could be a brilliant weapon against Icruria.”
Inauthenticity dripped from each of his words, so carefully positioning himself as the natural choice for that partnership.
Yet it was the slightest of openings. Despite the way she could never underestimate Lord Karev, he was a far safer choice than Lord Vlacik.
So she lifted her eyes to meet his and curved her lips into a small grin.
He tilted his head, peering around to check that they were still alone. It took every ounce of her control to stay focused on Lord Karev. He said, “Would you like to see the little scheme Lord Vlacik thought up while your brother reigned?”
That was all it took to get her full attention. Vaasa’s breath swelled in her chest as she silently nodded.
“Then I’ll send word in a few days. Join me for an evening out.”
“Where will we be going?”
“And here I thought you liked surprises, Heiress.”
She became the vision of rebellious excitement. Just a vapid little heiress who was in over her head. “A surprise it is, then.”
Lord Karev dipped at the waist, sketching a well-practiced bow, and then started back to the doors of the dining room. As he opened them, he looked over his shoulder at her. “I’ll send word,” he promised.
This was precarious. The closer she allowed Karev to get, the more capable he was of turning on her. She was under no illusions that he intended to be her partner in anything; he was the sort of man who took what he wanted, even if he made the exchange feel like a sound deal.
Yet what better choice did she have? At least for now.
“I’ll be waiting,” Vaasa agreed, and Lord Karev gave her a dazzling smile.
Through the pounding of her heart, the doors clicked shut.
Vaasa turned in a full circle, gazing around the empty hallway of the Sanctum, not a soul in sight. Where had the guard gone? Had she hallucinated a ghost?
The door opened again, and this time, it was Ozik.
“Brilliantly done, Vaasalisa,” he cooed, patting her elbow. “I think that’s enough for tonight, don’t you?”
He led her through the Sanctum, and Vaasa didn’t have the wherewithal to argue. She scanned each hall they went down, every turn they took. Even as they plunged into the night air and loaded into a carriage, she searched.
She knew she had seen him.
Roman.
The soldier she had loved when she was only a girl—and the first thing Dominik had ever taken from her.