7. Sienna
CHAPTER SEVEN
SIENNA
My cousin married into the Aurelius dynasty on a Tuesday.
Only dynasties could make a weekday wedding feel like a coronation.
The ceremony was held beneath a glass canopy at the Bellemere eastern estate, with flowers imported from other countries.
Enough gold detailing to make the whole afternoon look like sunlight had been forced to behave.
My cousin looked beautiful. I hated that my first thought was not happiness.
It should have been.
Elodie had always been kind to me in the careless way, that successful girls were kind when they had never been made to feel like a debt.
She kissed my cheek before the ceremony and whispered that my dress looked lovely, and I told her she looked like a painting.
She did.
A perfect dynasty painting.
By the time she reached the end of the aisle, her father was already being congratulated by men who measured daughters in treaties and sons in bloodlines.
The Aurelius merger was a good one.
No.
It was better than good.
It was clean, profitable, politically elegant, and it brought medical shipping corridors back under Bellemere influence.
Everyone was thrilled.
My uncles toasted until their faces turned pink. My father smiled so widely he looked young. Even my mother congratulated Elodie’s mother with both hands and a kiss beside the cheek.
But her smile had sharp edges.
Because Elodie had done what I had not.
She had converted herself from daughter to asset without delay, scandal, or a fiancé who looked at her like breathing near him was a crime.
By dinner the next night, my mother’s resentment had turned sharper.
It was a family dinner, which meant no outsiders, or protection from people who might pretend not to hear.
Just us.
My father at the head of the table, glowing with pride.
My mother beside him, cold with resentment.
My three sisters seated with their husbands. My two brothers with their wives. Children upstairs under nanny supervision.
And me.
Twenty years old.
Unmarried.
Still failing to turn a debt into an alliance.
Candles burned down the center of the table between arrangements.
Staff moved silently around us while my family discussed Elodie’s wedding.
“It was a spectacular match,” my eldest brother, Julian said, slicing into his lamb. “Aurelius gains ports, we regain corridor voting power. Very clean.”
“Her father negotiated beautifully,” my second sister added.
My father smiled into his wine. “He did. Though Elodie made it easy. No delays.”
My fork paused over my plate. The first little hook.
“Some daughters understand timing.” My mother did not look at me when she answered.
I looked down at my plate.
My youngest sister, Sabine, shifted uncomfortably. She was six months pregnant and still sweet enough to hate cruelty when it happened in front of her, even if she didn’t know how to stop it.
“Mother,” she said softly.
“What?” My mother lifted her glass. “I’m complimenting Elodie.”
No one believed her.
Everyone knew exactly where the blood was on the floor. They simply stepped around it.
My father turned toward me then, still wearing that bright, terrible pride from everyone else’s success.
“Sienna, has Jamison set a date?”
My stomach twisted.
“No.”
My mother gave a small, humourless laugh.
“Not yet.” I added quickly.
My father’s smile thinned. “Not yet.”
“He’s been busy,” I said, hating myself as soon as the excuse left my mouth.
My eldest sister looked at me with something close to pity.
Busy.
Jamison was always busy. Busy making me stand beside him, forgetting me at resorts. Too busy to marry me.
My father set down his wine glass. “The Crows are not a family one keeps waiting.”
My father’s disappointment came dressed as strategy. But over the years it made it harder to hate.
“Damius Crow is not a patient man,” he said.
The name changed the room. Even my brothers went still.
Jamison’s grandfather.
The old monster in Villain.
Who should have looked ancient but did not, because the Crows owned enough biotech, cell alteration, and banned private medicine to make time itself negotiate.
He was old enough to have buried rivals whose grandchildren were now grey. Yet every image I had ever seen of him made him look barely sixty.
No one in Harlan said his name casually.
No one in Villain did either.
My father continued, “Your grandparents made commitments to the Crows that cannot simply linger forever.”
My fingers tightened around my fork.
My grandparents. The dead people everyone spoke of with reverence when they wanted inheritance. They had gone to the Crows decades ago. Borrowed influence. Protection, with capital.
No one had ever told me the whole truth.
I only knew enough to understand I had been promised before I was old enough to know what promise meant.
The debt needed settling.
I was the settlement.
That was untrue…my blood was settlement.
My mother leaned back in her chair. “Every month this drags on, we risk Damius changing the terms.”
“I can speak to Jamison,” I said.
The table went quiet. My father looked at me with hope so sudden and misplaced it hurt.
“Can you?”
My throat closed. Could I speak to Jamison?
I could stand beside him. Make him look approachable to strangers.
But speak to him?
“I can try,” I said.
“Trying is what girls do before they become useful.” My mother added.
“That’s enough.” Sabine whispered.
Mother ignored her.
“You have to understand, Sienna.” My father rubbed his thumb along the stem of his glass. “Sons carry the dynasty forward. They preserve the name. Inherit, produce heirs, maintain the primary line.”
I nodded because every dynasty daughter knew this speech.
“But daughters,” he continued, gaze moving around the table to my sisters, “daughters are how influence grows outward and returns stronger. A good marriage is not a loss. It is a corridor back to the father’s house.”
My eldest sister looked down.
My brothers did not, they had the luxury of being carried forward.
My sisters had been sent outward. Married into families that widened Bellemere reach, then brought trade, votes, influence, and heirs back under my father’s pride.
They had done their duty beautifully.
I would not.
The Crow marriage would not work that way. Crows did not merge. They absorbed. Whatever wealth moved through me would not flow back to Bellemere.
It would not stay with me either. Unlike my sisters. It would become Crow. My name, my dowry, my body, my children if I had them, my future.
Everything settled the debt.
Nothing returned.
“With the Crows, we don’t gain a daughter’s corridor. We close a liability. That is all.” My mother said it aloud because she had always enjoyed turning thoughts into weapons.
My cheeks burned.
A liability. Not a wife building alliance, or creating influence. Just the pretty ribbon tied around an old debt my grandparents had no right owing to monsters.
“I understand,” My voice sounded calm.
Mother looked at me sharply. “Then why are you still unmarried?”
My fork slipped slightly against the plate. No one answered for me. Because they didn’t want to say it.
Jamison didn’t want me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
My mother’s disappointment was immediate. “That is not an answer.”
“No,” I said softly. “It isn’t.”
The dinner continued after that. And in the end I went upstairs with a headache that was not entirely fake.
The next morning, I went to ballet practice.
Pain was easier when it belonged to the body.
Madame Aveline corrected my alignment sixteen times before noon and told me my fear had moved into my shoulders.
I wanted to tell her fear had moved into everything. Instead, I adjusted my posture and tried again.
Between practices, I went to the Harlan Human Art Gallery. It was not called that officially.
Officially, it was the Harlan Museum of Classical Human Craft.
Everyone called it the human art gallery because everything inside had been created by hand before convenience swallowed the world.
Paintings with brushstrokes still visible beneath glass. Sculptures carved from stone, not printed from composite.
Old sketches where the artist’s mistakes remained in the paper like fingerprints.
I loved it there.
I loved that nothing moved unless a person moved it.
No holograms, adaptive lighting changing to flatter donors. No AI-restored compositions, or perfect replicas of extinct techniques made in minutes by machines that did not understand wanting.
Human discipline.
I entered through the side hall. I probably looked too plain for the gallery’s polished marble.
The old Harlan wing was nearly empty.
That was my favourite part.
I walked past oil landscapes and the glass case full of hand-bound books no one was allowed to touch.
Then I found my favourite painting. It was small compared to the others.
A girl in a yellow dress seated beside a window, her face turned away from the viewer, one hand resting on a closed book.
The brushstrokes around the window were rougher than the ones on her dress.
You could see where the artist changed their mind, the shadow had been deepened of the girl’s shoulder that had been softened after the first attempt.
I loved that most.
The evidence of trying.
I stood in front of it for a long time.
“What do you think of this one?” A voice spoke beside me.
Male.
I did not turn right away.
I was used to men asking questions in galleries when they did not want answers.
They wanted to be seen asking a pretty girl to say something charming so they could correct her.
But I loved the painting too much to give it a polite lie.
“I think it’s honest,” I said.
The man was quiet.
So I continued, because once I started talking about art, I was terrible at stopping.
“The subject is ordinary. Maybe that’s why I like it. It’s not trying to impress anyone. But the work itself is honest. You can see the discipline in it.”
“Discipline?”