“Am I?” She wiped just under her eye with her fingertips. Thankfully, her face was dry. “I don’t really cry.”
“Crying’s good.” He reached up to cup her cheek, thumb sliding over her skin. “What happened next?”
“I let myself imagine a different life. When I was reading, it seemed like the stories were set in another world, even the ones meant to take place in this time. This reality. Then I started to think of them as real. As something that was fiction, yes, but possible. Not impossible like magic and dragons.
“Once I did that, instead of a future as a pious wife to a boy from church, I imagined myself traveling the world as an archeologist, a scientist. A translator for the UN.”
“I’m sure you could have done whatever it was you put your mind to.”
“Maybe, but it was all in secret.” Nikolett made a wry face at Gus, who still knelt at her side. “Until the day my father told me I was going to marry.”
“Arranged marriage?” Gus’ tone was disgusted.
She hid a wince. Closed-mindedness about arranged marriage and polyamory was not a good sign in a potential member.
“I have no problem with arranged marriage,” she said carefully. “Matchmakers are, and have been, important members of a community.”
Gus rose, returning to his seat. “True. But I’m surprised to hear you defending it since I assume you didn’t want the marriage your father arranged.”
She refused to feel defensive. “You’re right. I didn’t want it. Because it wasn’t really about marriage. It wasn’t about my father finding a good man to be my husband.”
Gus searched her face, and with an almost-shocking quickness, he got it. “He sold you. Maybe not for money but for something.”
“To pay a debt,” she replied softly. “He’d commissioned a beautiful censer made of brass and gold. There was filigree. Inlay with jade and copper. Made by a renowned artist in the Carpathian Mountains.”
“Your father was a priest?”
“No. He was trying to get elected to the…parish council? I think that is the closest term in English. Looking back, it’s clear that council members were important people outside ofthe church. Those with influence and money, not just those who were the most devout.”
“He didn’t realize that?”
“Maybe he did.” She shrugged. “But he thought the censer would impress everyone and they would make him a councilor.”
“But he couldn’t afford the censer, so he sold you.”
She clicked her tongue in mock censure. “Sold? No. What he planned was divine. Holy. According to my father, the artist was so impressed by my father’s dedication to his faith, he decided he wanted to be like my father, and to do that he needed a pious wife.”
“Wasn’t just money, you were a religious talisman.”
“Exactly, and well put. I sometimes have trouble finding the words for it.”
“I’m going to assume it was a man far too old for you.”
“Of course.”
“And that he saw you as a possession rather than a person?”
Nikolett’s eyes narrowed. “You sound almost like you’ve had experience with this.”
He sighed, hand over his heart and gaze solemn. “I too was traded for religious regalia at a young age.”
Nikolett burst out laughing, the joke wholly unexpected.
Gus grinned, though it faded fast. “Actually, I watched my father treat my mother like a…plaything. She wasn’t a person with feelings and a life. She was this toy he played with every time he passed through.”
Nikolett made a soft noise of sympathy.
“And she never hated him. Never saw how wrong it was the way he treated her. Even after we figured out he gave me a fake, joke name because I wasn’t a person to him either, she didn’t hate him.”
