“Welcome to your wedding day, sunshine,” Yaelyn says, brushing a soft kiss over my lips that I am still way too surprised to return.
“But— And the— You planned this?” I whisper-shriek, now painfully aware of the guests starting to fill in around us. A thousand questions whip through my mind, but they’re ready for them.
Where are we? “Oh, this is where Liora and Iradil wouldreallymeet. Iradil built a portal into the pendant so they wouldn’t be found out, even if Liora was followed. And it’s where they hand-fasted.”
How long did it take them to work this out? “It took us months to find the treasure and work all this out, and you went and found it in hours, just like that. Brilliant little thief.”
How did you know the pendant would be there? “Ground penetrating radar. Humans are so fucking smart, Mischief. They have radar. That penetrates the ground.”
Is there cake? A scoff. “Of course, there’s cake, and of course, it’s strawberry chocolate chip with cream cheese frosting. Do you really think we went and tasted all those cakes for nothing?”
But… but why? “Because we love you, Lucy. Intensely and endlessly. Now, shall we get married?”
Yaelyn goes to untangle himself from me so we can stand, but a fae woman beats him to it, and when I look up at her, all I can see is a jaunty little elf hat and a bright red handprint on her ass. Well, she’s not wearing themnow—at least, not the elf hat, but I won’t speculate on the handprint, and I’m not about to ask—but that’s all I can remember.
“I saw you with a handprint on your butt,” I point out, the epitome of eruditeness.
“And now I’m your maid of honor. Up you get. It’s bad luck for the grooms to see you before you walk down the aisle. Come on, let’s get you ready.”
She hauls me up out of the ungraceful pile my men and I landed in, tosses a grin over her shoulder, and drags me away to a warm tent where there’s a vanity, a privacy screen and a garment bag hanging from one of the supports.
The fae woman flicks on a curling iron—no clue how she got it to work in the fae realm in the first place—and then sits me down in front of the vanity. She stalks around the tent, huffing, digs a brush out of a duffle bag, and finally rounds on me, pointing the brush at me.
“You! I cannot believe Vhal kept you from me! He never told me you were badass, steal-y and stabby. My absolute favorite kind of person, and he didn’t tell me. Asshole. Oh, I’m Vivienne, by the way, but you can call me Viv. And we are going to be the very best friends. You’re definitely coming to bad girl bestie brunch when you get back from your honeymoon and are able to walk again. How’s your February look?”
I gape at her in the mirror, but she just barrels on, unbothered, as she curls and pins up my hair. She and Vhalar are apparently deeply in love, despite her claim that he’s an asshole, and living in blissful sin with a master vampire and a dark demigod in a penthouse over the nightclub they own.
“Love a girl that loves her knives,” she says, and twiddles her fingers. A dagger of dark gunmetal-colored steel appears between them. She plays with it for a moment and then makes it vanish just as quickly as she made it appear. “Stab first, ask questions later. That’s how Vhal and I met, actually.”
“I stabbed Rez.”
“Atta girl.”
She carefully pins flowers into my up-do and clips a veil beneath them. I carefully inspect the gauzy fabric, never really having taken myself for a veil kind of thief, but this veil.Thisveil has to be some kind of magic because it sparkles like a clear night sky, full of stars.
“You deserve a little extra glitz on your big day.”
She does my makeup, which I’m grateful for, because I haven’t attempted it since I stabbed myself in the eyeball with a mascara wand while trying to doll myself up for date night a few months ago, and within minutes, I’m made up to perfection.
“Nothing left but the dress, gorgeous.”
She unzips the garment bag and the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen hangs inside it. Like the veil, it glitters in the low light of the tent. In the bright sunlight of the Winter Court afternoon, it’ll be absolutely dazzling. Blinding, even.
In other words: absolutely perfect.
And then it gets even perfect-er. Viv fans the full skirt apart to show me that it’s slit up to mid-thigh so I can access my dagger in a pinch if I have to.
My men truly have thought of just about everything, haven’t they?
Viv has just done up the last button of my dress when Aron calls “knock, knock!” from the closed flap of the tent. She gives me a wink and a quick hug and slips from the tent just as she lets my dad enter.
His dark eyes bead with tears when he takes me in, and he holds me at arm’s length for a moment before hugging me tightly. “Oh, Lucy. You have no idea how proud I am of you. No, no, don’t cry. You’ll ruin your makeup.”
I blink away the sting of tears as he guides me before the mirror once more. He draws something very sparkly from the pocket of his tux and carefully clasps it around my neck.
Liora’s locket.
It feels just as right, resting between my collarbones, as I thought it would. Like a piece of the legacy of the Light Bearer that I’m only just beginning to understand.
