“Kindness has nothing to do with it. You deserve this.”
The words struck a chord. Lying in her hospital bed after the accident, she’d thought it a thousand times:I deserve this.
Since then, she had forced herself to accept that it wasn’t about deserving. Nobodydeservedto have her face cut to ribbons and then have both her surgeries and naturally boosted shifter healing come up short.
The accident hadn’t been some kind of cosmic punishment for her rebellion. It was just a consequence, as natural and inevitable as gravity.
I deserve this, she tried thinking again, this time about something entirely new.
There was nothing inevitable about the Silver Council finding her a husband. It really was a judgment on her merits. And, almost impossibly, a positive one.
Even if they had just scraped the bottom of the barrel for her, it said a lot. They would never have assigned her a match if she had still been their resident screw-up.
For the first time in her life, she’d been judged andnotfound wanting. She didn’t know how to deal with that.
All she could do was nod again.
“The Silver Council,” Lady Marianne said, with the full weight of ceremony and authority behind her, “has ruled that you and Keith Ridley are an approved match.”
Keith Ridley?
She’d expected another former problem child, even if she didn’t know anyone as infamous as she had been. Or at least a stranger, chosen because he wouldn’t know enough about her background to judge her for it. Or even—though the Silver Council was supposed to be too high-minded to take appearances into account—someone else who was scarred, someone else who felt damaged.
Instead ....
“Keith Ridley,” Iris said, convinced she’d heard wrong.
“That’s right.”
“Keith Ridley,” Iris said, “is a tribute.”
“Yes, we placed him with the U.S. Marshals Service, and he’s been there for several years. He’s now with a special unit that works primarily with shifter-related crimes. He’s excelled and amply rewarded our faith in him.”
So why would you possibly want to marry him off tome?
She had to bite her tongue to keep from saying it out loud or repeating, yet again, what Lady Marianne obviously already knew: Keith Ridley was a tribute.
But hewas. Maybe Marianne could breeze past that fact, but Iris couldn’t.
Tributes were the crème-de-la-crème of unicorn society, second only to the Silver Council in terms of importance and reputation ... and almost all of them eventually took up seats on the Council sooner or later, once they came home from the outside world. There were never that many of them, and there wasn’t a unicorn alive who wouldn’t recognize their names. They were celebrities in a culture that scorned any others. The Silver Council hand-picked them to serve as the unicorn world’s gifts and ambassadors to the broader world.
There was no way in hell one of them could ever be happy with Iris Lightfoot.
“He grew up here, of course,” Lady Marianne said. “Do you remember him?”
Iris’s mouth was so dry that she was surprised she could talk at all. “Yes, a little.”
Very little. She didn’t think she’d ever spoken to him before. To the best of her knowledge, they’d never even come within ten feet of each other. He was just a vaguely glamorous figure on the fuzzy outskirts of her memory, someone who’d been pointed out to her once:See him? They say the Council already plans to make him a tribute.
“I haven’t seen him for a long time,” Iris added.
Lady Marianne didn’t seem surprised that Iris wasn’t more familiar with him. “He’s an unusual case, even for a tribute. I don’t think he’s been back here for longer than a day or two at a time since he was fifteen. But we do have a relatively recent photograph of him, a portrait from right before he was assigned to the Marshals.”
It was a large, glossy print. She handed it to Iris, who instantly worried about smudging it. She had to hold it by the edges.
The man in the photo looked handsome but inaccessible. His gaze was distant, like he was looking at the photographer but not seeing them. His striking gray-blue eyes were as cold as this awful room.
She knew what she was meant to see when she looked at Keith Ridley. Dignity. Poise. Nobility. All the traditional unicorn virtues, in other words.
