“Well, you were told wrong.”
One . . . Two . . . Three. She felt her smile slip a fraction, stretching slightly wider, knowing she looked completely unhinged, despite her immaculate comportment. Reaching forward, a long, slender lavender arm stretched out, the hand attached to it gripping the ivory silk of the man’s tie. It took her a moment before Silva realized the hand was hers.
The human man’s face contorted in shock and horror, but before he could brush her away, she yanked him down with a strength she had never before possessed. Blood pounded in her ears, roared in her skull. Her lip quivered, almost able to taste the metallic brine of blood on her tongue. She had a respectable life to get back to in just a few days, far away from all this.That just means there is no time to waste.His face was inches from hers.
“If you don’t give me the information I’m looking for, I will expose you.” Her voice was still high and light, Silva of the Daytime with a rictus smile, who might have been inquiring into nothing more scandalous than booking an afternoon tea. “I will turn you in to the authorities. I will go to the press. I will fuckingruinyou.” Her voice had dropped to barely more than a whisper, that of an unhinged stranger. Her shoulders jumped with her shallow, uneven breaths. She tugged the man closer until she could feel the heat of his mouth, able to taste the fear roiling off him. “I will destroy your life and your name. Your grandchildren won’t be able to hold down jobs as long as I’m around. So why don’t you just give me her name and number and save us both the trouble?”
Silva felt the resistance of his shoulders as he pulled back, attempting to disengage her grip, to no avail. The man’s face was red, a vein popping slightly at his temple as his fingertips scrabbled at the marble countertop, and she could nearly see him mentally calculating the cost of giving up his illicit contact . . . or finding out if the extremely demure-looking elfcurrently holding him in a death grip would make do on her threat. It was just a bluff, buthedidn’t know that.Watch the way they hold their eyes, dove.
“Fine,” he spat, stumbling a bit as he lurched backward, once she released the tie. “I only have a phone number. You’ll have to call her yourself.”
Silva gave the man an angelic grin, the hand that had gripped him coming to rest on the swell at the front of her dress. “A phone number is all I want.”
* * *
She had always known motherhood would change everything. It was the future she had been prepared for her entire life, the end destination of her roadmap. Create the illusion of perfection, marry well, and then focus all of her efforts and energy on the attainment of the crowning achievement of Elvish society — a perfect Elvish child of her own. And then — start the cycle anew with the next generation, teaching her own child the same.
She had always known motherhood would soften the edges of her existence, but Silva suspected she ought to be a bit offended by just how much she was currently getting away with, now that her status in the community had changed.
It seemed that overnight, she had gone from a spoiled, tantrum-throwing housewife, her whims unmet and her capricious wants kept firmly in check, who was neither upholding her commitment to the community nor making her husband happy, to one who was cosseted and cared for, her every passing fancy secured, her tantrums hand-waved away as a fit of hormonal pique.
She’d gotten lucky, again.
Lucky, or else she was still a marionette in her puppet play, Silva considered, the strings being pulled by something largerthan herself, larger than she could hope to understand.There is a kiss of fate upon you, I think.
She’d woken in the hospital. Unlike her multi-species hometown, which she had been foolish to leave, she now admitted, there was no multi-species health system here. Healers had served the Cambric Creek community for generations, but here, in this boring beige wasteland she was forced to call home, the nonhuman population had to be satisfied with a mere wing.
A wing of their own, but not doctors of their own. She’d been frustrated upon waking to find humans attending to her, but quickly realized that, too, was its own form of luck.
She had been delirious, they said. Babbling things that made no sense. Dehydrated, malnourished, suffering the effects of mild hypothermia. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost the baby she was carrying, they’d told her, a surprise to all. Silva was a professional liar by then, but this was also the first time her little flutter was being recognized by the wider world, and she had no difficulty weeping over the news.Your child will fail to thrive and die. The Queen’s voice was a sharp denouncement in her head.You haven’t been taking care of yourself, and that’s why she hasn’t been growing.
Tannar had been beside himself.
He blamed himself for what happened, had been blamed in turn by her parents, the blame cascading into anger from his family, everything he’d told the police when she had first disappeared painting a vivid picture of neglect upon her miraculous return home, considering her condition.
She had lost a pregnancy earlier in the year, he told the police. Had been depressed. Not acting like herself. She had been excitable and irrational, quick to tears and anger, nothing at all like the Silva of the Daytime he knew, and he’d feared she had possibly done herself an injury.
“And it never occurred to you at any point in the last eight months that she might need to see a doctor?!” her father had raged, as her mother and grandmother sat beside her hospital bed, clutching her hands and sobbing. “Thatyouhad a responsibility to her, as per this marriage contract, past your own selfishness? Not that I actually believe you have any decent doctors in this hole.”
She may have been a snob, Silva thought, but she came by it honestly.
The human doctors had been quick to placate the out-of-town elves, so unlike the passive nonhumans they were used to, assuring her parents that her disappearance was likely a result of her delicate condition. She had gone out for the day and, in her dehydrated state, had gotten confused. Silva feigned amnesia, professing that she had no idea what had gone through her head, where she had stayed, only that her bank account had a sizable amount of money gone, and she was glad to finally be home.
The lie wouldn’t have stuck on its own if she hadn’t had the genuine medical diagnoses to back up her befuddled state. She wasn’t eating enough. She was anemic. The baby she wasn’t even aware of was depleting all of her nutrients, and she herself had been such a poor cook that she hadn’t realized how lacking her diet had been.
“There was meat in the garage,” Tannar had confessed woodenly. “I found it after . . . after. We hired someone for food prep; she must not have realized we don’t eat meat. That’s probably why you kept getting sick.”
Silva had walked the goblin through what they did and didn’t eat herself, and she felt a twinge of guilt that the woman would likely lose her job, but not enough to dissuade him.
Between the anemia, the dehydration, and the fact that she’d evidently been wandering around in the cold, it was all Tannar could do to prevent her parents from packing her up right thenand there, whisking her back to Cambric Creek and terminating her marriage contract. Once they had left, nearly a week later, Silva wondered if she ought to have let them do exactly that.
And then what? Go back to Cevanorë? You’ll practically be chained to your bed. You’ll never have an opportunity to keep looking for him. You’ll be a mother in the enclave; you’ll never have a moment alone again. And he’ll still be there, in every corner, on every street. Memories that you won’t be able to escape, and you’ll never see him again.
No. She wouldn’t do that. She had run away for a reason, and that reason still held true. Silva of the Daytime was a mouse, but she was the mouse they had come to expect, the one they accepted, safe and secure as long as she acted out her part.
It was ironic, she thought, that the first slip of her mask, the first peek Tannar had received of Silva of the Nighttime, he’d assumed she was suffering a major medical event and had reported her disappearance to the police as such. She wondered if he had told them about the bite.Probably chalked that up to anemia, too. No one will everseeyou again if you quit now.
The realization hit her that first afternoon after her release from the hospital — once she’d been solicitously tucked under a quilt on the sofa with a snack, her water, a cup of tea, a book, her tablet, and the television remote — that Tannar was operating under the new assumption thathewas the father of the child she was carrying. This was a whole new level of deceit, one she’d not counted on, crueler than she would have liked.Are you really going to do this to him?
