Chapter 1
Hanna
Three years earlier
Ilook like I walked out of someone’s Victorian fetish magazine.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. On a regular day, I had a tendency to err toward the style myself, but Ireallyhad to wonder if that was what the dress designer was going for. I stared at myself in the huge, ornate mirror in front of me, blinking owlishly.
“Oh, Hanna,” my mother gushed from behind me as she adjusted the train of my cape. “This is definitely the one.”
I couldn’t recognize myself in the witch that stood before me. My life had become one obligation after another, and all I wanted to do was run away. To escape this ridiculous charade that was expected of me.
When they’d pulled it out of the tons of plastic that had covered it, they’d said that the dress was enchanted to movemagickally around me to ‘honor the Greyleaf legacy.’ To me, it felt like a spell that was meant to trap me in whatever they had planned.
Layers of pale green silk floated around me like mist, threaded with silver runes that pulsed faintly in time with my heartbeat—or maybe in time with the magick binding me to a future I didn’t choose. The corset, laced tight enough to remind me to stay quiet, shimmered with delicate embroidery of ivy and thistle—poisonous plants disguised as flowers.My mother had chosen that detail.
“A little reminder that beauty and pain belong together,” she’d told me, pinching my chin between her claw-like fingernails. I’d tried not to flinch at the words, but it had been a monumental feat.
The transparent sleeves trailed down my arms, drooping as if the dress itself was sad and feeling my regret about agreeing to this nonsense. The veil was as light as breath and smelled a little like rosemary and my mother’s perfume—which just made me want to gag.The female staring back at me looked like a storybook witch queen, regal and doomed in equal measure.
Everyone at the wedding would seepowerin this dress. AllIcould feel was the cage stitched into every seam.
My breathing was becoming erratic, and I just wanted to rip the damn dress off myself. It was smothering me and I wascertainI was going to suffocate to death.
“Just a few more adjustments, I think,” my mother was saying, whispering to the dressmaker she’d specifically hired to create this monstrosity. Her eyes were critical as they surveyed me from head to foot. “And I think you can at leasttryto lose a few pounds before the wedding, Hanna.”
The last sentence was a snap of censure. One that I wasveryused to. I’d been hearing her voice in my head like that since I was a little girl.
Stop eating now, Hanna.
No dinner tonight, Hanna.
Why don’t you start running to lose weight, Hanna?
I kept my thoughts to myself, because they’d never been welcomed by her. Telling her that I’d actually lost ten pounds since the wedding was announced—because I couldn’t force myself to eat a bite of food—wouldn’t fix anything. Nothing was ever enough and I’d never be the daughter she’d always pictured in her head anyway. God forbid I tell her I actuallylikemy body.
I’d inherited my curves from my paternal grandmother—my favorite person in the world—and my mother had never let my father forget that fact.Hisside was where all the terrible genes came from, apparently.
Instead of focusing on her, I kept my gaze on the dress, wondering if I was imagining the corset getting tighter. Sweat blossomed on my skin and I gasped, waving my hands in front of my face as my vision went blurry.
“Aw, she’s getting overwhelmed,” the dressmaker cooed. “I know, most brides see themselves for the first time in their dress and they start crying.”
She hurried over to the side-table where there was a gilded box with tissues. She bustled back, holding a couple out to me and I took them, not sure what else to do. If I didn’t, my mother would realize that it was panic and not joy that I was feeling.
“Corwin’s going to love you in this,” my mother hummed, tapping my stomach—because she always tapped it like she wished it didn’t exist. I’d always been too big for her. Taken up too much space. And I was certain that my fiancé thought the same.
She perused me from head to toe again, shaking her head. “I still can’t believe he agreed to marry you,” she sighed, mostly talking to herself. She did that often—pretending I wasn’t there. I’d gotten used to it. “He had so many options after all.” Shefluffed at the sleeve of my dress before giving my arm a hard squeeze. “You’resolucky. That kind of male doesn’t come around often. You need to become the kind of wife that he needs.”
Even with those words playing in my head—because I always had tobecomesomething since I was never quite good enough on my own in her eyes—her thin fingers digging into my arm were enough to bring me back from where I’d been losing my absolute shit.
My mother stared at me, as if waiting for something and I nodded my head, so used to her needs by now. Everyone in the family knew that my mother’s priorities were of the utmost importance, followed closely by father’s, then the servants and there at thevery bottom, under the spider that lived in the corner of the attic camemine.
There wasn’t anything I could say that would stop her criticism. I’d been trying since I was a child. My father was just as bad. Almost every day of the week, he lost himself in a bottle and didn’t come out. I wasn’t sure if he was meaner drunk or sober, since he was never actually sober enough for me to know.
“Why don’t you get her something to tame that frizzy mop on her head?” my mother scoffed, waving her free hand around my head as if my natural hair—that I’d inherited fromher—was another atrocity.
She kept hers chemically straightened and tamed, always doing more and more to her hair and face to keep herself young and beautiful. Whereas, since Iwasn’tnaturally beautiful—a fact that was well-instilled in my memory from childhood, with my mother’s constant repetition of how much I was lacking—I never thought it would make a difference to keep everything coiffed and primped.
