The dress is gaping now, the fabric falling away from my back in a wide V that exposes skin I can feel the air touching for the first time since yesterday morning. I'm suddenly acutely aware that I'm not wearing anything underneath the bodice. The dress was structured enough that a bra wasn't necessary, which means—
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.
His fingers stop.
"Last two," he says. His voice is slightly rougher than before, though the change is so subtle that anyone who hasn't been listening as carefully as I have wouldn't notice. "Can you manage those yourself?"
He steps back. I feel the distance open between us like a change in temperature.
"I'll wait outside," he says. "Take your time."
The door opens and closes. He's gone.
I stand there for a moment with the dress hanging open down my back, the cool air raising goosebumps across my skin, and I realise my hands aren't shaking anymore.
I reach behind me, undo the last two buttons, and let the dress fall.
It pools around my waist like a deflated thing, and I stare down at it with the dispassionate exhaustion of someone who has outlasted the object of their confinement. Then I step out of it, leaving it in a heap on the floor.
I wash my face in the en-suite, brush my teeth, pull the last few pins from my hair and run a brush through it. The mirror shows me a woman who looks hollow-eyed and pale and approximately a thousand years old.
When I open the bedroom door, he's leaning against the opposite wall with his arms folded, waiting. His eyes move over me, and something in his posture relaxes by a fraction.
"Better?" he asks.
"Yes." A pause. "Thank you."
He nods. Then: "Breakfast is in twenty minutes. But before that, we need to talk about the sheets."
The directness catches me off guard. I expected to be the one to raise it, carefully, obliquely, the way I've been trained to deliver difficult information. Not like this. Not head-on, standing in a hallway with no script prepared.
"You're thinking about the council," he says. It's not a question.
"Yes." I drop my eyes from his and hate myself for it.
"You're thinking that my decision last night will have consequences, and that those consequences will fall on you before they fall on me."
My eyes shoot back to his in surprise. Because yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking, and the fact that he knows it, that he's already mapped the fallout of his own restraint and calculated where the damage will land, destabilizes me in a way I didn't anticipate.
"They'll want the sheets," I say. The words come out clinical. Factual. "That was part of the arrangement. If they come back clean..."
I don't finish the sentence. I don't need to. We both know what clean sheets mean in this world. Rejection. Failure. A bride who wasn't wanted, or worse, a groom who couldn't perform. Either version ends with my father's voice in my ear telling me I've embarrassed him again.
Killian watches me for a moment. His expression is unreadable, but his eyes are not. There's something burning in them, low and steady, like the pilot light of a fury he's keeping in a very tight box.
"Come with me," he says.
He walks back into the bedroom. I follow because I don't know what else to do, and because the way he said it wasn't a command. It was an invitation. The difference is thin, but I've become an expert in thin differences.
He stops at the side of the bed and looks at the sheets. Clean, white, smooth. Undisturbed except where I lay on top of them all night in a dress I couldn't remove.
Then he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a knife.
It's small. Folding. The kind of blade a man carries out of habit rather than threat. Well-used, the handle smooth with wear. He opens it with a quiet click.
I don't flinch. I'm too tired to flinch, and too curious about what happens next. Too aware that if he wanted to hurt me, he's had ample opportunity and hasn't taken any of it.
He looks at me. Holds my gaze for a full second, making sure I'm watching.
