I lie in the dark and think about her hands. The way they trembled slightly when she dropped onto the edge of the bed. I saw it through the closing gap of the door, a half-second glimpse that I wasn't supposed to catch. Her hands pressed flat against her thighs, fingers splayed, trying to stop the trembling through force of will.
I stare at the ceiling and feel the ember in my chest pulse.
Tomorrow I will sit across from her at breakfast and begin the work of showing Katya Lazovski that not every man in her life will treat her like a means to an end. That she is allowed to occupy space without earning it. That her voice has value beyond obedience and her mind has worth beyond compliance and her body belongs to no one but herself, contract be damned.
Katya
I don't sleep.
Not really. Not in any way that counts. I drift in and out of a shallow, restless half-consciousness that feels more like sinking than resting, my body exhausted but my mind refusing to shut down. Every time I close my eyes, I see him standing in the doorway. Every time I start to go under, those six words drag me back to the surface.
I don't take what isn't given.
I've turned them over so many times they've lost their shape. Rearranged them. Searched for the hidden meaning, the trap door, the angle. Because there's always an angle. My father taught me that before he taught me anything else. People don't give freely. They invest. Every kindness is a deposit. Every gesture is a loan. And eventually, always, they come to collect.
So what is Killian Orlov collecting?
The ceiling stares back at me, pale and unhelpful.
At some point during the night, I tried to take the dress off.
The dress my father chose, the dress that has been slowly strangling me since ten o'clock this morning, has forty-two buttons running from the nape of my neck to the base of my spine. Forty-two small, fabric-covered buttons set into tight, hand-stitched loops, each one requiring the kind of precise,backward-reaching dexterity that is functionally impossible to achieve alone.
I know this because I spent twenty minutes trying.
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with my arms twisted behind my back, fingers cramping, shoulders burning, managing to undo exactly six buttons before my hands gave out. Six out of forty-two. Enough to loosen the collar, not enough to free myself.
The irony is not lost on me. My father put me in a dress I can't remove without help, and my husband left me alone.
I considered cutting it off. There are scissors in the sewing kit I packed, one of the few practical items I managed to fit into my single suitcase. But something stopped me. Not sentimentality. I have no attachment to this dress. It was chosen to advertise my virginity, not to make me feel beautiful. But destroying it felt like an act of rebellion I hadn't yet earned, and old habits are difficult to break when you're standing alone in an unfamiliar bathroom at two in the morning.
So I kept it on.
I'm still wearing it now, lying on top of the bed in a cage of white fabric, my hair half-collapsed from its pins, my makeup smudged into shadows. The sheets beneath me are smooth and clean in the way they weren’t supposed to be.
The sky outside the window is shifting from black to grey. Dawn, or close to it. I don't know what time it is. I don't have a clock in here and my phone is in my suitcase. Getting up to retrieve it feels like more effort than I'm capable of right now.
I stare at the ceiling and think about what happens next.
The sheets.
The council expects evidence. That was explicit in the contract; consummation verified, proof provided. The medievalperformance of a tradition that reduces a wedding night to a transaction and a woman's body to a receipt.
He didn't touch me. The sheets are clean. And when someone comes to collect them, they'll find nothing. No blood. No evidence. No proof that the arrangement has been honored.
And the first person to suffer the consequences of that absence won’t be Killian Orlov.
It will be me.
Because that's how it always works. The man refuses, and the woman is blamed. He'll be seen as disinterested. I'll be seen as insufficient. Not appealing enough, not compliant enough, notenough. My father will hear about it within days, and the shame he’s been trying to scrub from the Lazovski name will come flooding back worse than before. Now his daughter isn't just the sister of a traitor, she's the bride who couldn't even manage to be taken on her wedding night.
The ceiling offers no solutions.
I close my eyes and feel the dress tighten across my ribs as I breathe.
The knock comes when the light through the window has shifted from grey to pale gold
I sit up. The dress crumples around me, the skirt twisted from hours of restless shifting, the sleeve creased where I lay on my side. I must look exactly like what I am, a bride who spent her wedding night alone and awake and still trapped in the costume.
