When our biometric bracelets had become standard accessories in Neverra, Giya’s mother had gone to Earth to take a digital fashion design class. She’d returned soon after and had opened the first boutique that didn’t sell physical clothes but digital ones, outfits that could be stored inside our wristbands, then beamed onto our bodies.
Giya worked with her mother during the long Neverrian summers, but what my cousin truly wanted to do was become a kindergarten teacher—she had an endless supply of patience and was as sweet as I wasn’t. So Neenee was presently training Veroli’s daughter-in-law, Magena, in the art of digital couture, and Magena loved it. Their customers, too, because the Huntress from Geemee Kaji’s clan injected her designs with tribal patterns and beadwork that had become all the rage in Neverra.
I accepted the beamed dress from Nana Vee, then slashed my index finger over its holographic image to apply it on my body.
Giya studied her mother’s creation—stretchy and opaque on top, gauzy and sheer on the bottom—and then her eyes flicked to mine, and a small gasp flitted past her lips. “It’s purple!”
Faeries got engaged in purple and married in red. Although you could wear both colors year-round in regular clothes, no one wore gowns of such shades unless they had something to celebrate.
Ornotcelebrate in my case.
The brush Nana Vee had been clutching clattered against the pale-green quartz. “I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend!”
I shrugged. “I don’t. I have a fiancé. Well, soon I’ll have one.”
Giya’s eyebrows gathered over her nose. “You’re getting engaged?” Hurt. She sounded hurt. Like I’d purposely kept this a big secret from her. “To whom?”
I pressed my lips together so as not to grumble his name. “It’s a surprise.”
Forever the romantic, tears surged from Nana Vee’s eyes. “Oh, Skies, another one of my babies is getting engaged.” Since she was half-fae, she didn’t have a lot of fire, so her tears didn’t plume right off her cheeks.
Nana Vee grabbed both my hands and squeezed them so tightly she stopped the flow of blood and fire to my extremities. “Which boy stole your heart?”
“Oh . . . no one stole my heart,” I replied, a bite to my words.
Nana Vee’s eyebrows quirked. “Wh-what?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss it, but in fifteen minutes—”
“Fifteen minutes?” Nana Vee screeched before jerking me into the chair.
She crouched to grab the fallen brush and yanked it through my hair. After drying the damp ends with her palms, she braided the lengths into a crown which she pinned to the top of my head. And then she applied a line of kohl to my bottom lashes, swiped mascara over my top ones, and slicked on a nude lipstick that tamed the fullness of my lips.
“Giya, grab the jewelry I laid out on the bed.”
My cousin, who’d stayed silent as though trying to make sense of my sudden engagement, pushed off the wall and strode into my bedroom, her white dress whispering around her willowy frame. She returned holding a pair of dangling earrings fashioned from amethyst cabochons sprinkled through with rose-cut diamonds.
Nana Vee speared them through my lobes, then told me to hurry, that I was already five minutes late. Sighing, I got up, beamed high-heeled sandals onto my feet, and followed Giya back onto the deck.
Before we took to the skies to join the family, and the people who thought they were about to become our family, Giya asked, “Please tell me who.”
I leaned over and whispered Remo’s name into my cousin’s ear.
Her eyes and mouth rounded in shock. “No . . .”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I tipped my head toward the field of purpleadamansshimmering like cut glass beyond the forest ofcalimbors. Even from the distance, I could see bodies milling over the fan-shaped pavilion built for regal functions. “Politics.”
And then we both soared upward, two newly appointed sentinelstailing us. My guards were swapped around so often I never learned their names. Remo’s fault. After he’d become alucionaga, he’d insisted familiarity resulted in sloppiness and had advised the Council never to assign the same person to me twice in the same month. Oh, and he’d also instructed the guards never to address the princess . . . for propriety’s sake.
Safety and propriety, my ass.It was simply another way to ostracize me from Neverrians and show off his control.
“Maybe it’ll make him nicer,” Giya said as the pavilion came into view.
I slanted her an extremely dubious look. I didn’t think binding my essence with the man who took such pleasure in ostracizing me from the people in our world would make him any kinder. If anything, he’d probably get a bigger power trip out of it.
