She’d been too afraid to sneak into her mother’s room again, and when she nervously asked after her, her mother was always ‘indisposed’, according to the maids.
“What’s wrong with her mother?” Stefan blurted. Unlike the princess, he had decided rebellion was far more enjoyable than playing at perfection.
“She’s … oh Mistress, she’s dying!”
That got the princess to her feet. Sweat bloomed on her palms and at the back of her neck. Her eyes prickled, but she blinked that feeling furiously away as the maid led her along the hallways and up the staircases towards the room she’d been avoiding.
The door swung inwards, and the thick, cloying smell of blood almost had her gagging. What was happening? Her feet refused to move.I don’t want to know … don’t want to see …
“Promise you’ll care for her, like a daughter,” her mother’s thin voice quavered. “Promise you’ll treat her the same as him.”
What did she mean? Who was she talking to?
“I promise.” The greasy tone of her uncle was laced with deceit, and it made the princessshiver.
“Good.” Her mother sounded further away, her voice reedy. “Let me hold him, please. I’d like to hold him once.”
Hold who? What was going on in that room? Against her better judgement, the princess’s feet moved, carrying her through the open door, into the dank room.
Blood soaked the bed. So much blood, it stung her nostrils. And her mother, paler than a ghost, naked and smeared with blood, holding a mottled, red lump. A lump that, as she watched, emitted a thin wail.
“Meet your new brother,” her uncle murmured unctuously, his hand resting where her neck met her shoulder, giving a squeeze. “Now the family has a proper heir.”
And suddenly the princess understood what her uncle had been doing on top of her mother all those months ago … well, she’d understood the what of it, even back then. But now the why made sense.
She watched, numb, as her mother’s life slipped away in that awful pool of blood, as the baby was handed off to a maid and she was ushered from the room to mourn another parent with no one to share her grief.
It wasn’t until years later, when her little half-brother started spending time playing in the corner of the school room where she and Stefan met their tutor, that she started to realise that he was different.
He didn’t play with the toys in the corner. He created organised groupings. He lined them up neatly. He matter-of-factly explained to the maid who accompanied him the differences between dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, the Jurassic and the Triassic. He would go into wild, screaming rages if anyone so much as bumped his orderly groupings out of their perfection. Sometimes, when he was agitated or excited, he flapped his arms frantically.
He didn’t like to be touched. At least, not the way the maid tried to touch him, with gentle strokes of his head or pats on his hand. Midway through one of his meltdowns, the tutor raged that the older children couldn’t possibly learn with ‘that retard’s racket’. The maid dithered, patting her hands all over the boy and only making his distress worse. The princess, fed up with everyone being so stupid, approached him. She wrapped her arms around his skinny frame and squeezed him tight.
His screaming quieted, then stopped. “Just breathe,” she whispered to him. And he did, the tension in his little body slowly relaxing away.
He sought her out often after that, when he was feeling anxious or overwhelmed. And she hugged him hard, and it helped. And when her lessons were over, she wouldlet him talk to her about the things he found interesting. She was fascinated by his intelligence.
The more the princess got to know her special little brother, the more she loved him. And the more she loved him, the more she feared that her uncle would realise that he was different … and he would not appreciate him for who he was, the way she did … and he would be taken from her too, just like her mother and her father …
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Blurry Selfie of Your Turgid Member
IRINA
“How long have you known Henry?” Cadence asked, sliding into the chair he had just vacated. Her smile was forced. Clearly whatever she and Henry had been talking about over by the counter hadn’t gone how she wanted it to.
I shrugged, outwardly blasé. “Well … probably not as long asyouhave.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively. “Do I detect a history between you two?”
I would get the tea from this woman one way or another.
Her eyes flashed. “Oh, there’s a lot of history.” She flipped her long, platinum hair over her shoulder. “He asked me to marry him, you know.”
I blinked. “What?”
Cadence nibbled on her lip. “We dated for years, back at university. And …” Her eyes dropped to her bag, clutched between white knuckles and resting on her lap. “Well, let’s just say there are still feelings there despite the fact that we didn’t get married.”
Oh, I had no doubt there were still feelings. On her part at least. The way she’d launched herself after him when he left the table, had watched him as he’d visibly dismissed her and walked stiffly away, made me think those feelings were very much one sided.
