“You didn’t think. Great. Amazing.”
“Can we please focus on the issue at hand and not on assigning blame?” Ceridwen, the voice of reason, moved to stand between Victoria and Rhiannon.
Pru tuned out the bickering and looked at the photograph. In the brilliance of the morning sun pouring through the east-facing windows, the dark brown eyes looked particularly expressive on the glossy print, even if half the face was smeared in crimson. The paint transferred to her fingertips and stood in sharp relief on her pale skin.
Pru barely noticed it, no matter how stark the contrast or how vivid the imagery. She had seen it before, this crimson on her hands. In her dreams, two months ago, the day Rhiannon unlocked her magic.
“For what is yours, for the sin, you shall bleed.”
The words from her vision didn’t scare her. Not as much as the eyes on the picture she was holding. The beautiful, doomed ones that watched her, unseeing. The eyes she had seen all her life. The eyes she had looked into just a few days ago.
The eyes from the portrait in her father’s study.
It felt a bit surreal, all the little tendrils of information, snippets of premonitions, pieces of the puzzle that had been laid in front of her these past few months, had all led to this.
“I confess nothing quite has the allure of Europe, the French croissants alone are to be tasted to be believed…”
“Margaux was married in Europe…”
“Blackmailed on Dragons…”
“Mayor Fowler wanted the building for ages…”
Her skin crawled and she was afraid she might lose her breakfast at any moment, still Pru stuck it out and stayed with Rhiannon as the first wave of panic subsided.
Rhiannon kept throwing her strange looks, wordless inquiries about her silence, but Pru just held her, running her hands through the long curls, feeling the auburn warm her skin, sinking into the muted thrum of contained magic, letting her own settle around them, calming them both, even if Rhiannon could not feel its true heat.
“Are you okay?”
Pru nodded, hiding her face in the crook of Rhiannon’s neck. What could she say? Should she say anything?
Her father… Her own father…
Loyalty was a concept Prudence never struggled with. Her family was known for sticking together through thick and thin. They weren’t close, the Fowlers, and yet they were survivors, and family above all was expected and delivered by all.
But what was family? Her heart beat in her ears, a steady tattoo of life, of love. What a time to realize she was irrevocably in love. The love people lived for. The love people died for. What a time to realize that family was here, in her arms, even if they’d be empty soon enough.
And so there were no questions of loyalty.
“I have to run an errand, Rhiannon.”
She realized how seldom she said the name out loud, how sweet it was, how much she craved it, the taste, the feel of it in her mouth. She ran her thumbs over the sharp edges of the beloved face.
Beloved. Beloved. Beloved.
Rhiannon narrowed her eyes but dropped her arms, setting her free, and Pru wanted to scream, to fall to the floor and beg her not to.
“Hold me forever!”
But once her question of loyalty was answered, other questions rose even more stringently. She needed answers. And she needed them now.
“I…”I love you. I love you. I love you.“I’ll see you later.”
Rhiannon’s“Come what is meant,”so foreign in that sad, low voice, accompanied Pru all the way to the town hall. It could only mean that Rhiannon had figured out her “errand” was important and was sending her on her with a blessing. Well, she better use some of that blessing, then.
The guard at the massive doors smiled as she passed by him, unconcerned with the presence of the mayor’s daughter in the archives.
All the clues pointed toward the fact that she would likely not find what she had been looking for, and the absence of a divorce decree was her answer. There was a marriage license, but no divorce decree. The groom was marked as “never married” in the paperwork.
