It was exposure, pure and absolute, and she had just been placed at the center of the realm’s attention by a man she could not predict and did not trust.
The selection continued.
Lucien chose four more brides before the priest called the ceremony closed. Yselle was among them, marked third, her face a mask of gracious acceptance that could not entirely hide the fracture beneath. Tavi was not chosen. Brinna was not chosen. The unchosen brides were escorted from the Hall in quiet devastation, their white ribbons cut away, their participation ended.
But Sabine barely registered the rest.
She stood in the open with her marked hand still tingling and the weight of the galleries pressing against her shoulders like physical force.
When the priest struck his staff three times to signal the ceremony’s close, the royal family rose. King Aeron left without looking at the chosen brides again. Ilyra followed, her gaze lingering on Sabine for one cold, assessing instant before she disappeared through the side entrance.
Lucien was the last to leave the dais.
He walked past Sabine without pausing, close enough that she could have touched him if she had been foolish enough to reach out.
He did not look at her again.
But she felt the space he left behind like a wound opening in air.
Halvine’s attendants moved in to separate the chosen brides from the Hall, guiding them back through the corridors in a new configuration. No longer a uniform line. Now a hierarchy made visible: Sabine at the front, the others behind, arranged by the order in which they had been selected.
No one spoke.
The galleries’ whispers followed them all the way to the bride wing’s outer doors.
When Sabine finally reached her chamber, no longer the same chamber, she realized, but a larger suite on the inner corridor reserved for chosen brides, she closed the door and leaned against it.
Her hands shook.
She looked down at the mark spreading dark beneath her skin, already settling into permanence, and understood with absolute clarity what had just happened.
Lucien Vhalor had chosen her first in front of the kingdom.
He had marked her publicly.
He had made her visible, vulnerable, and politically dangerous in a single deliberate act.
And when his thumb had pressed into her palm, when the heat had answered and the mark had bloomed, her body had felt something her mind refused to name.
Not desire. Not yet.
But recognition.
The bond had answered.
And she could not take it back.
Eight
Marked
They separated Sabine from the other chosen brides before the galleries had fully emptied.
Not roughly. The palace never used force when redirection would serve. But the attendant who appeared at her elbow moved with purpose, and the hand that guided Sabine toward a side exit rather than the main passage carried the kind of polite inevitability that made refusal impossible.
“This way, my lady.”
Sabine glanced back once.
