Selene Verita.
For a moment I stood in the doorway and just breathed.
They had returned it while I was gone.
A girl could be watched, summoned, questioned, fitted, paired, and still not be present for the return of her own inheritance.
I closed the door.
The quiet pressed in.
I shrugged out of my coat. My mother’s brooch was pinned inside the left lapel where I had moved it before leaving Caspian’s rooms, not hidden exactly, but kept close enough that I could feel the metal when I breathed.
I touched it.
Then I opened the box.
The dress lay folded in the tissue like before.
Both sleeves were gone now.
Removed cleanly, with a care that made my throat ache. The lines at the shoulders had been reshaped, cleaned of every sign of the band they had tried to fasten over my Mark. Cosima had preserved every bit of its beauty.
She had done it well.
That was the insult: they could take things from my mother, alter them, return them, and still make them beautiful enough for me to want.
At least it had been Cosima’s had that did it.
I tried to picture my mother in it.
Not the woman I remembered at five, tired at the mouth and quick with her hands, but Selene Verita at seventeen. Green silk. Silver branches. Hair pinned back from a face that might still havebelieved a beautiful room could mean something beautiful was about to happen.
Had they painted her mouth? Had she let them? Had she looked into a mirror and recognized herself, or had the dress already begun turning her into the version of Selene the Council needed witnessed?
She had walked into her formal dressed for a future they would cut short because it wasn’t the one they had planned for her.
This dress had belonged to the girl before that woman died.
The girl before me.
The girl Zenith had dressed beautifully before it learned how badly she would disobey.
I sat on the bed.
Then I stood again because sitting near that much history felt like letting it climb into my lap.
The basin lit at half past seven.
A softer gray than the usual silver-white.
Words formed across the surface.
Formal preparation. Remain in quarters until attended.
“Absolutely not,” I snapped at it.
The water did not answer.
