He laughs. "You'd get eaten alive."
A pause settles between us. Below, the city hums, indifferent and alive.
"It won't be like this forever, Elle," he says softly.
I turn and glare. "Right. One day, when I'm old and gray, Mother will finally decide the coast is clear."
"Sooner than that." Something shifts in his voice. A weight I haven't heard before.
"What does that mean?"
He glances at the roof door. Checks it twice. Rubs the back of his neck, and I've known this man long enough to recognize that gesture. It's the one he makes right before he does something that could get him killed.
"Your mother's been meeting with people," he says. "Important people."
"Isn't she always? Stop being cryptic."
"Elle." His voice drops. He turns to face me fully, and something in his expression shifts into a thing I've never seen on him. Not caution. Fear. Fear for me. "I've overheard calls she doesn't know I heard. I'm telling you now because you deserve time to think before she springs it on you."
.
My hands go still.
"Springs what?"
His mouth quirks, but it's not a smile. "Your mother would kill me for this. Literally bury my body where no one would find it."
"I'll protect you," I say, flexing nonexistent biceps. "Now tell me."
"She's making plans for you. The kind you don't get a say in." He swallows. "She's marrying you off, kid. An arranged marriage. Some kind of alliance with one of the families she does business with."
Holy fuckity fuck. "She's what?"
"She wants to form an alliance. The details are being finalized."
The words hit strange. Like they've landed in water and I'm watching the ripple spread before the cold gets in.
I wait for the rage. It should be here by now, the white-hot fury of knowing she's done it again, decided my entire future without once asking what I want. Twenty-six years of this. Twenty-six years of being moved around her chessboard like a piece that never gets to choose its own square.
The fury comes. It floods in hot and familiar, and I let it burn for a moment, let it scorch through my chest the way it always does when I remember that I have never, not once, been asked.
But underneath it, quieter, stranger, something else is rising. Because marriage means leaving. Marriage means someone else's house, someone else's rules, a door that might, for the first time in my life, open from the inside.
My hands are shaking. I press them into the dirt to steady them.
"When?" I ask.
"Soon. Weeks, maybe."
"And this mystery man, he'd take me away from here?"
Jeffrey shrugs. "That would be the idea."
I shouldn't be considering this. My mother is trading me like livestock, and I should be tearing this rooftop apart. But the thought of leaving this place, even in such a medieval way...
All I can think, over and over, like a drumbeat in the dark: I might finally get out.
"Do you know who?" I ask quietly.
