Page 10 of Queen of Nothing

I make a face. Odd design choice.

“I loved him,” she says, soft, and I wish she wouldn’t speak at all. “Even when he wanted to explore others. I learned that if I fought with him, I would have his attention. He couldn’t stand when I refused to acknowledge him. But when we were good, he wandered. Every time.”

Still, I stare at the popcorn ceiling, speckled with chipped, peeling paint.

“Year after year, he changed more and more,” she says, then pauses to sigh, and I don’t know why she’s still talking to me. “I fought to just hold onto the part of him I once knew. Then this past year, I realised, I never knew him. I was only just starting to see him for who he really is. He’s just like Dray, isn’t he? He only smiles more.”

The huff deflates me, annoyed.

I shift to sit upright and slump my tired weight against the headboard.

“And what does any of that have to do with me?”

Serena turns a molten silver glare my way. “Oliver would take anything from me, including my child. I can’t let that happen, Olivia. You have to see that. If I told you the truth before we left, and you decided not to come with me, I couldn’t be certain that you would keep my secret.”

A strand of tawny hair falls over my face. I tuck it behind my ear, a little too harshly.

I get it. I get her reasoning.

It makes sense from her perspective.

An out of wedlock child is no safe thing in our world. I know that, but what I don’t know is why she thought she had the right to drag me into it with the promise of freedom, when now, I’ll be something of a nanny.

I never even wanted my own children. It was merely an obligation to be fulfilled.

Now, the hopes and thrills of a life away from the Videralli are spoiled.

And Serena is overlooking something.

She did to me what everyone else does.

She made my decisions for me.

Serena’s smile is tight, a grimace that she lifts to me, the corners of her mouth pinned to her cheeks. “If anyone in our society understands what it is to have everything taken from you, to have no autonomy, it is you.”

I shake my head with the disbelief of it all.

The audacity of it.

Serena roped me into helping her with her unsanctioned offspring.

Not conceived on the night of the wedding ritual, with the blessings of the gods, with magic at its strongest, and not within the magical sanctity of the marriage.

Children, like the one inside of her, are thought to be weaker, unhealthier, or even a spit in the face of the gods.

Those children are tucked away.

Somewhere like the Home for the Misplaced, or to be raised in a gentry home, I don’t know exactly. But yes, Serena is right—Oliver would remove any bastard child of theirs, no hesitation.

And it wouldn’t be my place to say anything about it.

“I did not mean for this to happen,” she says, soft, and it sours my insides.

The tone of my voice is as cold as my thoughts, “You weren’t taking the brew?”

Her voice comes thick with unshed tears, “I reached my lassitude limit. I didn’t connect the dots.”

I turn a blank stare on her.