Page 27 of Ocean of Silver

“Okay,” I agreed, my voice a little shaky. I had no idea why, but as I followed him into the hut, I suddenly became nervous.

ELEVEN

TEZYA

The wordvirginstared back at me through the paperwork as my mind whirled in a thousand different directions.

Unexplained relief.

Confusion.

Shock.

I wasn’t an idiot. She was married to the Dark Prince before coming to Lux. I felt reprieved that she wasn’t carrying his child because I didn’t know what I would have done if she was. To be honest, I hadn’t opened her file when I first got it from Semader because I was terrified. I’d been sitting on the information for days. I knew the King was planning on killing her if she was pregnant, and I didn’t know where that left me or why the thought of her dead bothered me so much. Maybe it was because I’d seen all she’d endured and believed that she deserved to be happy, at leastalive,after all of it. Maybe I was projecting my own past onto her, that it was what I hoped for myself and knew I would never get.

I was more shocked though that she never had sex with the Dark Prince. Sie must have had one hell of a willpower because I could tell from the little bit I glimpsed that he was crazy about her. During her interrogation in the monitor room, through her memories, he mentioned that he felt a pull through the blood bond, that his powers were amplified around her. That could only happen if the bond was completed, or so I thought. It didn’t make sense.

I looked up at her. She was perched on the green worn-in sofa, a frown forming on her face. She said how it wasn’t necessary, that she couldn’t be pregnant. I didn’t think she was lying to me… I just thought Sie compelled her to forget. Not that it mattered if I’d believed her or not. The King wanted it done, and there was no denying him, not unless you wanted to be publicly murdered.

Her eyebrows furrowed even further into themselves, and I couldn’t help but notice how her nose crinkled and her freckles drew closer together. Her skin had a slight burn to it from the hours spent under the sun today. She’d been so pale and on the brink of death when I found her in the dungeons that it was odd seeing her like this.

“Now do you believe me that I’m not pregnant?” she scowled as she crossed her arms across her chest. I quickly drew my attention back up to her face and tried not to notice the way her arms were pushing against her breasts. I really wished she had changed out of that black suit. Despite me brushing it off, it was distracting and revealing, and I couldn’t concentrate with her in it. The Tennebrisian bodysuit would have been much better.

“You’re a virgin?” I stupidly asked as if I couldn’t read the words on the paperwork. “But you were married?” I realized I was beating a dead horse by asking her, the proof was right in front of me, but I couldn’t help it. I somehow needed to hear it.

“I told you as much before, but you didn’t listen to me. Unlike some people, Sie’s a gentleman.”

I couldn’t suppress my laugh. “Sie isnota gentleman when it comes to this. Even I have heard of his reputation in his short twenty-something years of life. He gets around.” I thought of the memory of her crawling across the floor toward him, of his friends laughing, and the two girls draped around his neck, kissing him while she was forced to watch. I clamped down on my jaw until it hurt.

“Well, he didn’t with me.”

“Clearly,” I snorted. The man was an idiot for letting her slip through his fingers. Although I was relieved he had. She wasn’t who the prophecy spoke of. She was safe, and for some reason, that meant something. Relief flickered through me, and a small part of me was screaming that it had to be more than just relating to what she’d endured. I barely knew her, but she was slowly getting under my skin.

“What about you? Are you married or in love?” she asked. I could tell she was trying to change the subject as her cheeks turned slightly pink, and her scent radiated toward me. Embarrassment clung to her. She clearly didn’t want to talk about her virginity or her past with Sie.

“Marriages are different here in Lux. It’s not about love. It’s about who will be the best breeding partner to create a strong rank offspring. We don’t have a choice, and we only get paired within our rank anyway.”

“You can only marry someone of the same rank?”

I sighed heavily as I sat down next to her on the worn sofa, the paperwork still in my hand. “Yes. All rank fives get arranged marriages by the Council. Anyone of a lower rank can marry whoever they want, but it has to be within their own rank. Eventually, I will have to get married. It will be arranged for me with someone from Lux who is also a five. Until I am forced to take a wife though, I will keep delaying the inevitable.”

“So you don’t believe in marriages at all?”

“Not when they are forced upon you, and neither party has a say in the matter.” I turned back to face her, realizing that she had gone through the exact thing. Even though most of Tennebris allows you to marry whoever you want, they didn’t give her a choice because their High Council declared it when Prince Noren won the tournament. She probably understood more about Lux than she thought.

The news of what happened in Tennebris spread like wildfire. Although no one here knew what she looked like, the Luxian civilians knew the gist of what had happened in the Dark Kingdom. I remembered the moment I found out that a rank zero Tennebrisian flat out refused when she was announced and said no to the Council in a public manner. She only agreed when she was threatened with treason if she didn’t comply. I’d been intrigued by her ever since. I loved the idea of some girl standing up for herself, of fighting the system without even realizing it.

I was also envious of Tennebris. When I was younger, I wished I had been born into that Kingdom instead of Lux. I hated the ranking system, and I hated the Luxian Council to my core. I like that the Tennebrisian King changed every decade, that it wasn’t one fucked up family ruling and making the decisions over everyone since back on Allium. I also loved that they had more freedom than us. They could marry anyone of any rank. It wasn’t the exact freedom I wanted, it wasn’t like what the humans of Earth had, but it was something. A step in the right direction.

“Can you see now why I’m not in a rush to get married?” I said, forcing myself back into the conversation with her. I didn’t want to dwell on all the reasons I hated the Advenian Kingdoms. “Yours lasted a whopping two weeks and you didn’t even have sex, which is probably the only good part to it.”

“I don’t appreciate you joking about my marriage or my sex life.”

I looked her up and down, noting the seriousness in her tone. “You truly cared about him, didn’t you?”

“No… yes… I don’t know. I don’t think he’s as cruel as he wants people to believe he is. I hated him at first. He did a lot of messed up things to me. I might hate him forever for some of the stuff he did, but he also looked out for me… until he didn’t, when he—”

She stopped talking. I didn’t know what went down between them at the end, but I could sense the resentment radiating from her. I thought it was messed up when I learned that the Dark Prince was handing over his own wife. I’d been following them ever since I learned about her. But from what I saw of Sie, I had to believe there was more to it than anyone knew. It wasn’t an excuse though. I don’t care what corner he was trapped into, he could have found another way than to hand her over to the Lux King.

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