Page 79 of When Sorrows Come

“That is correct.”

“That will be on my actual body. That dress. Is the dress I’m not allowed to look at.”

“Yes,” said Stacy, with surpassing patience. “That is the dress you’re not allowed to look at but will be wearing to your wedding. Tybalt asked. I agreed.”

“I’m just going along with this because it’s funny,” said Julie.

“I think it’s sweet,” said May. “Come on. Let us get the dress on so I can fix your hair.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. “This whole thing has just been you arranging a massive ‘I told you so’ to punish me for abdicating my responsibilities regarding this wedding,” I accused.

“Yup,” said Stacy. May just laughed.

For the next several minutes, I kept my eyes closed as they poked, posed, and pushed me into the positions they wanted,occasionally instructing me to raise or lower my arms. A cascade of heavy fabric descended around me, adding another layer of snugness to the existing weight of the corset. I smelled roses. Stacy tugged at the fabric covering my back.

“Laces or buttons?” I asked, unable to suppress the note of despair in my voice.

“Both,” she said proudly.

I groaned.

With all three of them working, they were able to get me secured inside the dress in what was probably a reasonable amount of time yet felt much longer as I stood there with my eyes closed and listened to the rustling. There were no adjustments required; the dress did all that itself, reacting to Stacy’s tugging and twists. When they finally stepped away, Julie whistled.

“You clean up good, girl,” she said. “Be nice if you had any color in your cheeks, but we can’t have everything in this world.”

“You only agreed to come to the wedding to keep an eye on me for your uncle,” I accused, without heat.

“Hey. You’re going to be family now. I figured if I could help him get the wedding day he wanted, I could swallow my pride to see it happen.”

My eyes were still closed, and so I didn’t have time to react as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and yanked me into our first hug in years. Lips close to my ear, she said, “This is where I’d tell you not to hurt him, but you already have, and you’re going to do it over and over and over again, and that’s okay, I guess. That’s what you both want. You help him heal more than you do him harm, and that’s even better than never hurting him at all.”

She let go, pushing me away from her in the process. I staggered but didn’t fall off the platform.

“Here.” Stacy took my hand. “Come sit.”

“What?”

She guided me off the platform and across the room to a chair, where she put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me firmly down. “We’re going to finish getting you ready, and you’re going to sit there and put up with it,” she said firmly. “And if you have a problem with that, you can take it to the complaint bureau.”

“That consists of your mother, Evening, and Titania, in case you were hoping you’d get some sympathy from them,” said May.

I made a face. “Ugh, no thank you. I know two out of the three,and anyone who’d raise a kid like Evening can’t be someone I want to spend any time with.”

“Parenthood is hard,” said Stacy. “You know that. Maybe we can’t blame Titania for everything.”

“We can blame her for more than enough,” I said firmly. “No complaint bureau.”

“Stop talking. I need you to not be moving your face,” said Stacy.

What followed was a familiar dance, one we’d been performing as a group since we were seventeen and Stacy figured out that leaving me alone with a tube of mascara would result in mascara in my eye, notaroundmy eyes. She applied my makeup with quick, confident strokes, while May twisted and bent and teased my hair into place. The smell of roses grew even stronger, making me suspect she was using something other than pins to secure her work. With the importance purebloods place on roses, there’d been no way I was going to avoid them. I kept my eyes closed and tried to relax.

Absalom had been arrested, and we had managed to flush out what certainly felt like the majority of his people. This should be the safest possible time for us to distract the rest of the guard. With the size and nature of the crowd we had in attendance for the wedding itself, there was no question as to whether we could defeat whatever army had been raised by a king without a kingdom, however much he’d been willing to exhaust his former treasury in the pursuit of a new throne.

And even with all that being true, I was worried about the distraction we were about to provide. After all, Absalom’s entire plan had hinged on the necessity of a distraction, and while blood can’t lie, blood memories tend to focus on what the one bleeding has experienced or been thinking about most recently, which is why a lot of blood memory begins with “ow hey that hurt.” He could still have kept secrets from me, just by shoving them aside when I cut him, focusing on bigger, more important memories—which would explain why there’d been quite so much sex with Evening in what should have been more recent recollections.

Depending on his skill, it was possible the only sincere look I’d had at his plans was when I punched him, and he’d had no time to settle his thoughts.

Stacy brushed something across my lips, then stepped back. “Open your eyes,” she said.

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