Page 127 of Bride of the Midnight Prince

“She didn’t succeed?”

At that, I give a small laugh. “She tried to break them, but they didn’t even so much as crack. So she threw them in the fireplace. They’re all stained black now.”

“Where are they?”

I get up and beckon him to follow. We return to the bedroom—I cannot andwill notthink of it asours—and I pull the box from my room.

I hand it to him. He takes it, shifting his weight to one leg as he opens the lid of worn, gray velvet. Inside, the tip of the slipper’s blackened toe is visible. My ribcage tightens.

He hands the box back to me and watches me replace the lid and set it beside the bed. Then he bids us return to where we were sitting outside on the steps. Birdsong and the distant gurgle of the creek surround us. He props his foot up on one of the higher steps and leans his forearm on it.

“Tell me about your stepfamily,” he says.

I shrug, scratching uncomfortably at my elbow through my starched shirt. “What do you wish to know? When they became part of our family?”

“Let’s start there.” His penetrating gaze shifts away from me, mercifully, and focuses on the rolling lawn that disappears into forest. I can finally breathe a little easier. “You told me that your mother was lost to the Long Lost Wood when you were nine. Your father died a year later. When did your stepfamily come into the mix?”

“Well . . . after Mother vanished, Father kept hoping she would come back.” I feel the compulsion to explain that, instead of just answering the question. It is the most important part of the story, after all. That Father didn’t want to marry again. “After a year, he’d given up hope. He kept telling me that I needed a mother. At first, I thought he meant Mama would come back, but then it became clear . . .” My throat clogs and the words don’t come out.

“That he had no hope of her return, but he didn’t want you to be without a mother.”

I nod. “He met Agatha in Commington. I think he thought it was fate that she was a widow with two daughters in need of a father, and he was a widower with a daughter in need of a mother.”

He nods once. “It is rational.”

“Rational,” I huff, “until you realize that he never would have married her otherwise. He was blinded to her faults because of thefortuitousnature of their meeting—and apparently caught up in her deception. I don’t know how she hid her son from him, but she rightly knew he wouldn’t have married her if she’d had a son to inherit.”

“Your mother returned after the wedding.”

I gnaw on my lip and shove away the trembling that tries to overtake my hands. “She did. Shortly after the wedding. She looked like a ghost when she came out of that forest.”

“You were there? When she came out of Caph—the Long Lost Wood?”

Yes, I was.

“I saw her when Father brought her back home,” I say truthfully, side-stepping around the condemning truths. A shudder manages to work its way through my body. “She was a shell of the person she once was.”

I remember sitting beside her rocking chair, holding her cold hands as she stared vacantly at the wall. Not speaking a word to me. Not acknowledging me—even when I wept and buried my face in her lap. The Wood had taken too much of her soul.

“And she didn’t survive long?”

I swallow back the emotion. “Eleven days.”

“Your father?”

“Followed her to the grave but a month later.”

“You’ve lived with Lady Duxbury Vandermore and her daughters since?”

“I have. It would have been vastly easier if Father had left me an orphan,” I spit bitterly.

“Was your stepmother often cruel to you?”

“She was rarelycruel. But she did have a way of forcing my hand to do things I didn’t want to do. She always made me seem the unruly, unreasonable child any time I didn’t immediately obey her.”

Rahk shrugs. “To be fair, youareunruly.”

“You’re not supposed to agree with her!” I cry, whacking him on the arm before my brain catches up to my actions, and I yank my hand back. I stuff both hands in my lap. “I know I am a difficult person to manage.”

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