These Hollow Vows (These Hollow Vows 1)

“My room needs cleaning,” Stella, her sister, says, because gods forbid I do more for one spoiled cousin than the other. “The last time she did it, she barely spent any time in there, and it’s beginning to feel grimy.”

Madame V arches a brow and turns back to me. “You heard them, girl. Get to work.”

Sleep will have to wait a few more hours. I pull back my shoulders and turn toward my cousins’ rooms.

Chapter Two

THE SECOND I STEP into our shared bedroom in the cellar, Jas launches herself at me. “Brie! You’re home!” Our bedroom is little more than a storage room with a bed in it. I found the cinderblock walls claustrophobic when Madame V first moved us down here, but now we’ve made the space our own. One of Jas’s handsewn tapestries hangs over the bed, and our assortment of personal trinkets—odd stones and shiny scraps of cloth that have value only to us—decorate the top of the rickety dresser.

I hug my sister tight, breathing in the fresh linen scent of her. She might be only three years younger than I am, but in some ways she’ll always be the toddler I wrapped in my arms to rescue from the house fire.

Jas pulls back and grins. Her brown eyes are bright, and her sleek chestnut hair is bound in a knot on top of her head. My sister is my opposite—all soft beauty, like her cheerful personality. I’m all hard angles and stubborn will, with hair the color of a blazing fire, much like the rage I carry inside me.

“I heard you up there,” she says. “I would’ve come to help, but I was working on new dresses for Stella and Cassia.” She nods at the gowns now hanging on the stand in the corner.

“What’s wrong with the eighty other dresses they have?”

“They’ll never do!” she says in a mock-falsetto imitation of our cousins.

I would’ve thought I was too exhausted for it, but I laugh. Whatever the losses of my day, whatever new penalties tomorrow’s missed payment will bring, I’m glad to be home. To be here with Jas, who’s unusually chipper for this late hour. I narrow my eyes. “What has you so excited?”

“Didn’t you hear?” She has the absolute worst poker face, and her big smile reveals that she has some exciting news.

I’ve been working all day. Other than my short visit with Nik and Fawn tonight, I haven’t talked to anyone. The kind of people I work for believe the help should be neither seen nor heard. “Hear what?”

She’s practically bouncing. “In one day’s time, Queen Arya will open the doors to the Court of the Sun. She’s giving humans safe passage to Faerie to attend the celebration at her castle.”

“What? Why?”

“She wants to find a human bride for her son.”

I grunt out a disgusted huff. “Of course she does.” The fae are good at many things, but reproducing isn’t one of them, and without offspring, their lines die off—especially when so many immortals were lost in the Great Fae War. Good riddance.

“You really didn’t hear about it? It’s all the girls at work were talking about today. A Faerie Ball. We’re swamped with rush orders for new dresses.”

“You’ll have to remind me to stay far away from the portals.”

She giggles at my cynicism. “Brie! This is the Seelie Court. The good faeries! The faeries of light and joy.”

“You don’t know that,” I snap. “You don’t know they’re good.”

Her smile falls away. I’m a jerk.

The last thing I want to do right now is pick a fight. “Sorry. I’m just tired.” So tired.

“Look at your hands.” She runs her thumb across my cracked knuckles where the skin is raw from cleaning compounds. “Do you really want to be stuck in this basement for the rest of our lives?”

“Anyone who goes to that court has a death wish, Jas. You know as well as I do that there are no good faeries. Just degrees of evil and cruel.”

“Not so different from humans then.” She drops my hands. “I heard you and Madame V talking. I know the next payment is coming due, and despite your efforts to keep me in the dark—”

“I don’t want you to worry.” All I truly want is to protect her, my sweet sister with her optimism and joy, who loves me even when I’m a hateful grump. I’m not sure I deserve her.

“I know the contract as well as you do,” she says. “She keeps adding those penalties, and we’re never going to escape her without some sort of miracle.”

“And the miracle you’re counting on is beneficent faeries? I think we’d be better off going to the gambling underground and trying our luck at cards.”

She turns to a lavender dress in the corner and smooths the fabric of the deep neckline. “One of the girls I work with has a cousin whose friend fell in love with a golden fae lord. She comes back and visits with her family. She’s happy.”