CHAPTER TWELVE
ANNICKFELTSTRANGE, sitting there with his family. Knowing what she did about his father, and that no one else knew it. And just...being around the family. It was a strange and layered thing. Shot through with moments of exhilaration and happiness and deep, unsettling grief. She felt quite unlike herself.
Unable to find a retreat inside of herself to go to as she normally did. Unable to protect herself against the sheer domesticity of what was happening in the palace.
A palace that had not seen such a thing since the death of her family.
“Violet and Maximus have always been the excessive ones,” Min was saying. “And I was the one that everyone overlooked.”
“Not everyone, cara.”
Minerva laughed at her husband. “Oh, you most of all. Don’t try to rewrite history now, Dante. Anyway, if you would have noticed me a moment before it was appropriate, my father would’ve had you killed.”
“Unless I did it first,” Maximus said, smiling that charming grin that she knew was fake. What was real was the threat underlying his words. She knew that he wasn’t lying. Or exaggerating. Except that... He would’ve done it himself. If a man had done anything to harm one of his sisters, she had full confidence that Maximus would be the one to handle the insults all on his own.
“It’s good you have Maximus here with you, Annick,” Robert King said. “He’s always been brilliant. Since you’re trying to accomplish reform here in the country, I know he’ll do right by you and your people.”
Annick studied him closely. He did seem a very nice man, as Maximus had said he was. He was of indeterminate age, obviously old enough to have Maximus as a son, but still difficult to pinpoint. His wife even more so, her face dramatically lacking in lines. They were a beautiful family. Violet stunning, Minerva an understated mourning dove. Elizabeth King the sort of blonde beauty that all celebrities aspired to.
She could see how Maximus had felt like he lived a charmed life. And how badly it would’ve hurt to have had that challenged. To have lost that in any regard.
“Yes,” Annick said, looking directly at the older man. “He’s quite brilliant. And I think...much more than anyone realizes.” She could feel his warning glare burning into the side of her face. “I’m quite lucky to have him.”
“Anyone would be,” Robert King agreed.
Dinner was served then, a basket of pastries coming out before the meal. Annick smiled.
“Is this a tradition here?” Minerva asked.
“No,” Annick said happily. “Well, I suppose it will be.”
By the end of it all, the tension she felt toward even his father was forgotten, because she felt surrounded by this love that she had not been near for years.
And she wanted so desperately to be part of it. She wanted so desperately to belong to someone. Wanted so much to be...
She cut that thought off. It did no good to dwell on the things she did not have control over. It did no good to wish for the clock to reverse. To wish for life to be different. She had done it hundreds of times. She knew it did no good.
She had lived the life she did. That was all.
Tomorrow she would marry into this family. Something that she could never have foreseen. Something entirely different to the life she had imagined loomed ahead of her. Tomorrow, things would change.
When dinner was done, she excused herself, and she didn’t even wait for Maximus. She found herself wandering away from the bedrooms. Away from the ballroom. Away from every civilized part of the castle, to a place that she hadn’t been back to since the day that she had been set free.
Her heart constricted in her chest as she made her way down the dark, narrow steps. As she descended down a level, and then another. All the way to the lower dungeon.
This place was a reminder. Of where she had come from. Of what really mattered. It wasn’t her feelings or his family or...
Her dungeon lay untouched since she’d been freed.
It needed to stand. As it was. At least, it felt to her it did.
It was not a grimy jail cell. It was a room. With a bed in the corner. No windows. It was dingy, not clean. Atop her small nightstand a copy of the Bible and Anne of Green Gables sat there still, the two books that she had read the most during her isolation, as they were the only ones perennially left behind by her tutor. There was a small desk in the corner, which had also been there since the beginning. And nothing more. She felt small here. That trembling sensation that she’d always battled in her chest loomed large.
“What are you doing down here?”
“I...I might ask you the same thing?”
“I followed you.”