LITMIR.BIZ

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when my wedding had not loomed before me, beckoning like some kind of inevitable virus that nothing could keep at bay.

      There were no home remedies for my father’s wishes.

      “You cannot let Father see you in this state, Imogen,” my half sister, Celeste, told me briskly as she swept in. “It will only make things worse for you.”

      I knew she was right. The unfortunate truth was that Celeste was usually right about everything. Elegant, graceful Celeste, who had submitted to her duty with a smile on her face and every appearance of quiet joy. Stunning, universally adored Celeste, who had the willowy blond looks of her late mother and to whom I had forever been compared—and found lacking. My own lost mother had been a titian-haired bombshell, pale of skin and mysteriously emerald of eye, but I resembled her only in the way a fractured reflection, beheld through a mist, might. Next to my half sister, I had always felt like the Fitzalan troll, better suited to a life beneath a bridge somewhere than the grand society life I’d been bred and trained for.

      The life Celeste took to with such ease.

      Even today, the day before my wedding when theoretically I would be the one looked at, Celeste looked poised and chic in her simple yet elegantly cut clothes. Her pale blond hair was twisted back into an effortless chignon and she’d applied only the faintest hint of cosmetics to enhance her eyes and dramatic cheekbones. While I had yet to change out of my pajamas though it was midday already and I knew without having to look that my curls were in their usual state of disarray.

      All of these things seemed filled with more portent than usual, because the monster I was set to marry in the morning had wanted her first.

      And likely still wanted her, everyone had whispered.

      They had even whispered it to me, and it had surprised me how much it had stung. Because I knew better. My marriage wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t being chosen by anyone—I was the remaining Fitzalan heiress. My inheritance made me an attractive prospect no matter how irrepressible my hair might have been or how often I disappointed my father with my inability to enhance a room with my decorative presence. I was more likely to draw attention for the wrong reasons.

      My laugh was too loud and always inappropriate. My clothes were always slightly askew. I preferred books to carefully vetted social occasions where I was expected to play at hostessing duties. And I had never convinced anyone that I was more fascinated by their interests than my own.

      It was lucky, then, that my marriage was about convenience—my father’s, not mine. I had never expected anything like a fairy tale.

      “Fairy tales are for other families,” my severe grandmother had always told us, slamming her marble-edged cane against the hard floors of this sprawling house in the French countryside, where, the story went, our family had been in residence in one form or another since sometime in the twelfth century. “Fitzalans have a higher purpose.”

      As a child, I’d imagined Celeste and me dressed in armor, riding out to gauzy battles beneath old standards, then slaying a dragon or two before our supper. That had seemed like the kind of higher purpose I could get behind. It had taken the austere Austrian nuns years to teach me that dragon slaying was not the primary occupation of girls from excruciatingly well-blooded old families who were sent away to be educated in remote convents. Special girls with impeccable pedigrees and ambitious fathers had a far different role to fill.

      Girls like me, who had never been asked what they might like to do with their lives, because it had all been plotted out already without their input.

      The word pawn was never used. I had always seen this as a shocking oversight—another opinion of mine that no one had ever solicited and no one wanted to hear.

      “You must find purpose and peace in duty, Imogen,” Mother Superior had told me, time and again, when I would find myself red-eyed and furious, gritting out another decade of the rosary to atone for my sins. Pride and unnatural self-regard chief among them. “You must cast aside these doubts and trust that those with your best interests at heart have made certain all is as it should be.”

      “Fitzalans have a higher purpose,” Grand-Mère had always said.

      By which, I had learned in time, she meant money. Fitzalans hoarded money and made more. This was what had set our family apart across the centuries. Fitzalans were never kings or courtiers. Fitzalans funded kingdoms they liked and overthrew regimes they disparaged, all in service to the expansion of their wealth. This was the grand and glorious purpose that surged in our blood.

      “I am not ‘in a state,’” I argued to Celeste now, but I didn’t sit up or attempt to set myself to rights.

      And Celeste did not dignify that with a response.

      I had barred myself in the sitting room off my childhood bedchamber, the better to brood at the rain and entertain myself with my enduring fantasies of perfect, beautiful Frederick, who worked in my father’s stables and had dreamy eyes of sweetest blue.

      We had spoken once, some years ago. He had taken my horse’s head and led us into the yard as if I’d required the assistance.

      I had lived on the smile he’d given me that day for years.

      It seemed unbearable to me that I should find myself staring down so many more years when I would have to do the same, but worse, in the company of a man—a husband—who was hated and feared in equal measure across Europe.

      Today the historic Fitzalan estate felt like the prison it was. If I was honest, it had never been a home.

      My mother had died when I was barely eight, and in my memories of her she was always crying. I had been left to the tender mercies of Grand-Mère, before her death, and my father, who was forever disappointed in me, but still my only remaining parent.

      And Celeste, who was ten years older than me. And better at everything.

      Having lost my mother, I held fast to what was left of my family, and no matter if that grip often felt a good deal more like a choke hold I was performing on myself. They were all I had.

      “You must look to your sister as your guide,” Grand-Mère had told me on more than one occasion. Usually when I’d been discovered running in the corridors of the old house, disheveled and embarrassing, when I should have been sitting decorously somewhere, learning how to cross my ankles and incline my head in sweet subservience.

      I had tried. I truly had.

      I had watched Celeste come of age before me, elegant and meek in ways I envied and yet failed to understand. She had done it all with grace and beauty, the way she did everything. She had been married on her twentieth birthday to a man closer in age to our father—a hereditary count who claimed the blood of famed kings on both sides, stretching deep into Europe’s gloried past. A man who I had never seen crack so much as the faintest smile.

      And in the years since, Celeste had presented her ever-glowering husband with two sons and a daughter. Because while I had been raised to do my duty and knew what was expected of me—despite the dark thoughts I had about it in private while dreaming of Frederick’s blue eyes—Celeste had bloomed in her role as countess.

      It was hard to look at all that blooming, I thought uncharitably now. Not the day before I turned twenty-two, came into my fortune, and—not coincidentally, I was well aware—married the man of my father’s choosing, who I had never met. My father felt a meeting was unnecessary and no one argued with Dermot Fitzalan, least of all the daughters he used as disposable pawns.

      Happy birthday to me, I told myself darkly.

      I would celebrate with a forced march down the aisle with a man whose very name made even the servants in the manor house recoil in horror.

      A man I knew all manner of terrible things about.

      A man widely regarded as a devil in the flesh.

      A man who was not even the member of some or other gentry, as I had expected my eventual husband would be, given my father’s celestially high opinion of himself

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