This is the difference between riches and wealth.
It’s a colossal, circular room. The walls are lined with Victorian paneling, each of the edges crisp and painted over in a deep sea green that seems to swim before my eyes. The fireplace is carved from the purest white marble. In front of it sits a pair of leather wingback armchairs, and above it is a mantlepiece stacked high with gilt-edged books. Looking down over everything from above the mantle is a sprawling oil landscape of the moors. It’s cloudy, moody, dreamy. Almost certainly the lifetime achievement of some famous master artist whose name I could never pronounce.
The bed has a canopy draped with sheer tuille, though the hangings are tied back with golden rope to reveal the embroidered duvet and enough pillows to use a different one every night for months on end.
Directly across from the fireplace, the wall breaks again to ensconce a pair of windows and a Juliet balcony. It looks out onto the courtyard behind the manor, which is so green it makes my eyes throb.
“Well… fuck me,” I breathe.
I flinch as soon as the words come out of my mouth. This place might be fit for a lady, but apparently my manners don’t quite match. I glance guiltily at Edith.
She gives me a shy smile. “It’s quite a lovely room, isn’t it, Miss Camila?”
I frown. “Cami is fine.”
She looks instantly uncomfortable with that. “Well, you have an en-suite bathroom just through there,” she tells me, gesturing towards a cream door across the room. “And your wardrobe has a modest selection of clothes for you to wear for the time being. We’ll get you fitted for new things as soon as you’re ready, but in the meantime, I’ve taken the liberty of laying out a dress for you for tonight.”
I cut off my gawking at once and whirl to face her. “Excuse me: tonight?”
She wrings her hands in front of her. “Oh, yes, madam. For dinner.”
“Dinner?” I probably sound like an idiot, but I want to make sure I’m hearing this right. Because she didn’t say “dinner” like it was just the time of day you eat a meal.
She said “dinner” like it was a date.
“You’re having dinner with Master Isaak tonight, of course.”
I’m angry and I don’t bother hiding it.
“I most assuredly am not!” I say with all the adamancy I can muster. “You can go down and tell him that forcing me to marry him doesn’t mean I’m going to play along with this insane charade he’s got going on here. He married a prisoner, not an accomplice.”
I walk over to one of the armchairs and plonk myself down, still in my wedding dress.
“He can go fuck himself,” I add. “And yes, you can relay that part of the message, too.”
Edith stands rigid in place, waiting for the punchline. But it’s not a joke. Or if it is, it’s very, very unfunny.
When I don’t so much as blink, she comes to her senses, backs out of the room, and closes the door with a meek little click.
As soon as she’s gone, I kick off those fucking uncomfortable heels and curl my legs up and underneath me.
There’s a small fire crackling in the hearth. Just enough to cast off a glow of warmth against the oncoming London gloom. More clouds are thickening outside my window, and right on cue, just like Bogdan said, rain begins to kiss the glass.
My eyes drift around the room. Now that the big picture shock has worn off, it’s the little details that are amazing me. The chiseled horses cantering up and down the bedposts. The ornate frill of the lampshade. The gleam of the writing desk.
It’s the books that I come back to again and again, though. I can’t help myself. They’re an addiction I cannot quit for the life of me, no matter where I find myself or how or why.
So, despite the million and one other things I should be focusing on, I step up onto the hearth and examine the collection.
Anna Karenina is the first title my eyes land on.
Of course—Isaak did tell me that Tolstoy was one of his favorite authors.
I run my finger over the other spines. Mansfield Park. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The Great Gatsby. Women in Love.
My finger snags on one in particular—or maybe it snagged me, I’m not quite sure. I gasp as I pull it out to reveal a first edition hardcover of Little Women.
Giddy, I sink back into the armchair, crack open the book, and fall back into a world that I’ve fallen into again and again and again throughout my life.
And for a little while, I can forget.
10
Cami
I’m sniffling hard when the door opens without warning and Isaak sweeps in. He steps in front of me, leaning casually against the mantlepiece, and gives me a smirk that makes my ovaries quiver.
“Sorry to interrupt you two,” he drawls.
I slam the book shut and tuck it next to me.
“Edith said you had some choice words in response to my dinner invitation,” he adds.
He has this way of watching me. As though he’s noting my every movement. Memorizing it. Seeing things in me that no one else has ever or will ever see.
“Was that what you’d call an ‘invitation’?” I retort. “Then again, I guess you called that kidnapping earlier a ‘wedding,’ so maybe you just don’t know what words mean.”
“Are you unhappy with the dress?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Do I seem like a shallow, empty-headed doll to you?”
“My apologies,” he says, even though there’s nothing remotely apologetic about his tone. “I just wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” I repeat incredulously. “Do you honestly—”
“This doesn’t have to be a battle, Camila.”
“You know what? I think it does. I think that’s exactly what it’s going to be.”
He sighs as though I’m being the unreasonable one. “I expect you to join me for dinner tonight,” he says at last.
“Then you’re going to be disappointed.”
I decide not to look directly at those forget-me-not blue eyes. They have a way of hypnotizing me even when my guard is raised.
“Just because you bring me to a beautiful house and give me a beautiful room and beautiful clothes doesn’t change the fact that I’m here against my own free will.”
“Sometimes things aren’t as black and white as all that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I acted in your interests.”
I close my eyes and rub the bridge of my nose. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I don’t kid, kiska.”
His unfailing calm is not just unsettling—it also happens to be incredibly frustrating. I’m seconds away from ripping my hair out by the roots.
I jump out of my seat. Little Women goes clattering to the floor, but I don’t give a shit.
“You,” I breathe, jabbing a finger at him, “are using me. You are using me just like your cousin used me—allegedly, that is. Which means I was and am only a pawn between two powerful men with egos so large that they think they have a right to destroy lives without a second thought.”