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 and all he felt his vaunted pedigree—and thus mine—demanded.
In contrast, Celeste’s husband, the dour count, had a title that ached with age—but had very few lands behind it. Or any money left over after all those centuries of aristocratic splendor, I had heard them whisper.
And this, I knew, was why my father had chosen a man for me who might have lacked gentility or pedigree, but more than made up for both with his astonishing wealth. Because this would surely add to the Fitzalan reach and financial might.
Genteel Celeste, so gentle and fragile, had been married carefully to a title that would sit well on her perfect brow. I was hardier. I could be sold off to a commoner whose coffers only seemed to swell by the year. In this way, my father could have his cake and eat it, merrily.
I knew this. But it didn’t mean I liked it.
Celeste settled herself on the other end of the settee beneath the windows in my sitting room, where I had curled in a miserable ball this gray January day as if my brooding could make time stand still and save me from my fate.
“You will only make yourself ill,” she told me, pragmatically. Or at least, that was how I interpreted the way she gazed at me then, down the length of the aristocratic nose she shared with our father. “And nothing will change either way. It is a wasted effort.”
“I do not wish to marry him, Celeste.”
Celeste let out that lilting laugh that I normally thought sounded like the finest music. Today it clawed at me.
“You do not wish?” She laughed again, and I wondered if I imagined the hardness in her gaze when it faded. “But who, pray, told you that your wishes mattered?”
I noted the year in as grim a tone as I could manage. “Surely my wishes should be consulted, at the very least. Even if nothing I want is taken into account.”
“Fitzalans are not modern, Imogen,” Celeste said with a hint of impatience, as I knew my father would. Though he would not hint. “If what you want is progress and self-determination, I’m afraid you were born into the wrong family.”
“It was hardly my choice.”
“Imogen. This is so childish. You have always known this day would come. You cannot possibly have imagined that you, somehow, would escape what waits for every Fitzalan from birth.”
I turned that over and over in my head, noting it felt more bitter every time. More acrid.
The way she said you, with what sounded a great deal like scorn.
And the way she’d said escape, as if the very notion was fantastical.
It suggested she was neither as effortless nor as joyfully blooming as I had always imagined. And I didn’t know quite how to process that possibility.
I shivered, here in these gloomy rooms built to impress fellow Norman invaders centuries ago en route to their sacking and pillaging of England, not to provide any semblance of comfort for the descendants of those invaders. I stared out the window at the deceptively quiet countryside spread out before me. The gardens that rolled this way and that, dead now, but still scrupulously maintained and manicured. I pretended I didn’t know that the front of the house was decidedly less tranquil today as the family and guests gathered to cheer me on to my doom.
Celeste and her family in from Vienna, our shriveled great uncles from Paris, the impertinent cousins from Germany. My father’s well-fed and sly business associates and rivals from all over the planet.
Not to mention the terrifying groom. The monster I was expected to marry in the morning.
“What is he like?” I asked, my voice cracking.
Celeste was quiet so long that I dragged my gaze from the window to study her expression.
I don’t know what I expected. But it wasn’t what I saw—my sister’s mouth tilted up in the corners, like a cat in the cream.
An unpleasant jolt walloped me in the gut, then shivered through me. I endeavored to shake it off. Or better yet, ignore it.
“Are you sure you wish to know?” Celeste asked, after another long moment of nothing but that self-satisfied half smile that boded all manner of ill, I was sure. It shuddered through me like some kind of fear. “I am not certain that anything is gained by approaching an arranged marriage with an excess of knowledge about a man you must come to terms with, one way or another, no matter what you know ahead of time.”
“You did not marry a monster,” I retorted.
Though when I thought of the count and that expression of his that suggested he had never encountered a scent he did not abhor and never would, I wondered if the term monster might not have a variety of applications.
That smile of hers, if possible, grew ever more smug and made that shuddering thing in me all the more intense.
“He is not like anyone you have met, Imogen. It is impossible to prepare for the impact of him, really.”
“I don’t understand what that means.”
Again, that tinkling laugh. “I must remind myself you are so young. Sheltered. Untouched, in every possible way.”
“You were younger when you got married. And presumably, equally untouched and sheltered.”
But the way she looked at me then made my heart stutter in my chest. Because if her sly, faintly pitying expression was to be believed, my half sister was not at all who I had believed her to be all this time.
And if Celeste was not Celeste…it was almost as if I forgot who I was, too.
The truth was, I didn’t know what to make of it. I shoved it aside, thinking I’d take it out and look at it again when I could breathe normally again. Sometime in the dim future when I was married and settled and had somehow survived the monster who was already in this house, waiting for me.
“I feel sorry for you,” Celeste murmured, after a moment, though her tone did not strike me as the sort one would use if that was true. “Truly, it isn’t fair. How can a naive little thin
g like you be expected to handle a man like Javier Dos Santos?”
Even his name struck dread through the center of me. I told myself it had to be dread, that thick and too-hot sensation. It hit me in the chest, then spiraled down until lodged itself low in my belly.
That, I told myself, was a measure of how much I loathed and feared him.
“I thought you hated him,” I reminded my sister. “After what he did to you…”
I remembered the shouting. My father’s deep voice echoing through the house. I remembered Celeste’s sobs. Until now, it had been the only example I’d ever seen of something less than perfection in my half sister—and I had blamed the man who was the cause of it. I had held him responsible for the commotion. The jagged tear in the smooth inevitability that was our life here, so securely beneath our father’s thumb.
More than this, I remembered the one glimpse I’d had of Javier Dos Santos in person. After another bout of screams and sobs and the sort of fighting I’d been taught Fitzalans were above, I had plastered myself to the window over the grand front entrance where I could hide myself in the drapery, and I had gazed down at this monster who had threatened to tear my family apart.