So yeah, that’s the plan.
I look at my reflection on the gilded full-length mirror in my room. It’s the most basic accommodation offered by the most basic inn in Foxtown’s most basic section—a narrow third-floor room at a place calledMs. Drum’s Lodgings for Gentlewomen in Reduced Circumstances, which is Holborn’s way of saying this is where you go when you have manners but no money.
The room agrees. Single iron bedframe, coverlet fraying at the corners. Washstand with a chipped pitcher. A dressing table that’s actually a plank of wood under a cloth, with one candle and a silver-backed hairbrush that came with me from San Antonio. The only grand thing in here is the mirror. Huge, ornate, gilded, wildly out of proportion with the rest.
Which is Foxtown for you. Even the poor quarter has to look the part.
Outside, through the open window, the lamplighter is doing his rounds. The tap of his ladder against each post. The soft flare of gas catching. The shuffle of his boots as he moves on. Second lamp. Third. He’s been at it since I started getting ready, and he’s almost at the end of the street.
Like any good friend, Icelle offered to upgrade my room. But I declined. Naturally. How am I going to prove my undying love if this early on, I’m going to let my fairy best friend wave her magic wand and pay all my troubles away?
I’m tougher than that, duh.
Smarter, too.
But most of all—
I love him so much more than that.
And after six long years, I finally have the chance to prove it.
I look back at my reflection.
So let’s be strategic,I remind myself. Just because we’re talking about feelings doesn’t mean we can’t be strategic.
First, the dress: black silk can bring back memories, but what kind? Too risky. I toss it aside and go for the white velvet.
Next, the hair—
Oh.
A memory slips in.
It’s one of those rare mornings when I wake up in bed, and Arkane is still there.
I feel him before I see him. Warmth along my back, one of his arms heavy across my waist, his breathing slow and steady behind me. The room is dim, the curtains still drawn, and the light coming through them has that pale, early-morning quality that means it’s just past dawn.
I don’t move. I don’t want to. If I move, he might wake up, and if he wakes up, this might end.
But then his hand shifts at my waist, and I realize my mistake.
He’s already awake.
He’s been awake.
Watching me sleep.
I roll over slowly, and there he is, propped up on one elbow, looking down at me with those dark eyes. His hair is loose, falling forward. He’s shirtless. He hasn’t moved the whole time he’s been watching me, and somehow I know this.
“Are you obsessed with me?” I say it sleepily, teasingly. The day before was the day he had used the same line on me.
But Arkane being the enigma he is, he only smiles, and I end up asking, rather self-consciously, “What?”
“You dazzle me.”
“Ha.” Very mature, I know. But what can I say? Nineteen, allergy to beautiful men, and unprocessed childhood trauma don’t exactly make the ideal recipe for gracious acceptance of compliments.
He doesn’t laugh.