Starfall (Starflight #2)(13)
Above all else, what did he need?
One humiliation for another, she decided as she pushed up from her chair and sank to her knees, right there in front of Marius, his entire court, his romantic playthings, and every servant in the room.
“Please,” she begged, clasping both hands together. “Withdraw your troops and join our families. Help me make this right.” When he didn’t seem convinced, she swallowed her pride and took her submission to the next level. She bent down and rested her forehead on the tip of his boot. She could sink no lower than this. “If you’ll have me, I’ll marry you. I’ll do whatever you ask me to do. Just say you’ll have me.”
When she glanced up, Marius wore a smile so broad it threatened to split his face in half like an overboiled egg. He didn’t favor her with a reply—naturally, he would draw out the suspense—but his expression told her everything she needed to know.
Yes, he would marry her.
And he’d make sure she didn’t enjoy one moment of it.
In the days that followed, Marius made good on his unspoken promise to punish her. When he announced their engagement from the palace balcony, it was with a girlfriend under each arm and Cassia standing off to the side like a used-up handkerchief. Her display as the spoils of war elicited cheers from the crowd, just as Marius had intended, but she ignored their taunts and kept her gaze turned down, scanning the crowd for a familiar broken nose and a squadron of soldiers in disguise.
No one had come for her yet.
She expected to see General Jordan later in the week, escorting the royal cleric during marriage contract negotiations, but he didn’t appear then, either. Nor did he send a message or convey any type of instructions for what she should do next. She signed the contract and slammed down the pen in frustration.
Why wouldn’t Jordan communicate with her? What did he expect her to do? And just how far was she supposed to take this marriage act—all the way to the altar? She hoped not, because at this rate Marius would make her crawl down the aisle with an apple between her teeth. She didn’t even want to think about the wedding night, not that she had any intention of following through on that part of the ruse.
But when two more days passed without word, she was forced to do a lot more than think about it. The morning of her wedding arrived, along with an ivory satin gown, slightly yellowed at the hem, and a handwritten note from Marius.
My mother wore this on her wedding day.
May it bring you the same luck, dear Cassy!
“Cassy,” she hissed through clenched teeth. He needed to stop calling her that. And considering the fact that he’d killed his own mother, she had no interest in duplicating the woman’s “luck.”
She crumpled the note and threw it into the fireplace as her cheeks burned with anger. Where was her support? Where were the troops to help her with this mission? She’d never felt so alone. Every single person in her life had abandoned her, even her parents and her closest friends. Why wasn’t anyone trying to find her—and where was Kane when she needed him?
Kane.
An imaginary band squeezed her chest. Just when she thought she couldn’t miss him more, she pictured his face and lost another piece of her soul. She hadn’t meant to blame him for staying away. That was what she’d wanted, for him to disappear and be safe. But she would give anything to have him with her, to feel his long fingers in her hair and to listen to the low murmur of his voice in her ear.
If he were here, this time she wouldn’t pull away or make him stop. She would give him what he’d always wanted, what she’d secretly wanted him to have: her whole heart, all in. She wouldn’t care about political marriages or royal bloodlines. She would be brave and let herself love him.
But it was too late; she was out of time.
Tears blurred her vision as she drifted into the washroom. If Kane could see her now, he would tell her to stop brooding and rescue herself, then add a teasing insult to get a rise out of her. She would yell at him for some silly reason or another, and then they would bicker until one of them kissed the other one silent. She couldn’t believe those days were gone.
She was still smiling through her tears when she glanced at the sink basin and noticed something she’d overlooked before. There beside the soap rested a shiny new laser blade, much like the one she’d left on the Banshee, the one Kane was probably using right now.
A possibility occurred to her.
The idea seemed far-fetched at first, but by gradual degrees it bloomed into a plan, and in the span of a few minutes she knew what she had to do.
“Thank you, Kane,” she whispered to herself.
Then she put him out of her mind and set to work.
“Do you swear to honor His Royal Colonial Highness, Marius Edwin Durango, in your thoughts, words, and deeds?” the cleric asked Cassia through a long gray beard that puffed at the lips when he spoke.
“Yes.” She held her hand, palm up, toward the man. “I swear it.”
He pricked her index finger with a ceremonial knife and squeezed the wound until a fat droplet of blood rose to the surface. He guided her finger to a glass disk about the size of a walnut, etched with interlocking swirls, half of which already ran red with Marius’s blood. With one touch of her finger, the glass absorbed her life force and sent it rushing through the empty channels, where it completed the pattern and marked the joining of two families.