Chapter 87: The Girl Who Got Back Up

This room looked like a presidential suite on a holo-feed.

It was gorgeous.

A bed sat against the far wall, smaller than Derek’s but still large enough for three people and dressed in fabric so clean it looked like it had never been touched. A sitting area occupied one corner.

Everything Derek had ordered was hanging in a closet. Cloaks on hooks.

Nova flicked the lights off in the main room because darkness was a habit before she moved into the bathing chamber. Marble floors. A soaking tub. Rain water shower.

The shower was hot in a way that slave facilities had never been. She stood under it and let it run down her body, eyes closed, steam climbing around her until the bathing chamber disappeared and the only thing that existed was warmth and the sound of water hitting marble. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

She always did her best thinking in the shower. Right now, the wheels were turning in her mind.

She had known Thunderfang was a free pack. She had assumed, somewhere in the back of her mind, that free meant kinder. That was naive. The absence of silver did not automatically mean kind or that people would look beyond Nova’s slave identification number.

Why would a prince want a slave?

Nova kept coming back to that question and she hated herself for it. But it was the truth.

She was a slave that their prince bought. People were going to assume Nova had slept her way to get to the position she was in, even if they watched the Moonfire. Even if a fire exploded in the sky.

She toweled her hair dry and it fell in loose waves past her shoulders, the white strands catching the bathing chamber light in a way that almost looked gold if she tilted her head.

Short silk robe on. Slippers.

Derek had gotten her the nicest things. That thought kept circling back like a song she couldn’t get out of her head, a melody made of boots that fit and robes that were silk and a closet she hadn’t opened yet.

She took a deep breath and went into the closet.

It was a lot.

Maybe it was better that Derek wasn’t here, because her eyes started doing the thing immediately and there was no one to see it and no one to feel guilty about causing it.

Dresses hung in a row. Thunderfang one-pieces in black with the emblem on the shoulder, identical to the ones ranked wolves wore, fitted and thermal-regulated and carrying the quiet implication that the woman wearing them belonged to something bigger than herself.

Shoes lined the bottom shelf in pairs, boots and slippers and heels that Nova had zero occasion to wear but their existence suggested someone thought she would. Jewelry sat in a velvet-lined case on a shelf at eye level.

A wardrobe worthy of a princess. For a girl with a registration number.

A large dressing table sat in the center of the closet, the kind of piece that anchored a room and told every other piece of furniture to behave. On top of it, forty white roses in a crystal vase, full and open and impossibly alive for flowers that had been sitting here while Nova was in a parade getting called a whore.

The roses were how she knew she was in the right room.

Her chest tightened around something too big for the space it was occupying.

A vanity sat against the far wall with a cushioned seat and a mirror framed in the same white stone as the keep. Nova sat in front of it and looked at her own face for the first time since the yacht infirmary.

The bruise on her cheek was fading. A faint outline remained, yellow at the edges where the purple had been, visible if you knew where to look and invisible to anyone who didn’t. The swelling was gone. Her lip had healed. Her eyes were clear, greener than usual against the white of her hair, and for the first time in days she looked like a girl who might survive the week rather than a girl who was actively trying to.

She looked much better. She looked, if she was being honest with herself in the privacy of a locked room with no audience, like someone who might be pretty enough to deserve the closet she was sitting in.

She dismissed the thought immediately. Deserving was a word for women with last names. Nova had a registration number and a vase of roses and a man who kissed her knuckles and a servant who had told her to not wait up for him.

She stared at her reflection until the reflection stopped being a stranger and started being a girl she recognized. The girl from the arena. The one who fell in the sand and got back up because stopping wasn’t an option. The one who solved puzzles because solving puzzles was the only thing that ever made sense.

That girl was still here.

There was a loud knock on her door. The kind of knock that communicated urgency and familiarity and zero interest in being ignored.

Nova crossed the room, still in her silk robe and slippers, hair damp and falling in loose waves that were drying slower than usual because the room was freezing.

Nova opened the door.

Maria Emberclaw was already talking.

"—told Tavian that if you weren’t ready I would handle it because men are useless with timelines and I was right because look at you, you’re in a robe, your hair is damp, and I can already tell by your face that you don’t think you’re going to dinner which is exactly what I predicted and Tav owes me a Lightning Nectar for being wrong about—"

Maria walked past Nova into the room without waiting for an invitation because invitations were a formality Maria Emberclaw had eliminated from her social framework on day one. Nova shut the door behind them, sealing the cold corridor out and trapping the cold room in.

Maria stopped mid-sentence and looked at Nova. Looked at the robe.

"Actually, you’re not ready AT ALL. Worse than I thought."

"Ready?"

"Dinner."

Nova shook her head once. "Maria, I am not invited to dinner."