Gabrielle.
“Do you still have my pack?” The question left her mouth unbidden, and Lucian just laughed at her, an edge of insanity making him sound ridiculous.
“You want to know if I have your pack? After everything you’ve just told me?”
“It’s important. Do you still have it?” Emmie felt a calm settle over her, and her flat voice reflected it.
“Shit! Not like it matters anymore.” Lucian shoved himself to the end of the bedding, tucking himself away in his pants as he moved aside things in the corner to lift her bag. He tossed it at her, and she caught it against her chest. “There. You have your pack back, is that going to solve all of this?”
“No, but it will help to explain it.” Emmie ran her hand over the edges, and smiled as she opened it. It was untouched. Her spare clothes, her water, the knife, the last bag of dried meat she had snuck from the kitchen. Reaching inside, she pulled aside the hidden pocket and fished out the only thing she’d really wanted from it since he took her.
Lucian drew close as she let the bag slide to the floor, cradling the last material possession she cared about in her hands. “What’s that?” he asked as he dropped next to her on the bedding.
“This,” she pointed at the photograph, “is my sister Gabrielle.”
“Wow,” he breathed and leaned closer. Her sister’s dark hair practically glowed in the photograph, bright blue eyes burning into her even over the span of time since she’d seen her last. The image was painful to look at – they were both smiling, dressed in ball gowns for a party, and their cousin had insisted on taking their picture as he had recently purchased one of the new color photocameras. Gabrielle had her arm around Emmie, a bright smile on both of their faces, and the ache of her betrayal hit her anew as she stared into her sister’s face.
“She’s beautiful, I know.” Emmie wiped the tears from her cheeks, but Lucian just laughed.
“You both are, I’m just surprised. I didn’t know how good you could look until that photo.” His cocky tone was back, and she hit his chest on instinct before returning her hand to cradle the picture.
“Jerk,” she mumbled, waiting for him to react to the strike, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“I didn’t even know color photographs were possible.” He sounded reverent as he reached forward to trace her face in the photograph.
“This was taken about six months ago, it’s new.” Emmie sniffled, her fingers tightening on the edges. “It took our cousin Andre forever to get copies to us, and I just couldn’t leave it behind.”
“Why did you leave?” His words were quiet, and a sob escaped her as she stared down into her sister’s face.
“I had to.”
“But, why?” he repeated, and his warm hand landed on her back. She wanted to flinch away, but she was too deep in her own misery to care.
“My father.”
“Your father? Did he do something to you?” Lucian sounded angry, but she couldn’t deal with his mood swings as the memories she had tried to bury since she’d entered the forest returned in full color.
“No. I mean yes, but—” She groaned. “Not exactly. He wanted to unite our family with another. An extraordinarily wealthy family, because our own funds were dwindling – and Bastien Foss was the answer.” Emmie swallowed bitterly. “And Bastien didn’t care who he married as long as he was able to connect himself with my father. To marry a Daniau.”
“Not much higher to climb on the social ladder,” Lucian mumbled and Emmie shrugged because he was right. Her father practically owned the city. The rest of the council followed him around like ducklings, nodding at his every word. He was the center of everything, and many people had clamored to get close to him over the years. Lucian moved his fingers in small circles on her back. “So your father picked you?”
“No,” Emmie whispered, blinking away her tears so she could see her sister’s face clearly. “That was the problem. He chose Gabrielle.”
“But, wait, I don’t understand…”
“Gabrielle is two years older than me, and so he wanted to marry her off first. He wanted her to marry Bastien, and that was impossible – but my father refused to listen to her.” Emmie closed her eyes as the memory of that horrible argument flooded her. Gabrielle’s tormented shouts and cries as she had begged, the sound of his slap, the beating, and then him dragging her sister up the stairs to lock her in her room as she screamed for him to listen to her, to have mercy.
But their father was never merciful.
“Why was it impossible, Emmie?” Lucian’s voice was soft, but it still made her cringe to dig deeper into that nest of painful thoughts.
“Gabrielle couldn’t marry Bastien.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and forced herself to speak the secret she had guarded so carefully for so long, “She couldn’t marry him because she… doesn’t like men.”
“She doesn’t like —” Lucian sounded confused for a moment and then he stopped. “Oh.”
“Her girlfriend’s name is Sarah. They’ve been together since they were young, and they love each other. I was there, watching their relationship change, and there’s no mistaking true love like that.” Emmie sighed, remembering the two of them cuddled up on a small couch in the parlor, dramatically reading passages from books before laughing and eventually kissing. At first, it had always made Emmie blush, but then it had become commonplace, and she had taken over reading the books aloud while they whispered together.
“No. Love is pretty clear when it’s real.” He cleared his throat, removing his hand from her back. “Your father didn’t see it though?”
“My father didn’t know. About any of it. He would have completely lost his temper, and when he’s like that – there’s no telling what will happen.” She shuddered and turned her face away to brush her cheeks. “I sat outside Gabrielle’s room all night after he told her that she was marrying Bastien. Begging her to talk to me, to let me know she was okay, and she finally came to the door and sat on the other side so we could hear each other. She told me that she wouldn’t marry Bastien, that she’d rather die, because at least in death she wouldn’t betray Sarah, wouldn’t have to live without ever seeing her again. But I couldn’t let her do that, I couldn’t.”
“What did you do?” Lucian whispered.
“I convinced her not to do anything yet, and when my father let her out of her room for breakfast in the morning, I was already waiting at the table. As they came in, he was berating her for not being grateful for the marriage, and I… threw a tantrum.”
“That I can believe.” He huffed next to her and she turned to glare at him, surprised by the concern creasing his forehead even as he gave her a playful smile.
Emmie grumbled and looked down at the photo again. “I shouted at him that he always gave Gabrielle everything, that it was unfair that he just chose to let her be the one that got married just because she was older. He asked me if I wanted to get married instead, since Gabrielle was being such a petulant child about it, and —”
“You agreed to marry him in her place.” Lucian finished for her and she nodded. “So what went wrong? Why did you run?”
“That was almost two months ago, and I met him soon after. Something about him seemed – off.” She cringed, laying the photo aside to drop her face into her hands. “It didn’t take long, carefully asking questions of friends and staff, to find out that Bastien Foss was anything but a gentleman. He’s violent, and a drunkard, and needlessly cruel to his household. That was terrible to learn, terrifying even, but I was still resolute to keep my promise.”
Emmie sniffed hard and wiped her cheeks roughly to stare at the floor in front of her. Her stomach clenched into a knot, and Lucian took a breath to speak but she started before he could.
“Then, one evening I received a letter, unsigned, urging me to break the marriage agreement at all costs. It said that Bastien had bragged to a group of men that he’d soon have one of the Daniau daughters in his household and that they w
ere welcome to help… break me in. All of them.”
“Shit,” Lucian muttered and stood up, beginning to pace back and forth in front of her. “That’s why you ran.”
“Yes. I spent weeks researching the forest, watching the guards for the perfect place to go over the wall, and the whole time I played the excited bride-to-be. I lied to Gabrielle, to her face, that everything would be fine.” Emmie hid behind her hair, sick with the weight of her betrayal. “And then I fled like a coward, two days before the marriage was supposed to be presented, and I left Gabrielle alone with my damned father – and Bastien.”
Pain radiated outward from her chest, and all of her pent up guilt and grief and rage flooded her. She hated herself, despised herself. Emmie had done her best to hate every person in the village, but she was probably among the worst of them. Lucian’s own silence was condemning.
“So!” She wiped her eyes again, staring at the floor. “Now you know how despicable I am, how traitorous, and you’re at least justified in hating me. Go on, go and tell all of them. Spread the word, and let them do what they want with me.”
Lucian stopped moving in front of her, but she refused to lift her eyes to his. Whatever he had planned for her, she deserved it. She deserved all of it and more. His calm voice shocked her more than if he had shouted. “You are not despicable. You ran from an impossible situation, and you were damn brave going over the wall alone.”
“You don’t know —”
“I know that I do not hate you. Where on earth did you get that idea?”
Emmie raised her eyes, the spark of her anger returning as she glared at him. “Are you fucking joking?”
“You’re talking about this?” He gestured between the two of them and she rolled her eyes.
“Obviously.”
“Listen, aristocrat, you may be the daughter of Jules Daniau inside the city, but out here you’re just like everyone else, and everyone starts at the bottom here. Everyone earns their position in this village and you don’t —”
“Earns their position? You mean that I have to earn the right to be treated respectfully by spending time on my fucking back? Under you?” she shouted, standing up to face off with him.
“Respect? You want to talk about respect?” He laughed. “All I’ve been telling you since I fucking rescued you from being gored to death by a boar is that you just need to be respectful!”
“You mean keep my mouth shut and my legs open,” Emmie growled.
“When has anyone ever told you not to participate in a conversation where you were treating the other person with respect? Everyone here has a voice, no matter their position. From what I’ve heard, you have always been the rude one! A spoiled brat!” Lucian’s voice was rising, color meeting his cheeks.
“I was a spoiled, virgin, brat when I met you!” she screamed, and he went still. Emmie kept pushing. “You try to act so noble, and these people treat you like some hero, but you’re not. You’re an animal. You’re exactly how the raiders have always been described, and I’m glad my father exiled you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucian whispered, his face turning to stone.
“I know what you’ve done to me, and that’s enough.” Emmie turned away from him, ready to walk out of his house, completely naked, but he grabbed her arm hard.
“This is your role in the village right now! There are rules, Emmie, and —”
“Don’t use my name like you’ve earned the right to,” she hissed and tried to jerk her arm from his grip. “All of you and your ridiculous rules. I never agreed to follow them, and no one has handed me a fucking list to even figure them all out so I could know before I broke one!”
Lucian threw her towards the bed, blocking her way to the door. “That’s because almost no one here can read, or write. So getting them on paper would be both difficult and useless, but our rules are incredibly important.”
“Believe whatever fiction you’ve created that lets you sleep at night.”
“You have no idea what it was like when I was exiled!” Lucian shouted, raw emotion ripping at his voice for the first time, and the sight of him turning away from her to hide his face stalled her ranting. “All those stories of the raiders, the terrifying ones that you’ve heard, likely the same ones I grew up with – they used to be true. Six years ago these woods were full of scared people willing to kill to live one more day. A woman, or one of the elders, or a young one who was exiled was lucky to survive a week before something gutted them. We had a war of our own making out here, and each day was a question of whether or not we’d see the next sunrise.”
He turned around and kicked something across the floor, his hands finding their way into his hair again.
“I was seventeen when I was exiled, with no skills, but somehow I scrounged and kept myself alive for an entire month before I stumbled into Mathias’ camp. If I hadn’t been half-dead already, they would have probably killed me on the spot, but Mathias stopped them. He saved me that day, and he had a vision. A way to bring all of the exiles together, in safety and peace, to have a place for new exiles to come to so that the council’s ruling was no longer a death sentence.”
Lucian walked over to his chair and dropped into it, staring at the ground in front of him as he spoke, and Emmie found herself too curious to interrupt.
“It took us years to build this place. It started with Mathias’ camp. We made the shelters sturdier, and he taught me how to hunt. Whenever we encountered someone else, we talked to them instead of attacking them. We asked them to join us, to hunt with us. More hands, more spears, more food. Several of the men we found had already chosen a woman to protect, and she had chosen him too – and they were all welcome.” He laughed quietly. “The rules weren’t all written at once, they were built, one on top of the other as we needed them. And we did need them. Not every man we found wanted to respect the boundaries of another’s relationship. A woman was a woman, and if they wanted one…”
“They took them,” she finished for him, and he nodded. “That’s where the idea of mates came from, isn’t it?”
Lucian looked over at her, a wrinkle appearing between his brows before he nodded again. “Yes. There had to be boundaries that everyone understood, there had to be some structure, or none of the women would stay. And if they refused to stay, if they took the children, the men would leave too, and it would all fall apart because we are stronger together. We need each other.” He took a breath. “So, Mathias and I made rules. Once a woman was mated to a man, if they had both freely accepted the other, then both were forbidden to be with anyone else. It kept the woman safe, and it meant the other men had one less competitor for any free females. The penalty for breaking that rule is, and always has been… death.”
Emmie swallowed, her head spinning. It was not a rare occurrence to hear of both men and women breaking their marriage pacts in the city. In fact, it was so common that it was some of the favorite gossip among the few friends she and Gabrielle had. Who was sleeping with who? Did the wife know? Did the husband know?
How different would it all be if a marriage pact was taken as seriously as the exiles took the idea of a mate?
Lucian’s voice rose up again. “New female exiles are free women. They have no mate, and so —”
“Any free man can have them.”
“Yes.” Lucian swallowed, lifting his eyes to the closed roof. “Everyone starts out at the bottom. There are no exceptions, because exceptions would break all the rules.”
“But what about the men? The new male exiles? They just get to do what they want?”
“No. They have to earn the right to be a member of the village. We keep them bound, and they work in the gardens during the day, or help with maintenance, and sleep staked to the ground at night until they learn the rules, until they accept them.” Lucian spoke gravely. “There is no gray area outside the walls. You are either with us, a functioning and contributing member of this place Mathias built, or you die. We won�
�t risk a threat, especially not now. Not when we’ve built so much, not when there are children at risk. All of us have survived too much to let one person bring it all down.”
The words hung heavy in the air, and Emmie looked over at the picture of her and Gabrielle. So happy, so blissfully unaware of the world outside the city, so ignorant to the dangers within the walls as well. “You think I’m going to bring it down,” she spoke softly, and he turned towards her.
“I’m sort of hoping you have other plans.”
“My plans ended the moment I landed on the ground outside the walls.”
He shook his head slowly. “You really didn’t think we’d find you?”
Emmie let out a soft laugh, realizing now how foolish she had been. “I had hoped I’d be able to avoid the exiles.”
“Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” Lucian’s voice went flat as he cut himself off, and he stood before she could respond. “Your clothes are still at Mathias’, I’ll go get them.” He didn’t give her a chance to speak as he stood stiffly, pulled the door open, and left.
For a moment, she was shocked by his quick exit, but then Emmie scooted back on the palette of his bed, reaching for a blanket that was bunched against the wall. It was rough, but warm, and she draped it over her legs as she picked up the photograph again. “Well, he knows everything, Gabrielle…” Emmie whispered and sniffled. “But I think I’m in more trouble out here than I would have been staying with you, and at least I’d know you were safe. That no matter what happened to me, you and Sarah were okay. I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry...” The last words made her voice break, and she was busy drowning in her own misery when Lucian shoved the door open again.
“Here, I’ve got —” He paused, and she quickly wiped at her eyes and nose, trying to hide her crying. “Shit.” Lucian moved towards her and set her clothes on the end of the bed before taking a slow breath.
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