Page 135 of Nikolay

A moment later, Sloan drifted back in carrying a teapot and an extra little pitcher of warmed milk as if she had sensed, through some feminine bat signal, that my cup needed tending and my mood needed not naming.

She refilled my cocoa without asking.

The fresh warmth released another soft wave of chocolate into the room.

“Everything good?” she asked.

I looked up.

“Yeah,” I said.

The answer came out flat enough that even I heard it.

Sloan’s eyes rested on my face for a moment. She did not call me on the lie. For that alone, I could have hugged her.

I took a sip of the fresh cocoa. Warmth moved through me again, familiar now, almost treacherously kind.

After a moment, I said, “I’ll stay.”

Her whole face lit up.

“But,” I added before she could celebrate too hard, “I don’t have anything to wear for a formal festival.”

The effect of that was immediate and almost alarming.

Sloan set the teapot down with reverence, clasped her hands once under her chin like she had been granted a personal favor by the moon itself, and said, “Oh, I have the perfect thing for you.”

Chapter 21

Maddie

By the time the last pin disappeared into my hair, I no longer looked like the woman who had sat in Sloan’s sunroom drinking cocoa and pretending a single dry text from a vampire prince had not hollowed out the center of her evening. The girl in the mirror belonged to candlelight and old vows, to portrait frames gone dark with age, to some century in which women wore gold at their throats and let other people decide what beauty ought to cost.

I stood very still in the center of the guest room while the women Sloan had sent made their final adjustments around me with the solemn efficiency of a chapel crew dressing a bride for sacrifice or glory. Possibly both. One of them smoothed the antique lace where it lay over the full white skirt. Another checked the fall of the sleeves and pressed two fingertips at my waist to settle the fabric more precisely against the gold embroidery fitted through the bodice. The last one stepped behind me and touched the headpiece just above my left ear, confirming, I supposed, that it remained exactly where she had pinned it—gold filigree and small pearls worked into something delicate enough to seem fragile and expensive enough to survive dynasties.

Then they all stepped back.

I stared at myself.

“Well,” I said softly, because silence had become too loaded. “That seems excessive.”

One of the women smiled in a discreet, professional way that refused to become a full opinion. Another said, “It suits you.”

That ought to have been absurd. Nothing about this should have suited me. I was a mechanic’s daughter from Texas with a degree I had not used right and a talent for saying the wrong thing too honestly. I did not belong in a gown with an antique lace overlay and a skirt broad enough to whisper around my ankles like old secrets. I did not belong with my thick chestnut hair twisted and pinned into an elaborate arrangement at the back of my head, soft waves coaxed loose around my face and threaded around that gold-and-pearl thing until I looked almost... noble.

That thought alone nearly made me snort.

Instead, my hand floated up toward the headpiece again.

The woman nearest me caught my wrist lightly before I could touch it. “Please don’t.”

I looked at her in the mirror. “I keep feeling like the whole contraption’s gonna slide off and take half my dignity with it.”

“It won’t.”

“You sound awfully confident.”

“I pinned it for a woman once who danced six hours and cried twice,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”