Chapter 1

I'd upset my fiancé again, the men I'd grown up beside.

All because I wanted to borrow thirty million from him to buy back a ruby brooch.

Adrian was heir to the Vampire Prince. To him, the money was nothing.

But in front of every servant in the house, his face went cold.

"Elena. Don't be greedy."

Disdain filled his eyes.

"Yes, your mother died saving me fifteen years ago, yet I agreed to marry you."

"You're only human. Don't presume on that."

My throat closed. I'd been about to explain that the brooch was the only thing I had left of my mother.

But Adrian had already looked away, impatient.

"Whatever it is, it can wait until I'm back. Stop making a scene."

I ran my thumb over the few thin bills in my pocket and lowered my head.

A whole year of quiet work for the manor's servants, and that was all I'd saved.

I was still wiping my eyes when I got back to my room, and my father called again.

"Elena, have you decided? This is for your own good. No matter how long you wait, young Master Adrian will never marry you."

"Why don’t you take your stepsister's place. Marry into the North instead. You'll have an easier life."

This time, I didn't argue.

"Fine. I'll do it."

"But I want thirty million in return."

Chapter 1

Elena's POV

By the time I'd thrown on a change of clothes and rushed out to Adrian, the cars were almost ready to leave.

"Adrian, wait!"

I ran to his car, out of breath, and knocked on the window several times before he finally frowned and rolled it down.

"What is it?"

His cold, handsome features tipped down at me, my breathless reflection caught in his blood-red eyes. Even when seeing me put him in a foul mood, he still looked effortlessly elegant.

The skies over the Prince's domain were always overcast, and just then the rain came down without warning.

This was the one halfway-decent outfit I owned, and the silk was already speckled with rain.

I gripped the front of my dress, went quiet for a moment, and forced myself to speak.

"I... I need thirty million. Could you lend it to me? Just for now."

The moment I said the word "lend," something in his face soured.

The servants and the nobles in his retinue began to murmur.

I couldn't look at him. I stared down at my shoes, the ones I hadn't had time to change, and tucked my feet under my hem.

The truth was, I didn't want to ask him for money in front of everyone either.

But I had no other way.

Adrian hadn't come to see me in a long time. The manor was enormous, and if he intended to avoid me, it would be effortless for him to steer clear of his powerless fiancée in name only. If the Prince hadn't decided to take his heir south to tour the domain, it would have been months before Adrian summoned me to his study and dismissed me with a few empty consolations.

"There's nothing you lack in the manor. What do you need thirty million for?"

His question caught me, and I froze.

"A gown for some banquet? Jewelry?"

He let out a cold laugh the moment the words left his mouth.

"It's not as if you ever go to banquets."

The looks around me turned amused and mocking.

I'd been his fiancée for years, yet nearly every vampire and human noble knew my situation.

At the banquet the hunters attacked, my mother had thrown herself across the doorway to hold them off, so I could drag a gravely wounded Adrian out the back.

After she died, my father quickly took a new wife, and then they had a daughter.

And through all of it, I stayed beside a badly traumatized Adrian, day and night.

It wasn't until the anniversary of my mother's death, when I slipped home and saw my infant stepsister through the window, that I understood everything.

As a boy, Adrian depended on me completely. He couldn't eat a thing if I wasn't there.

The Prince and Princess weren't pleased that I was human, from a middling family, but for their son's sake they tolerated it.

Under the pretense of honoring my mother's spirit, they brought me into the Prince's domain to raise, when I was only ten.

To the outside world, they said only that Adrian and I were too young to be betrothed but fond of each other, so it was good for us to keep each other company.

Back then, the Prince and Princess pulled me aside every day to ask after Adrian. They praised me, told me I was a good child who'd done so much for them.

And Adrian always shielded me, never letting the servants gossip.

He said that once he grew up, he would turn me, so I could stay with him for eternity.

But then, he gradually recovered.

The hallucinations stopped haunting him. The mark on his chest, where a silver bullet had grazed him, slowly faded.

And so I, his human fiancée, became the single most unwelcome thing in the whole domain.

If they broke the engagement now, the entire royal line would be branded ungrateful.

But if he actually married me, my standing would never be worthy of a Prince's wife.

Back and forth it went, until I was twenty-five and still unwed.

I knew the vampire nobles were all waiting to watch me humiliate myself.

So after Adrian recovered and began avoiding me on purpose, I stopped going to banquets altogether.

With no one to shield me, I might well run into my father and stepmother’s family.

Going would only hurt.

Head down, listening to the laughter around me, I felt strangely numb.

Adrian's cold smile still lingered on his lips, sharp and cruel.

I just drew a slow breath and made myself speak again.

"I want thirty million. I... I saw a ruby brooch. I want to buy it back."

That ruby brooch was the antique my mother had been wearing the day she died.

She'd told me it had come down from her grandmother, and that on my wedding day she would give it to me.

She never got the chance.

Adrian was a vampire, sharp-minded, and he forgot nothing.

Fifteen years ago, my mother had been wearing that very brooch when she gave her life for him.

He knew that at her burial I'd cried and cried, saying the hunters had taken the brooch, that my mother would never rest easy without it.

My eyes searched his face, and I looked up, hoping.

He'd always hated it when I brought up my mother. He thought I was trading on a debt.

But he would understand. He would remember that this had always been the wound I couldn't close.

I pressed my lips together, not sure how to make him remember.

Adrian saw the plea in my eyes and stared for a moment, then blinked.

I clasped my hands and prayed he would smile, gently, just once, the way he had as a boy, and tell me he'd give me anything I wanted.

He had said it once. He'd held me at my mother's grave and said it.

"I'll find that brooch for you, Elena. I promise. Just stop crying, and I'll give you anything."

But he didn't look at me the way I'd imagined, with that tender, aching care.

"Elena. Don't be greedy."

Cold disdain filled his eyes.

"Yes, your mother died saving me fifteen years ago, yet I agreed to marry you."

"You're only human. Don't presume on that."

Chapter 2

Elena's POV

The tears I'd been holding back spilled over. My eyes went red, and as I lowered my head, a single drop struck the hem of my dress.

My throat closed. I started to tell him that the brooch was all I had left of my mother.

But Adrian had already looked away, impatient.

"Whatever it is, it can wait until I'm back. Stop making a scene."

My mouth opened, but all I could do was watch the car window glide slowly up.

Adrian turned and struck up a conversation with a female vampire inside, another of the royal line.

The woman watched me out of the corner of her eye. There was pity in her look, and above it, a cool, lofty distaste.

The cars rolled past me one after another, throwing up water from the road. I realized they were doing it on purpose, aiming the wheels at me, and I stepped back, but I couldn't dodge them all.

The silk was ruined.

Clutching what was in my pocket, head down, I made my way back to my room, quietly wiping my eyes the whole way.

I took the rain-soaked bills out and smoothed them flat, one by one, counting and counting again.

A full year of secret work for the gardener and the kitchen staff, and this was all I'd saved. Nowhere near thirty million.

I sat on the edge of the bed, looked around the cramped little servant's room, and could only manage a bitter smile.

When I first came to the Prince's domain, Adrian had just survived a hunters' ambush. He was badly wounded and prone to hallucinations.

Back then, he would grip my hand and swear the hunters were still there, hidden in the corners.

He wouldn't let me leave his side for a second.

He was terrified of seeing those silver guns again, and terrified I'd be killed somewhere he couldn't see.

At that banquet, the old butler he'd trusted most had handed him over to the hunters. After that, he couldn't trust anyone but me.

Because I was the one who'd taken his hand, amid my mother's screams, and led him out of that hell.

When the Prince and Princess came to see him, he would hold my hand and ask me to stay.

Fifteen years ago, I ate and slept beside him.

Even as a vampire, who needed no sleep, no rest, he could close his eyes and lie quiet for hours with his head on my knee.

My care healed him quickly, yet it sent my own life into free fall.

The Princess moved me into a servant's room in a far corner.

Adrian, it seemed, found those recovering days too shameful to remember, so he avoided me, and hated it most of all when I mentioned my mother.

At first, everyone assumed I'd been brought into the Prince's domain as the heir's young bride. They thought my widowed father would dote on me, his only daughter, and that the Prince would treat his future daughter-in-law like his own.

They called me the treasure of two great houses, the royal line and the Valerie family.

But before long, my father had a new wife and a new daughter.

Adrian got better, and started to find me an eyesore.

And now, I had no home left at all.

I ran my thumb over my empty pocket, still turning the problem over.

I'd only found the brooch by chance, passing an antique shop and spotting it in the window.

The owner had meant to keep it for his collection. I begged him for a long time before he agreed to sell it to me.

But thirty million isn't easy to come by, and he'd told me he could only hold it for a year.

And if someone else bought it while I was still scraping the money together, I would lose it forever.

My mother used to say that every daughter of the Valemont family carried an antique ruby brooch on her wedding day.

Her grandmother had loved her best of all, so she'd left her the most precious, most beautiful one in the family.

If I hadn't begged to go to that banquet to play, my mother wouldn't have died, and the brooch wouldn't have been lost.

I closed my eyes, wondering whether to find some way to beg Adrian again, when the phone rang.

It was my father.

He hadn't contacted me in close to nine years.

Not until last year, when an old marriage contract surfaced between the Valerie family and the vampire North.

Rumor said the Lord of the North was a monster who ate humans alive.

Years ago, he'd lost a power struggle with the current Prince and withdrawn to the North of his own accord.

The cold there was endless. No ordinary human could survive it.

For years, no vampire noble and no human had been willing to marry into it, and the Northern Lord remained unwed, so he'd dug out that old contract, only to give his people some kind of answer.

My father and his wife could never bear to send away Vicky, the daughter my stepmother had borne him.

So they turned their eyes to me.

For nine years after my mother died, my father hadn't spared me a thought.

Now there was a disaster that needed someone to absorb it, and suddenly he remembered that I, too, was a daughter of the Valerie family.

When I didn't answer, my father sighed.

"This is for your own good. No matter how long you wait, young Master Adrian will never marry you."

"Why don’t you take your stepsister's place. Marry into the North. You'll have an easier life of it."

Once, words like that would have had me choking out a protest.

I would have forced myself to say that Adrian loved me, that he treated me well.

I would have dredged up our childhood, over and over, and sometimes I'd even lied to make it sound true.

But sitting there clutching the wet, mud-streaked hem of my dress, I suddenly didn't want to lie anymore.

My chest felt tight. I couldn't get out a single lie about Adrian still loving me.

I'd seen the disgust in his eyes too clearly, all these years.

I knew Adrian was no longer the boy who couldn't live without me.

He didn't need me anymore. He resented that a human still clung to the place meant for his well-matched wife.

Adrian was always avoiding me. He never once walked to the end of the hall, to this cramped little servant's room.

Maybe he didn't even know his mother had banished me here long ago.

The servants here teased and mocked me without end.

The roof leaked. And for all my title as his fiancée, I still went to bed hungry most nights.

Whenever I looked at the scars on my hands, left from a year of work for the gardener, something in my chest turned bitter.

My mother had loved me, when she was alive.

If she could see me now, it would break her heart.

I'd nearly forgotten it myself, that I was the daughter of human nobility.

At that thought, I unclenched my fist and gave a small nod.

"Fine. I'll do it."

It was the first time my father had heard me agree so easily.

He'd probably braced himself to sit through my stammering lies, my tearful refusals.

For a second he was speechless, then he asked again, not quite sure.

"Really?"

I heard the delight in his voice. And in the background, my stepmother and Vicky, weeping with joy, holding each other, murmuring comfort.

What a happy family.

I laughed softly and closed my eyes.

The royal line didn't want me. Adrian found me repulsive. And the Valerie family was only too glad to send me north to die in Vicky's place.

If that was how it was, I had no reason left to stay.

But before I left, there was one thing I needed to do.

"I have one condition, though."

"I want thirty million in return."

"Transfer it now, and I'll marry into the North in Vicky's place."

Chapter 3

Adrian's POV

After I left the manor, something sat heavy in my chest.

A bad feeling circled overhead.

I kept seeing Elena in the rearview mirror, soaked to the skin, head down, arms wrapped around herself.

I remembered another time. The blood-soaked banquet, vampire nobles dead all around us, Elena filthy from head to toe.

But back then, the way she'd looked at me, her eyes had been bright.

She'd heard her mother screaming. She was crying hard. Yet the hand gripping my wrist was steady.

"Mother said if I get you out of here, she'll meet us outside and take us home!"

"Go, don't be afraid!"

Her voice had been shaking, but she never let go of my hand.

And just now, a little water on her dress had left her that crushed, that lost.

I pushed down the strange dull ache in my chest.

Of course. After all these years in the manor, climbing from a middling human noble to the heir's fiancée, she'd probably grown soft and spoiled.

My cousin was still chattering beside me, but I had no heart left for her words.

Before I left, Elena had said something about a ruby brooch.

I knew she'd spent years searching for one.

It was her mother's. To save me, her mother had stood in the doorway with nothing but her own body between us and the guns.

The hunters' shots had rung out, one after another.

Under the screaming, the image of Elena crying was burned into me.

I knew she might blame me.

If I hadn't taken her to the back garden to see the roses, she and her mother might never have been caught in the attack.

The old butler who'd served my father and me for years had betrayed us.

And what I'd never expected was that a human mother and daughter, strangers I'd met for the first time, were the ones who protected me.

By the time her mother was buried, the brooch had vanished.

Elena held onto me and cried for a long, long time, such a small thing.

She said her mother would blame her, that it was her fault for wanting to go to the garden.

She said that with the brooch gone, her mother's soul would never rest.

Her mother's chest had been riddled with bullets. The brooch had probably been burned to ash by the silver long before.

Back then I still wasn't free of the hallucinations. At the edge of my vision, hunters were always raising their guns at me.

I held Elena too, just as afraid to let go.

Because I was afraid the hunters would take my life.

And I was afraid they'd seize Elena and leave me to run through the heap of corpses alone.

But what I feared most was that Elena would blame me.

The hunters wanted only vampires. Their true target was me, the young heir to the Prince.

Most of the human nobles at the banquet had left long before; they had no standing to stay to the end.

If Elena hadn't happened to be holding my hand, walking to the back garden to look at roses.

If I hadn't, on a whim, wanted to show that pretty girl the things I loved.

Her mother would never have been forced to give up my whereabouts. She would never have been shot, one bullet at a time, where she stood.

My father said I was the heir. I couldn't be so weak. I couldn't show the hunters even a flicker of fear.

That day, so many of the royal line died on the floor, and half of it was because I'd failed to see the old butler's betrayal in time.

My father said that if this kept on, he could never trust me to become Prince.

I knew it was all my fault.

All I could do was hope Elena wouldn't blame me like the rest.

So I swallowed my fear and comforted her, gently.

"Don't worry. I'll find that brooch for you."

"I'll protect you."

"I'll take care of you. Anything you want, I'll give you."

The brooch, of course, was long gone.

I gave her dozens of similar ruby brooches, just to win a smile.

I only wanted her not to leave me, not to hate me for her mother's death.

Later, the hallucinations faded.

I went to find Elena, half wild with joy, to tell her I'd grow strong soon, that I could marry her soon.

But Elena didn't look happy.

She'd moved out of my rooms.

I asked my mother, and she only said the heir couldn't keep his fiancée at his side every waking moment. It would sound too ugly if word got out.

A middling noble's daughter, made wife to the heir of the Vampire Prince, would always invite ridicule.

I had no answer for that.

Maybe it would have been better if I'd never insisted on the engagement, never kept her at my side under that title.

I found Elena, meaning to comfort her, and heard her crying.

She was buried under the blankets, murmuring for her mother.

With the hallucinations gone, every time I looked at Elena I could see the grief in her eyes.

It was because of me that her mother had died at the hunters' hands.

Maybe I never should have kept a human girl trapped in a vampire's world.

It was after that I began, deliberately, to avoid her.

My cousin, seeing me silent so long, asked carefully what was wrong.

I blinked, pulled myself out of the memory, and said quietly that it was nothing.

Outside the window, the rain still came down in unbroken sheets, gathering and sliding off the glass.

Never mind.

If Elena still wanted a ruby brooch that badly, I'd buy her a better one. A gift.

Chapter 4

Adrian's POV

The tour of the southern domain was almost over.

For days, my parents had paraded vampire noblewomen in front of me.

Each one matched my station, fit to be the heir's wife.

I didn't refuse the meetings. But I chose none of them.

Elena and I truly weren't a match.

For years I'd kept her at a distance, and every time she came to me, she wore that meek, careful, long-suffering look that made my chest go tight.

For all the lavish comfort the Prince's domain gave her, she never learned to behave herself. When she looked at me, the smile on her lips was always stiff, and she'd grip the hem of her dress and say nothing.

I shouldn't have chosen her for my wife.

It really would sound too ugly.

Not only because she was human.

But because the whole noble world knew the state I'd been in after the blood-soaked banquet.

For three full years I was lost in hallucinations, suspicious of everything, refusing to let a single servant near me.

They all said it: the heir to the Prince, frightened out of his mind by a pack of hunters.

To choose Elena as my wife was to tell them the heir had never escaped that year's shadow.

That he could never lead them to wipe the hunters out for good.

So all I could do was push the wedding back, and back, and no one seemed to mention the fiancée I kept tucked away in a corner.

Elena never once asked me when I'd finally marry her.

Every time I saw her, she had that delicate, just-finished-crying look that only vexed me.

I held a proper smile on my lips and took each noblewoman's hand in turn, accepting every barely-disguised advance, trying to drive Elena out of my mind.

Without Elena, I could have married a wife who matched my station with ease, without all this hesitation, without becoming a laughingstock.

The tour was nearly done. There was only one stop left, an orphanage for vampire children.

Most of the children here had survived that blood-soaked banquet, the small ones of noble families.

The butler's betrayal had nearly wiped out the vampire nobles of the core domain.

With no parents and no kin to take them in, these vampire orphans were gathered into the orphanage, to wait until they were grown and the Council assigned them respectable work befitting their birth.

Thinking of them, I felt only pity.

Some of those children had been three years old when it happened.

They had no claim to saving the heir, the way Elena did, no place in the Prince's domain to enjoy a servant's care.

"Young Master Adrian, thank you for honoring us today, on the Prince's behalf."

The one speaking was a vampire woman with a settled, mature air.

She looked after most of the children here.

I studied the way she dressed, wondering whether she skimmed from the Council's stipend, whether she mistreated the children. Nobles were greedy by habit.

Then a girl came running over from a swing in the distance, laughing.

"Mama!"

She wasn't even afraid of the armed guards behind me. She bounded over to the matron, clung to her leg, and refused to let go.

"Mama, the flowers I planted last time all bloomed! Come see them with me, please?"

The matron smiled and stroked the girl's hair, helpless.

"Jasmine, how many times have I told you? Mama has an important guest today. You mustn't interrupt."

The girl kept up her little act, all sweet and willful, burying her face against the matron and refusing to look up.

I didn't press it. I kept my gentleman's smile in place.

"Is this your daughter? It's all right. There's no need to send her away."

The matron looked at me, and for a moment her red eyes hesitated.

The girl felt the silence and looked up, curious.

She had blue eyes. She was human.

Not a vampire's child.

And yet she laughed, easy and warm, calling a vampire noblewoman her mother.

For no reason at all, I thought of Elena's face.

The matron soothed the girl, promised her candy after dinner, and only then did the little one go skipping off to find her friends.

Among them were a few other human children, mixing with the vampire children as if it were the most natural thing, close, without a trace of rank between them.

"My apologies, young Master Adrian."

"That child's always been lively. Forever climbing on things, planting flowers, kicking a ball around."

She glanced at the children playing in the distance, and her voice dropped.

"Her parents were killed by hunters too, by mistake. Over the years, I've taken in a good many human noble children."

"At first they all cried. But after a while in my care, one by one, they started calling me Mama."

The matron lowered her eyes and smiled, all the warmth of a mother in her face.

I listened, watching the children, and said nothing.

I was thinking of Elena.

It had been a long time since I'd seen her laugh like that.

The matron said children loved to climb and clamber. Elena never had.

She always seemed to be tucked in a corner, staring blankly out a window.

The children sat on the grass and played, never minding the dirt on their clothes.

Elena always held the front of her dress so carefully, always stood so straight.

She never wanted to be around the vampire nobles. Every time, they only mocked her.

Why?

She lived at my side, in lavish comfort, in the Prince's domain.

Why wasn't she happy?

Watching the matron wave to the children, I suddenly understood.

It was me.

It was all those years I'd shown her nothing but cold indifference.

All those years I'd said nothing, when my mother called her "only human," when the nobles sneered at her at banquets.

I'd considered everything. My image as the heir. The thought that Elena might hate me for her mother's death.

Everything except Elena herself.

It had never occurred to me that keeping her safe and settled at my side took more than the manor's servants, more than the title of fiancée.

It took my care. My attention. My love.

All these years, I'd failed to see what she needed.

A dull ache went through my chest. I called for my men and ordered us back to the domain at once.

I had to see Elena.

I had to make up for these years.

There was still time. There had to be.

I could make her happy, like those children.

I could make her smile at me again.

Chapter 5

Elena's POV

The moment the money came through from my father, I rushed to the antique shop and handed the owner a check.

For a little while I forgot my dread of the North. There was only the anticipation, full and bright.

I remembered sitting on my mother's lap as a child, reaching up to touch that ruby, curious.

The feel of the stone surfaced under my fingers in my mind, and with it, almost within reach, my mother's gentle smile.

But after the owner took the check, his face turned awkward.

"I've sent the brooch out to be cleaned and restored. It'll be about a month before it comes back."

"Why not wait a little longer, Miss? I'll deliver it to your residence myself."

I thought of the manor and shook my head.

The servants there were always tormenting me. I toiled away for the gardener and other servants for an entire year, yet the wages I received were constantly shortchanged.

The Princess said that as Adrian's fiancée, I couldn't go out and take work; it would shame the Vampire Prince.

So I had no choice. Even though every servant in the manor knew how cold Adrian was with me, how he avoided me, even though they bullied me because of it. Still, I had to endure their mistreatment while laboring for them just to get a little money.

If they saw the shop owner come to deliver something, they might just confiscate it.

"That won't be necessary. I'll come for it myself."

A month later turned out to be the day before I left for the North.

If I went early, it wouldn't get in the way of anything.

The day before the wedding, I sat in the Valerie family's great hall in a gown they'd rushed together, waiting to meet the Lord of the North.

It was only a plain blue dress, the stitching a little rough, but the fabric was the finest I'd worn in years.

Even as Adrian's fiancée, I'd never had to go out with him to visit or receive guests, so once I was grown I just cycled through the same few outfits.

The dress I'd worn to ask him for thirty million was a secondhand thing I'd gritted my teeth and bought off a maid. The rain had ruined it.

That was the only reason the Valerie family had to throw a new dress together overnight.

They'd only prepared a wedding gown, never expecting the Northern Lord to arrive a day early, insisting on collecting his bride to the North himself the next morning.

Maybe he feared the Valerie family would back out at the last moment.

I sat there on edge, my eyes drifting again and again to the clock.

My appointment with the shop owner was almost here, and the Northern Lord still hadn't come. All I could do was wait.

I hesitated, frantic inside.

The clock struck again. The phone in my hand kept buzzing.

In the end, I couldn't bear it. I stood, made an excuse about the bathroom, slipped past my stepmother and father by a hair, and crept out the back door.

I ran through the streets in heels and made it into the antique shop at the last possible moment.

"Sir! I'm here for my brooch."

Out of breath, I braced myself against the doorframe and forced myself upright.

At the edge of my vision, I saw the ruby brooch.

Even now, the stone caught the light, lovely as ever.

A pair of long, elegant hands held it, turning it over, studying it carefully.

I looked up, and saw Adrian.

And beside him, Vicky, clinging to his arm, all sweetness.

"Young Master Adrian, this brooch is gorgeous. Are you going to give it to me?"

Adrian frowned. "I only brought you to see whether the style was simil—"

He looked up, saw me standing in the doorway, and stopped.

Adrian clearly hadn't expected me here. Surprise flickered across his face.

I only swept a flat glance over him and my stepsister, my expression unmoved.

He pushed Vicky's hand off and stepped aside, as if to clear himself of suspicion. But when I gave no reaction, his face slowly darkened.

"Sir, I'm here for my brooch."

The owner's face turned awkward.

He knew who Adrian was. It wasn't easy to simply take the brooch from his hands and give it to me.

A part of me burned with humiliation, and for a moment I couldn't move at all. I just stood by the counter.

I was about to leave for the North. I hadn't thought I'd have to suffer one more insult from Adrian before I went.

"That brooch has already been bought," I said. I drew a breath and made myself face him. "By me. Give it to me."

It was the first time I'd spoken to Adrian like that. My voice still shook, careful, but I wasn't so afraid anymore, and I didn't sneak looks at his reaction.

Strangely, after he'd called me greedy in front of everyone, it had stopped hurting.

After I cried my way back to my room that day, the tight, sour ache that had lived in my chest for so long was simply gone.

Adrian was right. I was only human. I wasn't worthy of him.

It was as if I'd seen it all clearly, all at once.

Those things he'd told me as a boy were only words spoken in delirium, to fool me.

He found me so repulsive, such a nuisance. There was no reason to cling desperately to those empty promises.

Looking at the calm, hollow look in my eyes, Adrian's brow drew tighter.

As if in retaliation, he wrapped an arm around Vicky's waist and stared straight at my face.

"And what if I happen to want this brooch for myself?"

Chapter 6

Elena's POV

I didn't want to see that cold, contemptuous look again. I just closed my eyes.

"Young Master Adrian, if you'd like to give Miss Vicky a gift, there are plenty of choices here."

"But I've already paid for this brooch. It's mine."

“It's mine.”

I'd said those words so many times.

The servants were always taking my things. More than once the Princess had seen it, and never lifted a finger.

She'd probably understood, earlier than anyone, that Adrian didn't love me. That was why she'd opposed the engagement from the start.

Young as I was then, I refused to believe it. I thought Adrian couldn't live without me, that I couldn't live without him, and I clung to that to the death.

But within five years of my mother's death, Adrian recovered, and proved her right.

I lifted my eyes and looked at him, coldly, without a trace of love.

The more plainly I laid it out, the more I forced myself to watch the two of them wrapped around each other, the clearer my head became.

Adrian despised me for being human, and turned all his gentleness, all his manners, on my stepsister.

After every banquet, the servants brought back their whispers.

Alone in my room, I could always hear them gossiping at the door.

Adrian hit it off well with Vicky at the banquet. When they crossed paths, he'd greet her.

They all said that if he'd been betrothed to Vicky instead of me, the dull elder daughter of the Valerie family, things might have turned out completely different.

We shared a father but not a mother, and yet she looked so much like me.

That had always been the thorn in my heart.

If I hadn't slipped home on the anniversary of my mother's death, I'd never have seen that infant in my father's arms, the one he was rocking so tenderly.

I hadn't even known he'd built a new family.

Back then, Adrian had snuck out with me, held me, and said he would marry me, that he would be my family, that I shouldn't grieve.

Only now did I understand.

He'd been lying to me all along.

Those careless promises, I never should have believed.

Adrian saw the coldness in my eyes, and his expression tightened.

"How much is this brooch? Where did you get the money?"

I didn't answer. He turned his glare on the shop owner, who went rigid with fear.

"Young Master Adrian, the brooch is thirty million. Miss Elena paid for it a month ago—"

At the price, something flickered in Adrian's eyes.

But his face only went darker.

"Elena. Where did you get thirty million?"

I lifted the corner of my mouth, about to answer, when Vicky cut in.

"My sister's marrying the Lord of the North. Of course she's not short on money."

Adrian's grip tightened on the brooch. I lunged forward to snatch it, and he caught my wrist.

I fought him, hard, and only left my wrist ringed with red.

"You'd marry someone else for thirty million?"

His eyes had gone bloodshot. He pinned me with the question, low.

"You're already betrothed to me. Where do you think you can run off to?"

I stopped struggling. At those words, a cold smile rose to my lips.

"What does it have to do with you where I’m to marry?"

My reflection crossed his eyes, and something there flinched, stung.

"Adrian, it's been so long and we still aren't married. I know you think I'm not good enough for you, that you don't want to marry me."

I said it all with that cold smile fixed in place.

My chest felt hollow. I couldn't feel a trace of pain.

"So it's fine. I'll leave on my own. You don't have to drive me out."

Adrian's grip turned crushing. He was rattled, and it came out almost before he could think. "If it's about money, I'll give you thirty million. You are not marrying anyone else!"

I looked up at him, unable to tell whether he was mocking me or actually trying to keep me.

So I shook my head and stared back, cold.

"And what if it is about money?"

"Even if I sold myself for money, I'd never sell myself to you."

That, finally, enraged him. He let go of my wrist.

I stumbled, dodged the hand he instinctively reached out to steady me, and stood alone, facing the two of them.

"Sir, I'll give you forty million. Sell me the brooch."

Adrian tossed the brooch carelessly onto the counter. "Wrap it up for me."

My throat seized. I turned to the owner.

His eyes were full of fear. Terrified of offending so high a customer, he could only give me an apologetic look.

"I'm so sorry, Miss. I'll refund every cent, and compensate you besides—"

"I don't want compensation. I want this brooch!"

I cut him off, sharp, and looked back at Adrian, hatred rising in me before I could stop it.

"Do you really despise me that much?"

The words tore out of me at him.

"I've already walked away on my own. Why do you still have to humiliate me?"

The tears I couldn't hold back slid down my face.

I saw Adrian freeze, while I clumsily tried to hide my tears.

I lowered my head. A handkerchief of ivory white, held in a warm, elegant hand, appeared before me.

"My lady. I've found you at last."

"Don't cry. I'm here."

I looked up, into a pair of smiling eyes.