“I don’t care who you invite, I don’t care what you serve for dinner, I don’t care what time dinner is served or which rooms you assign to anyone who isn’t invited by me. I don’t care if you present yourself as the mistress. All of that fluff means nothing, and we’ve probably already covered what matters to me.” Severine turned to Mr. Brand. “We are cold.”
“Indeed.” He gestured at the butler who again led the way up the next stairs. There were two suites and Severine handed the first one over to Lisette. Severine followed the other two to the next room and she heard the bathwater before they had even opened the next door.
“That room was the better one,” Grandmère said with a bit of a smirk.
“I lived in a nun’s cell up until I returned to the New Orleans mansion. I’m sure this will be better than anything I’ve had for the last half-dozen years.”
Grandmère sniffed and left Severine while Mr. Brand said, “We could dry your dogs?”
“Bathe them, please,” Severine told the butler, but she handed the puppies to Mr. Brand. “When they’re ready, bring them back to me.” As usual Anubis followed Severine silently.
“The standing order on dogs is the stables, Miss DuNoir.” Disapproval tinged the butler’s voice for half a moment, but Severine lifted a brow and smoothly shoved back her hair.
“Yes, well, that’s clearly changed.”
“Dinner is at 8:00 p.m.,” Mr. Brand told her. “Do you want to attend?”
“I suppose I must,” Severine told him and then grinned wickedly before she shut the door. She didn’t hurry through her bath, soaking in the hot water until she was warmed through, and when she left the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her trunks had appeared in the bedroom along with three clean and dry dogs. Anubis lay next to the fire with the puppies on either side of him. Severine crossed to him and leaned down to nuzzle his face.
The basket for the puppies she’d sent with Mr. Brand had also arrived, and the puppies had already learned to stay in their basket until Severine let them free. She toweled her hair dry before the fire and dressed herself quickly.
Her dress was long and mostly black, but it was embroidered with blood red along the seams on either side. It had been made to fit her body, and it made her appear more voluptuous than she was by accentuating every curve. She looked like the wife of Hades or a sort of temptress. She could imagine what Sister Mary Chastity would say at the sight of Severine, and she flinched. She really did need to find her way to a confessional or dive into good works before she paved her way to hell.
She wore only red lipstick and mascara for cosmetics, which alone made her feel foreign to herself, having never worn them before. She found Lisette dressed and ready to go.
Lisette saw Anubis at Severine’s side. Her gaze darted to Severine’s cheek. “You didn’t bruise.” She looked Severine up and down. “That dress looks like someone skinned a million black widows and made you a dress out of their carcasses.”
“Ew,” Severine said to Lisette’s smirk and then stopped to look in the mirror at the end of the hall. Her cheeks were pale and the redness from the slap and then the bath had faded, leaving her as ghostly as ever. “You’d think it would be easier to bruise this white skin, but no, I’m thick-skinned, and she’s old.”
“I don’t think you’ll be close with your grandmother,” Lisette told Severine bluntly. “But I wasn’t expecting that. Also, she might be old, but that woman won’t roll over for you.”
“That was never going to happen,” Severine replied. “I hope for peace after our situations are settled. She should be more powerful in my life than she is. My father arranged that she not be, and I am realizing how grateful I am that he did. As for some sort of subjugation of her? I’d be happy as long as she’s kind to you and the dogs.”
“You might not have been sent away if he did leave you to her,” Lisette pointed out as they passed down the hall, which was shadowed as though only half the lights had bulbs.
Severine shrugged. “I wouldn’t have been loved as deeply as I have been if I hadn’t been put in the nunnery. The nuns loved me as truly as every child they never had themselves, even knowing that someday I would leave them. I no more regret my time in Austria than I do my birth.”
Lisette mumbled low, but Severine caught the gist of her friend’s comments. She shouldn’t have to travel across the world to find love. Severine didn’t disagree.
A moment later the dinner gong rang.
“That sounds like something from a novel,” Lisette said. “I’m waiting for a ghost to appear in a cupboard or for a secret passageway to creak open and lead us to our doom.”
Severine laughed and paused at the foot of the stairs. Did they go right or left? She closed her eyes and tried to remember. A flash of memory assaulted her. One of the maids scolding her as she’d been lost again and late for dinner.
Right, then. Severine started that way and found herself facing her half-brother. She blinked rapidly. She had expected to see him, but she hadn’t seen him in the great hall and assumed he wasn’t in residence.
“Andre,” Severine said with surprise. Her first instinct was to back up, but she instead pressed forward and reached out both hands. They had never been close and the six-year gap between the last time she’d seen him and the current moment had caused a rift large enough that she might not have recognized him on the street.
“Sevie—” He squeezed her hands and grinned at her. “You wound Grandmère up.”
Severine lifted her brows, surprised that Grandmère had told him. “That wasn’t my intention.”
He laughed and eyed
