Jesus was gone. The party moved around us as if nothing untoward had taken place.
And I? I looked back at a monster who mouthed the word “wife” before he pulled together my dress.
It was then I saw her. The bride dressed in white, who unlike the rest of the crowd seemed to be paying close attention to whatever had just passed. Our eyes met. Mine blue, hers glowing red.
She sneered.
And I loved her for it.
I loved her as if she’d always been mine.
Chapter Fifteen
Pearl
Over the course of my years, and especially of late, I imagined many things—about my future, about a world I longed for yet retreated from… about my unknown child. Thoughts of her unsettled me the most.
My baby could have been anything, grand or monstrous. One look at her might have cut out my heart for a multitude of reasons that made me unworthy of such a gift. Not once in my life had I ever considered that I’d birth a child. I was cursed. I was sickly. Yet I had. Not that I remembered it, or her, or why, or how, or anything. I’d even tried to, finding only a black hole in my thoughts. And that hole was far too easy to fall into and so much more difficult to climb free of.
Entire pieces of my brain had just been yanked out and filled up with sawdust.
The few memories of Darius I had were enough. Never did I want to know the rest. But I burned with something deeper than anger, a constant pinprick behind my eyes.
An infant’s creation, her time in my body, her birth had been torn out of my mind. A person I was entirely blind to, who I would have never known existed had Vladislov not told me she walked the earth, had no idea I was her mother.
A disturbing, worrying, guilt-inducing horror I’d have to answer to God for. At the feet of my Lord, I’d have to explain my misgivings and disgust. I’d have to confess that the first mention of her did not bring me joy. It brought me horror.
I’d have to ask forgiveness for the sin of bitterness-laced fascination. That I wasn’t at her wedding for her benefit, but for purely selfish longing to know who I was.
A sick curiosity wrapped up in pretend obligation to a fully grown woman.
Yet, one look at the woman my baby had become… and every last pang of disgust and uncertainty blew from my skin like unsettled dust when a tomb was disturbed.
I grew lighter. I knew that somewhere stuck in the untouchable parts of my memory, I had felt that child move inside me and loved her.
Had her first cries been beautiful? Had she nursed from my breast after I delivered her into the world?
I bet her head had smelled divine.
What had she looked like as a baby?
“You want to know, so I will tell you this.” Softly at my ear, a creature who could see into my darkness whispered, “True to form, he cut her out when your condition became inconvenient. Though you fought him despite your entrails spilling everywhere, Darius never allowed you the honor of holding her in your arms. Not after she’d drawn your attention away from him once too often. The squalling, naked, and bloody babe was delivered to the man Jade will wed tonight. You were never allowed to love her.”
But I did love her. Right in that moment, I loved her as I have never loved anything. And it moved me to cuddle closer to the beast whispering ugly secrets in my ear—to lean on him as if there was nothing more natural than sharing the moment my heart felt whole for the first time in all my existence.
As a bride, my baby was a vision.
Perfect in every conceivable way in my eyes. Even the obvious evil of her.
That was how God had designed her, and God was flawless.
The arm around me grew all the more reassuring. “And if you follow that logic, then you must also concede that you are perfect. I’ll even concede that this might be the only topic upon which your false God and I agree.”
God loves his children just as they are. God is love. The immeasurable love I had for my child was the love God had for all things. Even Vladislov.
Even Darius.
Who had harmed my child by taking her from me.
A thought that led to a complicated resentment it was not the time to indulge in. My eyes, my devotion, were for one being only that night.
Jade, her limbs draped in exquisite white lace as she observed me in return.
I knew that high forehead, the more feminine lines of a jaw from my worst nightmares. The aristocratic nose. She was her father made female.
The vivid red of her lips oddly highlighted eyes that burned of hellfire.
There was nothing in that regal woman that had the look of me.
“You’re wrong. Her eyes, my soul. They were the same shade as yours.” Pulling me before his body so I might rest against his chest and enjoy a better view, Vladislov wrapped me tight in his embrace, causing the woman to cock a sculpted dark eyebrow. “Blue as the burning core of the hottest flame. When the day comes for you to know one another, she will find comfort in recognizing that part of herself in you.”
I’d never thought much of my eyes, but I would every day from that night forward. I would look in the mirror and see this child, even if that was all of me she had.
“There are portraits of her from when
