“Keep telling yourself that, Princess,” he said in that dark, quiet voice that made her alive and bright with need. “If it helps.”
CHAPTER SIX
THE day of her wedding dawned wet and cold.
Was it childish that she wanted the weather to be an omen?
A summer storm had swept in from the mountains, shrouding the ancient city in a chilly fog that perfectly suited Lara’s mood. She was up before the gray dawn, staring broodingly out her windows, feeling like a princess in one of those old fairy-tales her mother had given her to read when she was a child.
It did not do much to brighten her outlook when she reflected that she was, in fact, a princess locked away in a castle and about to be married off to a suitor not of her choosing. That in her case, those old stories were real.
No matter how little it all felt real. No matter how much she still wanted to jolt awake and find herself back in her safe, small life in Denver. The little apartment she’d barely tolerated, and now missed. The job and the friends and the life that she had treasured, because it was hers. Because she had not had to run from anything anymore. She had been so proud of that. Of what she’d built when Marlena had let them stop running.
Marlena … who might not be at all who she’d claimed to be for so long. Who Lara had had no choice but to believe.
She tucked her knees up beneath her on her window seat and took in the luxury that dripped from every inch of the suite all around her—the cascade of window treatments in gold and cream, the tapered bed posts, the ornamentation of every surface, every detail. What terrified her was how, every day, the real world seemed further and further away. She spoke less English. She found her new clothes less uncomfortable. She forgot.
How soon would she forget what was truly important? How soon would she forget herself completely?
But then the door swung open, and she was no longer alone. And it was, after all, her wedding day.
She was bathed, slathered in ointments and perfumes, and dressed in a gown so beautiful, so light and airy, that it should have taken her breath away. It made her look like a dream. Like another fairy-tale princess. Her hair was curled, piled onto her head, and bedecked with fine jewels and a tiara that one of her attendants told her, with a smile, had once belonged to Cleopatra herself. There was a part of her that longed to believe such a story, that wanted to revel in the very idea of it. But when she looked at herself in the mirror, she hardly recognized herself.
If she allowed herself to disappear inside this dream, the dream she’d cherished as a girl and hardly believed could be happening now, how would she ever wake up? Could she ever wake up? Would she want to?
By the time they had finished with all their ministrations, the bright summer sun had burned away the morning fog, and as Lara was driven outside the palace gates it was as if she drove directly into the happily-ever-after portion of all those old fairy-tales she couldn’t seem to put from her mind. The people of Alakkul crowded the streets, cheering and waving. The sun streamed down from the perfect blue sky above. She even thought she heard birds singing sweetly in the trees as she climbed the steps to the great cathedral. Everything was perfect, save for the stone inside her chest where her heart should be, and the fact that she desperately did not want to do this.
Yet … was that true?
She did not break away from her fleet of handlers. She did not pick up her heavy skirts and run. She did not even stop walking, step by measured step, toward her doom. And when she entered the cathedral and saw the figure standing so tall and proud at the altar, she knew why.
He stood at the head of the long aisle, where a few days before her father’s coffin had been laid out for all to see. Where, so many years ago, she had stood with him once before, in the very same spot, and dreamed of exactly this moment. Yearned for it. Was it the echo of those long-ago dreams that kept her moving, as if it was the very blood in her veins? Or was it the way