in fostering a relationship with the future wife of a wealthy plebian, and even less a spinster. “I prefer Teriana’s company.”
“It is improper how much you favor her.”
Lydia sat up straight with such violence that the wine in her glass sloshed over the rim. “How so? She is my friend.”
“A friendship that is itself improper. The daughters of senators don’t fraternize with the lower classes. It looks ill.”
“Lower classes?” Lydia stared at him, horrified to hear such words coming from his mouth. “You speak as though she were some pleb sweeping the streets. Her mother is both captain and owner of her own ship—one of the most influential Maarin ships there is.” Never mind that Teriana and her family were richer and more educated than half the Senate.
“Don’t play the fool, Lydia. You know well what I mean.”
“I do not.” A lie, because she did. But if he intended to espouse these views, then Lydia would be damned if she’d let him hide behind innuendo. “Explain yourself.”
Her father gestured angrily at the musicians and servants, all of them promptly exiting the room, leaving him and Lydia alone. Then he rounded on her. “As you like. Teriana is not patrician. And she is not Cel.”
Rising to her full height, Lydia stared him down. “Neither. Am. I.”
And no amount of pretense would make it otherwise. Not when every blasted person in Celendrial knew Senator Valerius had found her clutched in her dead mother’s arms outside the gates to this very home. Had taken her in and, being the man he was, had given her not just a home but his home, adopting her as his daughter.
His eyes clouded. “It’s different.”
“How?” Lydia was shaking, barely in control of her anger. “How is it different?”
“Because I make it so! My name! My power! My influence!” her father shouted. “And when I am gone, you will lose all of it unless you are wed to someone willing to provide the same. Because rest assured, Vibius will not allow you to remain in this house.”
Lydia knew that her father’s nephew despised her, though she didn’t understand the intensity of his hate. She was careful never to cross him, yet Vibius’s animosity toward her had grown with an alarming ferocity over the last year to the point Lydia was afraid to be alone with him. “It’s uncharacteristic of you to speak this way, Father. I don’t care for it.”
Tension thickened the space between them, not vanquished until her father conceded with an exhaled breath of defeat.
“I’m sorry, my dear girl.” He rested his elbows on his knees, head in his hands, an unfamiliar fruit, which was what he’d been hiding behind his back, now abandoned on a cushion. “My fear makes me speak to you in a way I should not. Please sit.”
Lydia didn’t move.
“Lydia, you are nearly eighteen years old and it was past time you were wed. For there to be a chance of a man with a good name taking you for a wife, you must perform the part of a patrician girl to perfection, which is perhaps something I should’ve been training you to do all along.” He sighed. “Instead, I raised you within the framework of my own beliefs and notions, which are not shared by most. Created an unsustainable world for you, never thinking that there would be a moment in which you’d have to step outside of it. And yet that moment is now staring me in the face. The moment when I’ll no longer be able to protect you.”
Terminal. The physicians’ prognosis echoed through her thoughts. Terminal. “Yet you wish me to cut ties with the only other person in the world who cares for me?”
Her father was silent for a long moment, as though he was considering his words. Then he spoke. “I know Teriana is like a sister to you, but know also that her mother is not warm to your friendship. Why else does the Quincense avoid the most profitable harbor on Reath like it is infested with plague? The Maarin keep to themselves, for reasons they keep to themselves, and to have a girl of Teriana’s importance doing otherwise looks ill upon her. It may be the case that she has come to realize that fact, which is why you’ve not heard from her in so long.”
It had been six months since she’d seen Teriana. A whole half a year without so much as a letter. Was it possible that Teriana, too, had decided Lydia