The Duke Should Divorce Me, So Why Is He Stalling My Death? novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Terms

At midnight in his study she bargains for the terms of a marriage neither wants, and he warns her never to carry anything to the Saintess.

The study was on the second floor at the end of a long, cold corridor.

Lysandra reached it at midnight exactly, because she was a woman who read the instructions.

The door was open.

A fire burned low in the grate, and the only other light came from a lamp on a desk piled with maps.

Alaric stood at the window with his back to her.

He had taken off his coat, and his white shirt was open at the throat.

"Close the door," he said.

She closed it.

He turned around, and she saw that he had been waiting there with his hands behind him for a long time.

"Sit."

"I'll stand, thank you."

"Sit, Duchess," he said.

She sat.

It was a hard chair, placed so that the lamp fell on her face and not on his.

Alaric stayed where he was, ten feet away, and looked at her.

"Yesterday morning," he said, "you told your maid you would see me hanged before you signed anything of mine."

"I was upset," she said.

"Last night you offered me wine handle first."

"I wasn't myself," she said.

"No," he said. "You weren't."

He said it flatly and watched her face while he said it.

Lysandra kept her face still and wondered what a claims adjuster would do.

She would make an offer.

"I want terms," Lysandra said.

One of his eyebrows moved.

"I won't sign your paper. Not tonight, not next month, not at the Banquet. You can't put me out without a crime, and I don't intend to commit one."

"That seems to be settled."

"So we're married," she said. "For a long time, probably. I'd like to know how that works."

He was quiet for a moment.

"What do you want?"

She had made a list on the pillow that afternoon.

"A lock on my door, with the key on my side," she said. "My own purse, paid on the first of the month, with no questions. My maid stays my maid. And I sit at any table where the Saintess sits."

"Why the last?"

"Because anything that happens to her will happen when I'm not there to see it, and then it will be my fault."

Alaric said nothing.

He didn't look surprised.

It was starting to bother her how seldom he looked surprised.

"Granted," he said at last. "All four."

"That was easy," Lysandra said.

"I have terms of my own."

"Of course you do."

He crossed the room slowly and stopped in front of her chair.

Up close he smelled of cedar smoke and cold air, and his eyes were not quite as grey as she had thought.

They had a ring of darker blue around the iris.

"You do not touch the Saintess," he said. "No hand on her arm, no embrace, no help on the stairs unless she is falling."

"That's one," Lysandra said.

"You do not lie to me about small things. I'll forgive the large ones if I have to."

"That's two," she said.

"And you will tell me where a duchess learns to catch."

Lysandra swallowed.

"I used to catch things as a girl," Lysandra said. "Kittens. Chickens."

"You were raised in a townhouse in the capital."

"I had a very ambitious cat."

He gave no sign that he had heard it as a joke.

Then he reached down and took her right hand in his and turned it over.

His fingers were warm and dry, and his thumb stopped on the inside of her wrist.

Four small crescents were there, going purple already.

"She marked you," Alaric said.

"She was frightened."

"She was not frightened."

His thumb moved across the marks, once, very lightly.

It was the first time he had touched her since she woke up, and her whole arm noticed.

Lysandra sat very still.

The book had called him cold and finished, and his hand was warm.

"You used to flinch," he said, low, to her wrist. "When I came near. For eleven months you flinched."

"Did I," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm not flinching."

"No," Alaric said, and let go of her hand.

The room felt colder where his fingers had been.

She stood up, because she did not want to be looked down on, and found she was standing much too close to him.

"My terms," she said. "I don't touch the Saintess. You don't touch me, unless I ask."

His mouth moved.

It was nearly a smile and it was gone at once.

"Agreed," he said. "Unless you ask."

That was too quick and too smooth, and she knew a deal that had been expected.

"One more," Alaric said, and the lightness left his voice.

"Do not carry anything to her. Not a cup, not a letter, not a flower, not a dish from the kitchen. If she asks, you send a servant. If she smiles and insists, you send the servant anyway."

"Why?" she said.

"Because that is how it begins," he said.

He said it with such terrible simple certainty that her arms went cold.

"How what begins?"

"Go to bed, Duchess."

She went.

She was all the way to the end of the corridor before the words appeared in the air in front of her, small and white in the dark.

[Alert: the character "Alaric Veyrath" is behaving outside the script.]

[This has never happened in a scripted book.]

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