Page 29 of The Nightmare Bride

O n my return to the library, I found Amryssa and Lunk sitting cross-legged on the carpet together, laughing.

I paused, letting their lightheartedness soothe the sting of my disgrace. It helped that they weren’t just laughing, but outright giggling —her with a silvery twitter, him with a rumble akin to furniture being moved.

I watched them until my heart quieted.

Because...this was it, wasn’t it? This was why I loved her, why I’d give anything.

Why I’d marry Kyven all over again if necessary.

Because even after the nightmare had brought such suffering, Amryssa shone like a diamond in a coal mine, like a lamp on a foggy night.

She was the best and brightest humanity had to offer, and she deserved a little peace.

She glanced up at my approach. Her white curls spilled down her back and trailed onto the carpet. Amusement brightened her face.

And...wow. I’d have to leave her with Lunk more often. He’d done more to revive her than anything else I’d tried. Affection for the man surged through me, so potent my eyes stung.

“Harlowe.” Amryssa patted the floor. “Come sit. Lunk was just telling me about the time he tried to slaughter a chicken, but it made off with his underwear, instead.”

The giant ducked his head. “Oh, the keymistress doesn’t need to hear about that.” Keymistress came out as keymithreth , while doesn’t became doethn’t. “No doubt she’s got better things to do.”

He was right, of course—there were four massive walls of books here for me to hunt through. A million leatherbound possibilities that might describe the rise of the nightmares, or the Lady Marche’s dagger, or...well, I didn’t know what I was looking for, exactly.

But I did know Lunk was simply being shy. Amryssa had an undeniable softness, a tranquility that encouraged confessions about underwear-pilfering chickens, but I was decidedly less inviting, and the giant often slanted away when I came near.

I smiled, trying to soften the harshness of my features, but Lunk’s dark eyes sought the floor and stayed there.

Well, no chicken stories for me today.

“Don’t mind me.” I moved away. “Pretend I’m not even here.”

“Oh, but you are.” Amryssa pulled a pale curl through her fingers. “And without your husband, at that. Where is he?”

My husband . I wished she wouldn’t call him that. Somehow, on her lips, the word sounded much too real.

“I’m right here,” came a voice behind me.

I turned to find Kyven striding through the doors.

My heart momentarily forgot its cadence.

He looked fresh and clean and perfect, his wet hair glinting like polished mahogany, that sky-blue waistcoat accentuating his eyes.

As I stood there, trying to quiet the fireworks in my bloodstream, he rolled one snowy shirtsleeve to the elbow, then the other.

Those sinewy forearms hooked my gaze and held it.

I tried to shake off my reaction. All he’d done was resist a nightmare—okay, he’d also done a mild amount of saving my life—but that shouldn’t have granted him the power to affect me like this. Especially because logic implied he might also be kidnapping the housemaids.

I just...gods among us, I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t make myself, not when he was standing there like he was ready to work. To help me save the person I loved most.

“How’d you get out of my room?” I said, hating my own breathiness.

He shrugged. “I picked the lock.”

“Picked the...” I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to know where he’d learned that particular skill. Or why. I didn’t want to know anything except how to free Zephyrine, because every word I exchanged with this man only drew me further into his thrall.

“I assume,” he said, “that when I agreed to help, I agreed to do research. So where do we start?”

“Didn’t you say you don’t read?”

He made a face. “Gods forbid. But this isn’t reading , really. More like solving a puzzle. Conquering a challenge, you could say.”

“Which is...something you enjoy,” I said, more statement than question.

He started toward me. I swore I caught Amryssa smiling from the corner of my eye.

“It absolutely is.” Kyven came close. His voice dropped, his vowels filling out even further. “And the pricklier the challenge, the more liable I am to throw myself at it. I’m especially fond of the ones that seem impossible at first blush.”

A heatwave rolled up my spine. Were we still talking about books? Something told me not.

A sound like a suppressed snicker broke into my awareness. I glanced around to find gray eyes and black ones taking our measure. For all that the colors differed, both pairs shone with repressed mirth.

My gaze narrowed. Great. Lunk and Amryssa were clearly in cahoots, now.

“Right.” I turned back to Kyven, my tone brusque. “Why don’t you start at the other end, then, and I’ll stay here. We’re looking for...ledgers, maybe. Diaries. Anything that might chronicle the years around the start of the nightmares. Or that might mention the dagger.”

He nodded and moved off. I watched him go, earning myself another round of giggles from the peanut gallery.

I briefly wrestled with the compulsion to flip Lunk and Amryssa the bird, then stalked to the nearest bookcase without lowering myself to their incredibly childish level. Moral high road, and all that. Because wasn’t I just a paragon of fucking virtue.

Hours dragged by. I flipped through books and books and more books, but progress was slow. At one point, Vick wandered in to survey the library. His attention moved from me to Kyven, a sneer twisting his lips.

I frowned. What was that about? Every time I saw him, he seemed increasingly resentful, and now I wished he would just get on with his plans to rob us elsewhere.

Or whatever the hell he was doing.

By mid-afternoon, my back ached. The books had no apparent order—fiction was jumbled with treatises on inter-territory commerce and textbooks on astronomy. I even found a volume about something called paleography, which turned out to be the study of ancient handwriting.

I tossed that one aside, frustrated. How did Olivian get anything done in here?

Then again, he mostly didn’t. He spent his time holed up in his study, arguing with the Lady Marche’s ghost.

With an aggrieved sigh, I thought better of my desecration of literature and bent to retrieve the paleography book. It had tumbled beneath an armchair, and when I reached for it, I spotted a bundle of withered weeds beside the splayed pages.

Wait. Not weeds.

My breathing picked up. No, those were the peonies Kyven had given me on our wedding night. I’d ditched them beneath the chair, then forgotten them completely.

I snuck a furtive glance, but he stood atop the sliding ladder by the window, thumbing through a massive tome. Meanwhile, Lunk and Amryssa huddled around a boardgame they’d unearthed.

Nobody was paying me any attention, so I snatched the flowers. The stems had shriveled, but the blossoms retained some volume, their champagne petals preserved in a perpetual state of bloom.

My mouth edged downward at the corners. How fitting that Kyven had chosen a flower that barely lasted. What was it he’d called me the other night?

My eight-week wife.

Eight weeks. Just a blip. Ephemeral and meaningless. Like these peonies.

“I think I’ve found something.”

I whirled, one hand flying to my chest when I found the subject of my ruminations standing right behind me. I shoved the flowers under my skirts, then winced at the snap of breaking petals. “What is it?”

He gave me a puzzled look. Shit. I’d spoken much too loudly for the rain-drenched gloom of the library. I composed my face, trying not to look too deranged.

“It’s only a sentence.” Kyven hefted the weighty tome.

“And I’m lucky to have seen it at all. I only happened upon the right page.

Otherwise, this book holds nothing but the lethally boring ramblings of some old steward who apparently considered the daily state of the larder to be worthy of immortalizing in ink. ”

I blinked, digesting that. The peonies crackled again, and I forced a concealing cough. “Okay. Tell me what it says.”

“It’s dated from thirty years ago.” He read aloud in an immaculate Oceansgate accent.

“ Aside from waging war on the larder’s rats, I worry for the Lady Marche.

She copes with her childlessness by writing feverishly in that little brown diary of hers, as if enough scribbled pleas to Zephyrine might buy her a babe . ”

Childlessness . My mind swiveled and swooped around the word. I hadn’t realized Amryssa’s mother had had difficulties with her conception. Then I raked over the rest, and a spark simmered in my chest. “A ‘little brown diary?’”

“Exactly. Something like that would have to be around here somewhere, wouldn’t it?”

It would, and that was exactly the sort of thing that might provide clues to the dagger’s origins.

But when I scanned the room, the internal spark flickered and died.

These shelves housed thousands of books, half of which were brown, and while Kyven’s find might have narrowed our search, we’d still need weeks to sort through them all.

I glanced up to find him contemplating me, his head tilted.

“What?” I said.

“I’m just wondering if there’s any particular reason you’re crouched there on the floor.”

A flush warmed my neck. If I stood, he would see the peonies, and that was the last thing I needed. If he thought he’d caught me mooning over some meaningless trinket he’d given me, this cocksure prince would grow even cockier. Or...cocksurer? Cock?—

Never mind. Probably best to move on from that word entirely.

“Nope,” I said. “No reason. I’m just...admiring this chair. It’s very nice, don’t you think?”

He snapped the tome shut. “I didn’t know you were such a connoisseur of furniture.”

“Oh, but I am.” Panic set in, heating my insides to a glow. “Furniture is so...functional. You can do all sorts of things with it. Sit on it. Or...not sit on it? So many options.”

Kyven slitted his eyes, a silent proclamation that I’d lost my mind.

Which wasn’t off the mark. Someone had clearly stolen my body and was now using my mouth to spout gibberish. Briefly, I considered hurling myself through the nearest window, if only to escape this disaster of a conversation.

“Well,” he said, after approximately a decade of silence. “Carry on, I suppose. Though I’m a bit disappointed to hear you don’t have more stimulating uses for the furniture. I can think of at least a half dozen, myself.”

When he strolled away, a slow breath leaked out of me. I tucked the peonies behind my back and stood, only to find Amryssa and Lunk watching me with undisguised glee.

This time, I did give them the finger. And afterward, I wasn’t even sorry about it.

We didn’t find the diary the next day. Or the next.

The rain continued for a week, dampening the world, cloaking the manor in gray.

Amryssa and Lunk played games while Kyven and I combed the library.

Vick continued his relentless search. The whole time, water trickled down the panes, and I swore the rain filtered through the gaps in my ribs, drip-drip-dripping into some hollow chamber nestled beneath my heart.

Into the same secret place that housed the fluttering wings I’d first felt while looking at Kyven after the last nightmare.

In light of Althea’s disappearance, I knew I should have suspected him.

Hated him. But that same sparkly feeling kept rearing its head, determined to outstay its welcome.

It assailed me in the unlikeliest of moments—like at the dinner table, when Kyven buttered Amryssa’s bread and set it on her plate with a big-brother smile.

Or in bed, when he propped a hand behind his head and tugged idly at his breech-laces, a suggestive smile playing over his lips.

And the time Olivian barreled into the library, intent on upbraiding me for some infraction or another, only for Kyven to divert him into a discussion about the merits of alligator leather while simultaneously throwing me a wink.

Then, those wings would stir, and I would look away. Do my best to escape him.

But at night, I didn’t have that luxury.

Each evening, Kyven would croon his flirtations and do everything in his considerable power to fluster me.

Which worked. Ninety-eight percent of the time, it worked, though I did my utmost to hide the betrayal of my staccato breathing.

Eventually, he would roll over and sleep, which always left me feeling like he’d laid out a banquet for my benefit, then smiled knowingly when I’d refused a single bite.

Out of desperation, I stopped using the dagger’s enchantment.

Maybe if Kyven didn’t look so damn contented at night, I could exorcise this increasingly urgent.

..awareness. But he slept nearly as soundly without the dagger’s influence.

Meanwhile, I tossed and turned. And sometimes, in nighttime’s youngest hours, I just.. .breathed. Held him in my nose.

I couldn’t seem to help it.

Tonight, I lay on my back, watching the swamp-glow shimmer on the ceiling. The rain-streaked pane made it look like purple firelight, dancing to a tune no one could hear.

“Lioness,” Kyven murmured.

My heart nearly burst out through my mouth. I rolled toward him, breathless, but whatever I’d anticipated went unfulfilled, because he wasn’t even awake.

His eyes fluttered beneath closed lids. Was he...dreaming? About me ? The way he’d said my name was unfamiliar—hungry and windswept—and I ached to hear it again.

But he only sighed and rolled over, stealing himself from sight, though the view from behind wasn’t anything to complain about, what with all those ripples and lines laid out like a feast for my eyes.

Still, I barely slept that night. A hollow throb chased me into slumber—an uneasy sense of incompletion, as if I’d gone into town half-remembering I’d left a pot on the hob to burn. That something critical had gone undone.

And, to my dismay, the same thing happened the next night.

And the next.