Page 34 of The Nightmare Bride

S omehow, I was certain of what we’d found before we even opened it. The diary had a sheen, a well-worn patina that buzzed against my fingertips.

The moment Kyven locked us into my bedroom, I cracked the book’s cover. Sure enough, the first page bore a portrait. Of Olivian. Younger and beardless, without any of the anger now cemented into his features. The artist had rendered him mid-laugh, eyes glinting.

Underneath, it said, My sweet Ollie, overflowing with smugness after this morning’s Great Donut Incident.

Ollie . I couldn’t imagine anyone referring to the seneschal that way, and I had no idea what a donut incident was, much less a great one, but clearly, we’d struck gold. This book had belonged to the Lady Marche. No one else could have transmuted love into each sweep of the charcoal like this.

“Ky.” Urgency slanted my voice upward. “This is it.”

I turned pages, revealing flowery handwriting, plus more drawings: the ancient oak at the heart of the swamp, then Zephyrine, dark-eyed and brown-skinned, wearing her usual attire of palmetto leaves. Something about the goddess looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And?—

My pulse jumped. There was the dagger, in crisp and perfect detail. And a few pages later, a sketch of a baby who could only be Amryssa.

“We found it,” Kyven said.

I grinned up at him.

“And,” he said softly, “you finally called me Ky.”

My brow wrinkled. I had, hadn’t I? “It just...came out. I don’t know why.”

His mouth tilted. “Probably because of that whole familiarity business we discussed. Accompanied by a commensurate amount of contempt, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure,” I echoed, faint.

Something in his eyes shifted. “Would you like to read this alone? Or together?”

I considered. “Alone” was the obvious answer, and I opened my mouth to tell him so.

But something else came out.

“Together. If you want.”

Apparently, he did want, because he stripped to his usual nighttime breeches and stretched out on the bed with the diary while I ducked into the bathroom to change. When I reemerged in my nightgown, Kyven—Ky?—opened his arms, gesturing for me to join him.

I drifted toward the bed, contemplating how best to refuse him. And then I just...

Stopped.

Seven hells, I didn’t have it in me right now.

Not when all I really wanted was to nestle against his side.

To let the thud of his heartbeat assure me that while he’d almost died—trying to save me for a third time, no less—we’d both come out of that room alive and no matter what this diary said about Zephyrine, or Amryssa, everything would be okay because we’d make it okay, and tonight I just wanted to forget that I still didn’t know Ky’s secrets, and that he’d soon marry Amryssa and desert me, because couldn’t I worry about all that in the morning?

So I gave in. I crawled across the mattress and settled in the circle of his arms, my head pillowed on his shoulder.

He didn’t move. When I glanced up, pure shock was splashed across his features.

“What?” I said.

“I just...didn’t think that would work. Not for one single second did I think that would work.”

“Are you complaining?”

“No.” He cinched an arm around me and propped the book on his chest, where we could both see it. “Complaining is the last thing I’d dream of doing right now.”

“Okay. Good.”

“Are you ready, then?”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “But it’s now or never.”

The Lady’s Marche’s story started out innocently enough.

The diary’s early entries detailed her marriage and subsequent move to the house—“happy events,” in her words—followed by paragraphs about her hopes for a baby.

But when pregnancy eluded her for a year, then two, her optimism lapsed into despair.

Ky turned pages. In them, the Lady chronicled how, in her third year of marriage, she turned to Zephyrine. She made routine treks into the marsh, armed with cakes and wine she left beneath the holy oak.

There, the Lady swore she could feel Zephyrine’s presence. Hear a divine whispering. But her prayers went unanswered, despite the offerings she laid at the goddess’s feet.

In the fourth year, the Lady turned to the hex-casters and healing-women, the ones the townspeople snubbed in daylight but visited by night anyway, pleading for love tonics and beauty salves. There, the Lady paid exorbitant sums for pills and potions, for poultices she let dry on her belly.

Nothing worked.

But I believe I’ve found the answer , she wrote. The woman I saw last night told me hope doesn’t lie here in town, but in the swamp. I just haven’t gone about getting Zephyrine’s attention the right way.

It takes blood, the healing-woman said, and doesn’t that make sense? The patron goddess of things that go slithering in the shadows has no need for wine, but blood.

At that part, I pressed closer to Ky.

“This isn’t going well at all,” he said. “If only the Lady had attended the theatre, she would’ve known not to make a blood pact with a goddess. It never turns out the way it’s supposed to.”

I smiled grimly. “Somehow, I don’t think that would’ve changed anything. She was obviously desperate.”

“Hmm. You’re probably right.”

We read on, about how one day, the Lady slipped into the swamp when “sweet Ollie” went to town. At the foot of the giant oak, she opened her vein. A chalice full of blood later, Zephyrine finally heeded her call.

How can I describe her, other than to call her dazzling?

I was dizzy by then, so dizzy I could barely see straight, but that didn’t stop me from recognizing divinity.

Zephyrine shone, her skin the color of a cypress’s heart, her hair like dark oil.

She wore nothing but leaves and vines, yet I’d never seen anything so breathtaking.

I begged. I threw myself at her feet, told her I would do anything for a child.

Zephyrine knelt. Laid a hand on my belly. She peered into my eyes and told me my wish can’t be granted. That something is wrong, inside of me. Not made right for nurturing a child.

The news almost broke me.

But then she offered a boon. My years of pleading hadn’t gone unnoticed, Zephyrine said, and my blood had bought her favor. She said she could birth a child for me—one that would be part of her, of divine origin. I could have the sweet daughter I’ve always craved.

But there’s a catch. Because isn’t there always?

I can only keep the child for a time.

At that, a pang twisted my stomach. Ky’s fingers tightened around the book.

“Is that possible?” I whispered against his chest.

“I don’t see why not. The gods are mysterious. And powerful.”

“So that’s why Amryssa doesn’t look like Olivian? Because she’s not actually his? Or the Lady Marche’s? She’s...Zephyrine’s?”

He made a sound I couldn’t interpret.

Mind churning, I flipped back a few pages, to the sketch of the goddess rising from the swamp.

That was why Zephyrine had looked familiar.

Because she had Amryssa’s face, or a version of it.

Their coloring was so different I hadn’t immediately made the connection, but now that I had, there was no mistake.

The concept of the goddess bearing a daughter rocked me, yet the more I mulled it over, the more sense it made. My best friend was so much better than other humans, so of course she wasn’t one. No, she was something more. Something godly.

“Maybe you’ll get to marry up, after all,” I told Ky.

He said nothing. When I glanced up, his expression was tight.

The unfamiliarity of it gave me pause. “This doesn’t change anything for you, does it?”

“I never imagined I’d marry a goddess,” he said slowly. “Aside from the one I already have, of course.”

“Oh, stop it. I’m no goddess.”

He made a tutting noise. “I thought we’d established that you’re exceptional. And that I’m a fount of wisdom and truth.”

I rolled my eyes. “And bullshit, clearly. Lots of it.”

“Only half the time.”

“Uh-huh. And which half are we dealing with right now?”

He aimed a fond smile at me. “The truthful one, of course.”

My chest fluttered, which I ignored. “Fine. Then if I’m a goddess, you should listen to what I tell you, and I’m saying you need to marry Amryssa.

Now more than ever. Because if the Lady Marche made some kind of promise to give her back, then broke it, I need to get Amryssa as far from here as possible. ”

For long moments, he didn’t answer. His chest rose and fell beneath my cheek. “Does that mean you’ll tell her? What she is?”

“I...” Silence welled. I didn’t like that question. “Can we just keep going?”

He didn’t argue. He propped up the book again, and we read on, about how the Lady Marche had faked a pregnancy while Zephyrine carried a true one.

Olivian knew, but no one else, and on the day the child was born, the Lady went into the swamp.

She emerged not only with her long-awaited baby, but an antler-hilted dagger, gifted from the goddess.

The knife holds a piece of Zephyrine, she wrote. One she cut from her own breast and forged into a weapon. It will help keep my daughter safe until her eighteenth birthday, at which point I’ll return her to the swamp.

Because if I don’t, Zephyrine will fall into a peaceless sleep that will bring ruin to all Oceansgate. And the goddess will never stop looking. Never stop trying to dream her child home.

A cold shimmer rolled down my spine. I flashed back to the night Amryssa had leapt from her window, when the nightmare had helped me. And the dagger, both. They’d conspired to save her.

Which made sense, now. A terrible, horrible, sickening kind of sense.

Few entries remained after that. The Lady Marche had apparently taken to motherhood like a muskrat to the reeds, because the intervals between updates grew. Two sketches accompanied the dwindling entries—one of the dagger, another of Amryssa as a toddler.