“Ready to go?” he says. I take his arm, and we manage to escape unnoticed.
Once outside, I can see that the snow has faded away. I realize that the sunny afternoon inside the building was not reality. The cold air hits me with a force. We move toward the limousine, and I think, I could run. The security guards are inside, not outside. There’s only Linden to overpower, and he’s so frail that I could just push him and he’d be out of my way. I could do it. I could go. I would never see the inside of that iron gate again.
But when Linden opens the door, I climb inside the limousine, where there’s warmth and light. It’s offering to take me back home. Back home, I think, and it feels strange but not that strange. I slump tiredly and begin unbuckling my painful black heels. It’s more difficult than I remember. The limo starts to move, and I lurch forward, and Linden catches me, and for some reason I laugh.
He takes my shoes off for me, and I sigh in gratitude.
“How did I do?” I ask.
“You were beautiful,” he says. His nose and cheeks are a little red. He traces my cheek with the back of his finger.
I smile. It’s the first smile I haven’t forced since the expo began.
It’s late when we make it back to the mansion. The kitchen and all the hallways are empty. Linden goes off to check on Cecily, whose light is still on. She’ll be waiting for him. I wonder if she’ll notice that he’s a little bit drunk, which I guess is my fault, because he was following my lead. I wonder if Rose used to take the glasses from his hand and tell him when he’d had too much. I wonder how she endured these things with her sobriety in check.
I retire to my bedroom and unpeel the sweaty red dress from my body. I put on my nightgown and sweep my hair—still durably curled—into a clumsy ponytail and open my window and take gulps of the cold air. The window is still open when I climb into bed and begin to drift off, my eyelids full of spinning houses and pregnant bellies and glasses of wine floating to me on trays.
Sometime in the night the air gets warmer. I hear the sound of the window being closed, and whisper-quiet footsteps on the lush carpet, and Linden’s voice saying,
“Asleep, sweetheart?”
He remembers what I called him at the expo. Sweetheart. It sounds nice. Soft. I allow it.
“Mhm,” I answer. The darkness is swimming with glittery fish and spreading ivy. The room is also spinning a little.
I think he asks if he can get into bed with me. I think I mumble in the affirmative. I feel his slight weight beside me, and I’m an orbiting little planet and he’s the warm sun. I can smell the wine and the party on him. He gets close to me, and my head rolls right toward his.
It’s silent and dark and warm. I feel the tendrils of ivy leading me into a lavish dream, and then Linden says,
“Please don’t go.”
“Mm?” I say.
He’s breathing against my neck, putting little kisses there. “Please don’t run away from me.”
I’m back from my dream, but barely. He tilts my chin with his finger, and I open my eyes. I can see a strange glaze in his eyes, and a small droplet hits my cheek. He’s just said something, something important, but I’m so tired and I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything, and he’s waiting for my response, so I say, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
And he kisses me. It isn’t a forceful kiss. It’s soft, his lower lip gathering mine with a gentle lapping motion.
His taste fills my mouth, and for a moment it’s not so bad. Just like everything else about this night was not so bad. In a drunken, hallucinogenic kind of way. A small noise escapes my throat, like a baby gurgling into its bottle. He draws back and looks at me. I’m blinking wildly.
“Linden . . .”
“Yes, yes, I’m here,” he says, and tries to kiss me again, but I draw back.
I put my hands on his shoulders to push him away, but I can see the strange pain in his eyes that makes me think he was dreaming of Rose for a minute before I materialized back into Rhine.
“I’m not her,” I say. “Linden, she’s gone, she’s dead.”
“I know,” he says. He makes no more advances so I release his shoulders and he lies beside me. “It’s just, sometimes, you—”
“But I’m not her,” I say. “And we’re both a little drunk.”
“I know you’re not her,” he says. “But I don’t know who you are. I don’t know where you came from.”
“Didn’t you order that van full of girls?” I say.
“My father did,” he says. “But before that, what made you want to be a bride?”
I choke on my next breath. What made me want to be a bride? And then I think of the surprise in his eyes tonight when that man asked where I’d gotten my eyes from.
He really doesn’t know.
And I know who does. Vaughn. What did he tell his son? That there are bride schools where eager women devote their childhoods to learning to please a man?
That he’s saving us from a destitute orphanage? That may be true for Cecily, but even she is so dangerously unprepared for what’s to come when this baby is born.
I could tell him right now. I could tell him that Jenna’s sisters were executed in that van, and that the last thing I’d ever wanted to be was a bride. But would he believe me?
And if he believed me, would he let me go?