“This is great!” Maelin cheers. “I’ve missed having you around so much. We’ll need to celebrate your move. Maybe we can both go to Brew Tea? Their chocolate peanut butter cake is the most incredible cake I have ever tasted.”
“Morana,” Viktor mutters, hefting one half of the back of my bookcase bed into the room Kyran has designated for me, a modest two doors down from his. “Where do you want this?”
“Oh.” I swallow, look at the vast space, which presently seems unfillable even with all my crap steadily entering it. “Over…there, maybe?” I say, pointing toward a corner that I might be able to stuff with my things in a way that doesn’t make the high ceiling seem quite so…far.
He shuffles past, and Lukas—at the other end—grins.
They don’t know I’m married.
No one knows I’m married.
I barely know I’m married.
After I settled down some last night, Kyran somehow coaxed me into my bathroom and got me to brush my teeth before he cradled me in my bed until I passed out in my wedding dress on his lap. No kiss. Nowedding night. Just a few mild swears about how pretty I was and how much he loved me as he laid in my bed and wrapped me in a blanket and told me I washis wife.
“Where does this bookcase go, mistress?”
My heart lunges up my esophagus as my face explodes. Stiff, I turn ever so slowly toward Zakery and Kyran hauling my big antique bookcase in through the door sideways.
My sister’s husband. My…husband.
“Um…uh…” I swallow.
Kyran’s lips quirk slightly.
“Is this going to keep happening?” Zakery asks.
Kyran nudges him along, heading toward an empty slice of floor by where Lukas and Viktor are setting up my bed. “Leave her alone. She’sshy.”
I amnotshy.
I amstupid.
And, between last night and this afternoon, I have lost the ability to speak to my…husband.
Turning me around so my back is to the menfolk, Maelin huddles, whispering, “Did something happen between you and Kyran?”
“Yeah,” Kyran answers, passing behind us on the way back out the door, “we got married.”
“Hey!” Viktor barks, figuring out how to get the sliding cabinet doors on my bed back in their tracts. “Don’t evenjokeabout that.”
Straightening away from our conspiratory huddle, Maelin giggles. “As ifbothof us would pass up planning a proper wedding. Dad wouldsob.” Bright as the angel goddess she is, she beams. “Sorry, sis. I’m afraid that duty falls on you.”
I swallow. Again. Because swallowing is a basic human function. And all that jazz.
I have shirked my childly duty.
I did not have a proper wedding.
My parents don’t even know I’m married.
Last time I spoke with them, I did not so much as allude to the possibility that I would begettingmarried any time soon. I was single, working, content, the end.
Dad is going tokillme.
They barely even had a chance tomeetKyran when they came for Maelin’s impromptu wedding because he said,Wow, matrimony, congratulated his brother and new sister, then expressed that he was exhausted from the Creator’s Ball and would be lying awake in his bed for the next twelve hours.
There is no future where my parents approve of this outcome.
