Page 60 of The Scarlet Ball

“Of course not. Iphigenia Marshall, on the other hand, received the finest tutors and was kept too busy to roam. And her face, why, I am looking at her face and I can see no flaw in it, so why would anyone else?”

“But why me?”

“Perhaps I have become fond of you. It is not impossible.”

The look I gave her was so skeptical that she dropped that tactic immediately, indifferent to its failure. She had not expected me to be quite that foolish, and I appreciated it.

“I held my granddaughter’s place in the world for as long as was possible. At any moment before the Rose Ball, she could have returned, reclaimed her name, and danced as you have danced.”

My mind flashed to the Snowflake Festival. I didn’t say a word.

“That possibility ended when you reached out into the darkness and one of them took your hand. You were chosen, and when they choose, they do not do it on the basis of gowns or jewelry or the wealth such trappings denotes. They do not choose by whose blood runs in your veins or by what name you use. They choose you, and there is no other substitution that might be made.”

“Of course there is,” I snapped. “You tried to give him Mielle, didn’t you?”

“They must be fed,” she said, without turning a hair. “Or have you known no wives who chose their husbands’ mistresses?”

“You’re choosing his meals.”

“You will learn to do the same. I do not look at you and see a girl who will go into the jaws of her own doom willingly.”

“You are very confident in what I will or will not learn.” Even as I said it I understood the trap was closing around me, not sharp and hard to break my neck, but slow so I could feel every point of the steel teeth.

“As I said, you are not a fool. And knowing what you know now, and seeing what you have seen, you must understand that there is no choice at all. You will stay with me, and you will learn what you need to learn as Iphigenia Marshall. Or do you think you will survive being hunted by a demon lord? He has chosen, and that means he knows you and that he wants you.”

I stared at her, and she smiled, soft like a snowfall that will freeze to ice overnight.

I should have known—and if I were truly honest with myself, maybe I had known in some way I had chosen not to acknowledge—that there was no way out when I decided to attend the Rose Ball. After what I had seen, what I had felt, I had been sure that if I went, if I held my hand out in the dark, Sebastian would take it. He would never let me go.

“Right now, he is playing by the rules. He wears a human face. He starves for you. However, there is only so long that you can keep a beast like that at bay. By the time of the Scarlet Ball, you must bind him or he will devour you.”

“How will I bind him?” I asked numbly.

“The usual way it is done. You call him, you feed him, and then, if you can, you stop him. After that, he’s bound with a ring on your finger and a promise that you will feed him well the rest of your lives together.”

I choked on a laugh. “And now tell me why. When you realized that Ginny wasn’t coming home, it would have been easiest to get rid of me before the Rose Ball, wouldn’t it? You’d have to lick your wounds, learn to hold your head up among your proud friends, but you’ve done that before, with your daughter Scylla. It wasn’t your pride that sent me to the Rose Ball, it was hope. Tell me, what did you hope for?”

She held my gaze for another moment, and then she looked away.

“You left us,” she said, and if there was recrimination there, she hid it well, like she must have hidden it from everyone who had ever betrayed her whose favor she still needed. “When he and Sebastian Rowe broke off, he was starved, and there was. There was nothing in that place to eat.”

On the last word, her voice broke, and her hand on the table between us tightened into a fist. I told myself not to be fooled. She’d fed this thing longer than I had been alive. I should not grieve it if she had to pay the price at least once. Then I realized that of course it would never have been only the once. You didn’t live with monsters without paying a price, and I took a shaky breath of my own.

“What did you feed him?” I whispered, and she removed the glove from her left hand.

She had stuffed the fingers before she’d left the house. In time, she would be able to have light wood inserts made to hold the fabric more naturally, but it served well for the moment. You could not tell at first glance that nearly half of her left hand was sheared away to the wrist, leaving her only a forefinger and a thumb. The flesh remaining had a raw look to it—someone had healed it over with some skill, but there were only a few layers of thin skin over the wound. I think I uttered a soft dismayed cry. She replaced the glove with a wince, her eyes still wet.

“Henry is a ferocious old battler, you know. He was in the war, attached to Daniel Sickles’s brigade. He saw action at Gettysburg, and at Rappahannock River. He sent a unit of slave traders fleeing with every single one of them on fire. He was never fed better than he was in those years, but every day, he wrote me letters asking if he might come home. I held him off for two years, thinking that if only he ate enough, burned enough—but that was then.”

She took a deep breath.

“And now he is even more dangerous. Perhaps I have starved him too long. Perhaps I have fed him too well. There are so few hard and fast rules with his kind. The first, above all and always, is that they are hungry and they must be fed, but to what degree and with what, well. That is the question, isn’t it?”

“And you thought Ginny and her new husband could help you feed him. You thought they might protect you.”

“No. I thought they might destroy him.”

There was a midnight weariness to her voice. When she first thought of it, I imagine she must have recoiled. She had built a world upon him, and then the thought crept in, sly and insidious, that some worlds were meant to end.