Page 35 of Her Cruel Empire
There’s more. Jeans that feel like butter against my palms and hug my thighs and hips lovingly. A wool coat in deep burgundy with a silk lining. Boots that are wide enough to fit my calves.
Everything fits. Everything is beautiful.
Everything isright.
I’m sorting through it all—holding up a dress that makes me feel elegant just looking at it—when I realize what’s missing.
Where’s all the fancy underwear? I search through the boxes and finally find something with a familiar red and white logo on it.
Surely not.
But when I open it, I find plain white cotton underpants and bras, the exact same kind I’m wearing now.
I check every box twice through. No other bras or panties. Nothing but the Target collection, as though…
As though my body underneath all the pretty packaging of couture doesn’t deserve the expense of fine lace or satin.
My cheeks burn. Was it intended an insult?
I can’t figure it out. But I also can’t demand an answer. Eva’s not here, and this is the only underwear that fits me. So it will have to do.
As I get dressed in my new clothes, I catch myself in the mirror. The top flatters my cleavage perfectly. The jeans make my legs look longer, somehow. I look…expensive. Curated.
But underneath it all, I’m still just me in my Target underwear.
The contradiction unsettles me more than it should.
With Eva gone, the castle feels different. Emptier. The silence presses against my ears like cotton balls, broken only by the distant sounds of staff moving through corridors that are empty by the time I get there.
I wander the halls aimlessly, my new boots loud against stone and hardwood floors. Every portrait seems to stare at me. Judge me. Ask what a kindergarten teacher-wannabe from Vegas is doing playing dress-up in a real-life castle.
I dine alone, my meals appearing in my bedroom as though whoever brings them has timed it so they don’t have to interact with me. The next morning, after I’m shooed out of the kitchen after being fed breakfast, my feet carry me toward the door Eva told me never to enter.
I don’tmeanto go there. But that forbidden corridor draws me in like gravity.
The hallway stretches before me, lined with heavy wooden doors that look like they could withstand a siege, and possibly have in times past. This is the oldest part of the castle, maybe built back in the Dark Ages, if what Eva told me on the tour was true.
I’ve investigated the first room at the top of the corridor—the door is open, and inside is a disappointingly empty storage room—and I’m about to leave and go back to my room when I hear it.
A click.
One of the doors down the hallway has opened.
I duck back into the storage room, leaving the door slightly ajar so I can see out.
The woman with the silver braid emerges first. She moves like a ghost, silent and controlled. Behind her comes the man, equally quiet, equally dangerous.
The man carries a tray.
On it: bloodied bandages. Crimson stains dark against white fabric.
I clap a hand over my mouth to stifle my gasp and press myself deeper into the room, not breathing, not moving.
When I peek out again, they’re gone. The door has clicked shut behind them, and when I try the handle, just to see, just to make sure…
It’s locked.
Back in my room, I pace the floor. Eva has been gone for about thirty hours, and when I’m not worrying about Adrian and Dane and Alicia and Maisie, I’m going out of my mind with boredom, so I fixate on the one interesting thing that’s happened.
