CHAPTER 274: HIS HOME
EMBER’S POV
I do not know what to do with that.
I’ve spent my whole life being the woman people look through. Being looked at like this/like I am s omething, makes my skin feel two sizes too small.
I am busy, not knowing what to do with my own face when one of them just-leaves./
She breaks right out of the line, a little older woman, small and fast, and she is already crying before she gets to us, which, I want to be clear, no one had warned me was on the agenda.
“You brought someone home.” She says it to Knox, and then she says it again, quieter, like she doesn’t believe her own mouth. “Oh, dear. Ten years. Ten years and you finally brought someone home.”
Beside me, something in him goes soft. First soft thing I’ve felt off him in hours.
“It’s late,” he says. “You should be asleep, Marjorie.”
“Don’t you tell me about my sleep.” She scrubs her face with the back of her hand, and then she
turns all of it on me, and I brace, because I know that turn.
I have felt that turn in every fancy room I’ve ever been shoved into. The up-and-down, the math, the
silent judgment that says you don’t belong in our world.
It doesn’t come.
What comes is a smile so wet and so happy it makes my chest hurt, and two small warm hands grabbing one of mine like she’s found something she lost.
“Look at you,” she says. “Oh, look at you. He didn’t say you’d be tired, the great idiot. Have you eaten? You haven’t eaten, I can see it.”
“I’m okay,” I say, which is a lie, and she knows it is a lie, and she lets me have it anyway.
“You’re about to fall over is what you are.” She wheels on him without dropping my hand. “Forty minutes up the mountain and it didn’t cross your mind to feed her?”
And the scariest man I have ever stood next to looks, for one second, exactly like a kid who got
caught,
“There was a situation.”
“There’s always a situation with you.” She squeezes my fingers and drops her voice like we are
10
OONG
CHAPTER 274 HIS HOME
already conspirators. “He’s been like this since he was a boy. All teeth and trouble and never once a straight answer. You’ll learn. I’m Marjorie. I run his house, which mostly means I run him, and don’t let him tell you different.”
“Ember,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want. “It’s- I’m Ember.”
“I know who you are, love.” Her eyes go soft and wet all over again. “We all know who you are.”
I want it on record that the warm, crying woman is what nearly breaks me. I have armor up for the cold.
I’ve been getting ready since the plane for the polite freeze, the you-don’t-belong-here said in a voice nice enough that you can’t call it what it is.
I have nothing for an old woman crying because she is happy to see me. My throat just-closes. have to look at the floor.
Which is the only reason I don’t see the next one coming until she is already there and the air has changed.
“Your Majesty.”
Smooth voice. Where Marjorie’s had been all torn edges, this one is pressed flat and sent just far
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