The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 538

Liora’s POV

They didn’t even give me a bouquet.

Bianca pressed a single wilted rose into my hands outside the throne room doors instead, brown at the edges and shedding petals, with a smile that told me she’d picked it out herself.

“Every bride deserves flowers,” she said, loud enough for the guards to hear. “Even you.”

Then the doors swung open, the trumpets blared, and six hundred people turned in their seats to watch me walk down the aisle in a ruined dress.

I walked it alone. No arm to hold. My father sat up on the dais in his ceremonial coat, completely unfeeling, staring at a point somewhere above the doors. The organ droned from behind the columns, and the red and black banners of Falcon’s Reach hung where my family’s gold and white had always been.

The murmurs started before I’d made it ten steps.

I caught pieces of them with every row I passed. The marker. The words across my bodice. The slit Ambrose had cut up past my knee. A woman in the third row laughed behind her glove, then looked away when I turned my head and stared at her.

I kept my chin up and kept walking.

Let them stare, I thought. Let them read every letter and laugh all they wanted. By the end of the night, all six hundred of them were going to remember this dress for a very different reason.

Ambrose waited at the altar in red and black, medals pinned to his chest for battles I doubted he’d ever fought. His eyes went straight to the cut he’d made, and his mouth curled.

“You kept it just how I left it,” he murmured, trailing his fingers across my neckline when I stopped across from him. “Good girl.”

My thumb found a thorn on the rose stem and pressed down until it hurt. It kept me from lashing out. For now.

Bianca took her place to the left of the altar, exactly where a maid of honor would stand at a real wedding, radiant in her blood-red gown. The officiant was a thin, sweating priest who wouldn’t meet my eyes.

And off the dais, in the shadow of a column, I found Belinda without meaning to look for her. Her hands were folded as always, head tilted, watching me the way a cat watches a mouse it already had cornered.

The tone in his voice was clear. Somewhere past this night, if they had their way, a parapet at Falcon’s Reach was waiting for me. But that was the thing. They weren’t going to get their way.

Marcus was in position. Callum was here. All I had to do was pick my moment.

“Do you, Lord Ambrose of Falcon’s Reach,” the officiant said at last, “take this woman as your lawful wife, to keep and to command, from this day until her last?”

“I do.” He said it slowly, savoring it, eyes dragging down the ruined bodice one more time. He made no effort to hide the way his tongue came out to slide across his lips. I suppressed a shiver and slid my hand toward my skirt, where the throwing star was kept.

The officiant turned to me. “And do you, Liora, take this man as your lawful husband—to obey, to serve, and to remain at his side until the end of your days?”

The room went quiet.

I looked down at the dead rose in my hand. I thought about arrows in the dark piercing the back of the one woman who had always been too good for this world. I thought about my mother’s hands, once the hands of a great warrior, now thin and pale on white sheets. I thought about the list I’d been keeping since the first time this dress was ruined.