Chapter 6 The wedding night part 2

Chapter 6: Chapter 6 The wedding night part 2

Talia’s POV

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

Kaelen did not look at me. He just stood there, cold and patient, like a man who had all the time in the world—or like a man who had learned, a long time ago, that waiting was easier than hoping.

Around us, the sacred flame waited. The elder waited. The hall waited.

"I accept," I whispered.

The words were small. Too small for everything they carried. But the elder nodded as though I had shouted them from the rooftops.

"Then it is done."

And just like that, I was married.

No one cheered and no one smiled. The wolves murmured among themselves—some surprised, some pleased, some already calculating what this union meant for them and their bloodlines. But not a single wolf in that hall lifted their voice for me. Not one.

I reached for the list behind my teeth, then stopped. Because this was not something the Cress family had done to me. This was just what my life had always been. Uncelebrated. Unwitnessed. Unwanted.

Some wounds have no one to blame, and those are the hardest kind to carry.

Kaelen turned to me. "Come," he said.

He did not hold my hand this time. He just walked, and I followed—because that was what I did, and because I did not know what else to do.

The hallway was long and cold. Torches flickered in iron brackets along the walls, and guards stood at every corner, their eyes following me as I passed. I kept my head down and my shoulders hunched, the same way I had walked through Cresswood for fifteen years. Small. Quiet. Forgettable.

Old habits do not fall away just because your title changes. I had spent fifteen years learning how to disappear, and one white gown could not unteach me that.

Kaelen did not look back to see if I was following. He just walked, and I followed, and the distance between us stayed exactly the same the whole way—three steps behind, like a shadow that had not yet decided whether to belong to him.

The room they gave him was larger than any room I had ever been in at Cresswood.

A bed big enough for four people sat against the far wall, draped in dark furs. A fire burned in the hearth, casting orange light across the stone floor. The walls were dark and cold, like him—bare, except for shadows. A desk in the corner was buried under papers I could not read. A wardrobe stood against the opposite wall, taller than I was.

Everything in this room looked expensive. The furs on the bed. The silver candlesticks on the mantle. The thick rug beneath my bare feet.

I had never stood on a rug before.

It felt soft. Like walking on something that had never known cold, never known hunger, never known the weight of a raised hand. I stared down at my feet sinking into it, and my throat tightened for a reason I could not name.

"There is a bath through that door," Kaelen said, pointing. "You may use it."

Then he left.

No orders. No expectations. No demands. Just a door, and warm water waiting on the other side of it, and a man who had walked me all the way here without once looking back to make sure I obeyed.

I stood alone in his room, wearing a white gown, officially married to a stranger.

I should have been afraid. I was afraid. But beneath the fear was something heavier—tiredness. The kind that lives in the marrow. I was tired of hiding. Tired of surviving. Tired of waiting for a mother who might never come back.

I walked to the bath.

I touched the water, and it was already warm. Someone had prepared it while we were at the ceremony. Someone had thought, ahead of time, that I might need this. That I might want to be warm.

No one had ever prepared anything for me before.

I removed the gown and stepped into the tub. The heat wrapped around me like a blanket, and I closed my eyes and let myself breathe—really breathe, for the first time all day.

My fingers found the silver chain at my throat. The charm rested against my skin, cold and familiar, the one constant in a life that had just upended itself.

My mother’s voice echoed in my head.

"Never remove the glamour charm before your twentieth birthday."

It was two more days until my birthday. I could wait. I had waited fifteen years. Two more days was nothing.

But the water was warm. And I was so tired. And I wanted—just for a moment, just for myself, just for the privacy of this steam and this silence—to feel like me again. Without the weight. Without the lie. Without the girl I had pretended to be pressing down on my skin.

So I pulled the necklace over my head.

For the first time in fifteen years, I took off my mother’s charm.

I set it on the edge of the tub, and the silver chain caught the firelight and glowed. But the small stone at its center looked dimmer than I remembered—as if taking it off had cost it something. As if it were counting the hours I had stolen from it.

’Two more days,’ my mother’s voice whispered in my head, faint and far away, like she was disappointed in me. ’You were supposed to wait two more days.’

I told myself it was just the light. I told myself one night would not matter.

I looked down at my reflection in the water.

And I saw her.

My real face.

The glamour charm had hidden her for so long that I had almost forgotten she existed. Bright eyes. Soft skin. Lips that looked like they had been made for smiling, even though I had forgotten how. The water trembled, and her face trembled with it, and I stared at her, and she stared back, and neither of us breathed.

I was beautiful.

I had always been beautiful.

I raised my hand and touched my cheek—my real cheek. The skin was soft, smooth, nothing like the rough, dull texture the charm had shown the world for fifteen years. I traced my jawline. My lips. The curve of my brow.

This was my mother’s face. She had given it to me. And then she had hidden it, to keep me safe.

I wondered if she would recognize me now.

What would she think, if she could see me—married to an Alpha, bathing in warm water, wearing a white gown that did not smell like potatoes and old wood? She would probably laugh. Or cry. Or do both, the way she used to when she thought I was not watching.

I pressed my palm flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat. Steady. Mine. I was still here. Still alive. That was what mattered. That was what she would want me to remember.

I wondered if she was watching me from wherever she was. If she knew what her daughter had become.

I hoped she was proud of me. I hoped she was safe. And more than anything, more than breath, more than warmth, more than this face I was only now meeting—

I hoped she was still alive.

Because if she was not, then all of it—the hiding, the waiting, the surviving, the fifteen years of gray water and locked doors—had been for nothing. And I could not survive that truth. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. ℯℯ𝑙.

So I needed her to be alive. I needed it the way a drowning woman needs air.

And now I understood, fully, why my mother had made me wear the charm. With this face—this face that looked like hers, this face that could not be ignored, this face that demanded to be seen—Celeste and Vivienne would have destroyed me a long time ago. They would not have just locked me in a storage room. They would have ended me completely.

Beauty, in a house full of wolves like them, was not a gift. It was a death sentence.

Without the chain against my skin, I felt lighter. Freer. Like I had been holding my breath for fifteen years and had only now remembered how to exhale.

I washed my hair. I scrubbed my arms. I let the water wash away the smell of Cresswood—the grease, the old wood, the cold, the years. I watched it swirl down around me, and I wanted to believe it was taking all of it with it.

And for one moment—one stolen, reckless moment—I let myself believe I was safe.

Then I heard it.

A sound. Something knocked over. In the room.

I froze. The water stilled. The steam curled around me, and my hand flew to my throat—to the place where the charm should have been—and found nothing but bare skin.

The glamour was off.

My real face was bare to the world. And the one rule I had been given—the only rule that had kept me alive for fifteen years—I had broken it two days too soon.

The floorboards did not creak again. Whoever it was had stopped moving. Had stopped breathing. Was standing somewhere in the dark of his room, close enough to hear my heart hammering against my ribs.

I did not dare turn around. I could only stare down at the water—at the trembling reflection of a face no one had been allowed to see for fifteen years.

And in that same still surface, just behind the ripple of my own image, I saw it.

A second shape. Dark. Still. Standing in the doorway.

I had not been alone in this room for longer than I knew.

And whatever I was about to do next, I would do it with my true face uncovered.