Chapter 32: Gilded but Courted
The morning arrived with the indifferent brilliance of castle sunrises, all sharp gold angles cutting across the polished floor. Charlotte was already awake, staring at the canopy, when the soft knock came.
“Enter.”
Evette slipped in, a neat silhouette against the bright corridor. She closed the door, the heavy thud a punctuation mark between night and day. For a suspended second, they just looked at each other—two dhampirs in a vampire’s bedroom.Then Evette straightened her spine, a subtle shift. “Good morning, my lady.Shall I draw your bath?”
The formality was a cold splash. It was necessary, Charlotte knew.The walls had ears, and the corridors had eyes.Servants talked. A friendship between a queen and her attendant was one thing; a blatant disregard for protocol was a weapon they could hand to their enemies.
“Yes, please,” Charlotte said, her own voice flattening into the expected tone of casual command.The next hour was a study in silent contradiction. Evette moved through the room with efficient grace, laying out a deep green lounging dress, stirring aromatic salts into the steaming water of the sunken tub. Her hands were steady, her face a placid mask. But when she fetched the hairbrush, her fingers, briefly tangling in Charlotte’s morning-mass of chocolate curls, were gentle. When she passed a fresh towel, her storm-gray eyes flickered up, a quick, shared glance that said, I know this is absurd.
Charlotte sat before the vanity, watching in the mirror as Evette worked the brush through the knots. The rhythmic pull was soothing. The silence between them was no longer the hollow silence of the castle, but a full, quiet one, like the space between breaths after running.
“Will you require anything else before midday, my lady?” Evette asked, the question rote.
“I think a nap,” Charlotte said, meeting her eyes in the reflection.“After luncheon. I find I’m… fatigued.”
A ghost of a smile touched Evette’s lips. “Of course.”
The pretense of luncheon was its own kind of theater. A parlor in the west wing, sunlight filtering through leaded glass to paint colored shapes on the linen tablecloth. A junior footman served them cold pheasant and roasted roots, his presence a silent third wheel that mandated distance. Charlotte ate little. Evette, standing politely by the sideboard as was customary for attendants during mealtimes, ate nothing.
When the footman finally cleared the last plate and bowed out, the door clicking shut felt like a lock releasing.Charlotte let out a breath that shuddered at the end. “Gods, that’s exhausting.”
Evette immediately sank into the chair opposite, abandoning her stance. “He’s new. Terrified of dropping something.”
“Aren’t they all?” Charlotte pushed her plate away.“Come on. I’m declaring myself officially fatigued.”
They retreated to the bedroom, a sanctuary with the heavy drapes half-drawn. Charlotte kicked off her slippers and sprawled on the settee by the cold fireplace. Evette perched on a footstool, tucking her feet beneath her. For a moment, they just sat in the dim, comforted quiet, listening to the distant, muted sounds of the castle.
“Does it ever feel normal?” Evette asked, picking at a thread on her skirt.“The switching, I mean. From… this,” she gestured between them, “to ‘my lady’ and ‘miss.’”
“No.It feels like putting on a costume that itches.” Charlotte frowned. “You get used to the itch, but you never stop feeling it.”
Evette was quiet for a long time, her gaze on the intricate rug. When she spoke again, her voice was different, lower, threaded with an anxiety she usually kept buried.“Can I ask you something? Something… presumptuous?”
“You’re sitting in my bedroom while I’m supposed to be napping. I think we’re past presumption.”
“The others. The maids, the footmen in the lower halls… they talk.” Evette took a breath, her freckles seeming to darken against her pale skin.“They say a lot of things.About you.And the king. And the Warden.”
A cold knot tightened in Charlotte’s stomach. “What do they say?”
“That you’re… a favorite.” Evette winced.“That’s the polite word. The impolite ones are… well.”
“Spit it out, Evette.”
“Mistress.” The word dropped into the room like a stone. Evette hurried on, her words tumbling out.“Some say you’re his—their—kept thing. A pretty dhampir they pulled from the scullery.A spoiled toy. Others whisper that maybe you’re compelled, that you don’t have a choice, that it’s all…”
“Enthrallment?” The cold knot exploded into a flash of white-hot anger. Charlotte sat bolt upright.“They think I’m some kind of thrall? Some puppet?”
“Not all of them,” Evette said quickly, hands up.“But some. They see a dhampir maid elevated to a queen’s chambers, seen with both the most powerful men in the court, and they… they draw the simplest, ugliest conclusion.”
Charlotte stood, pacing to the mantle.She gripped the cool stone, the anger subsiding into a sharp, painful clarity.Of course. This was the court.This was what happened when you stepped out of the shadows. You became a story, and people always preferred the sordid versions.
“I am not enthralled,” she said, each word a chip of ice.“I am not a mistress. I am not a kept toy.” She turned, meeting Evette’s worried gaze.“No one owns me. Not like that.”
Evette’s shoulders slumped in visible relief.“I didn’t think so. Not really. But I had to hear you say it.”
The tension bled from the room, replaced by a weary understanding.Charlotte walked back and slumped onto the settee.“Gods. Is that really what they see?”
Evette chewed her lip, thinking.“Maybe not all. Some… some see something else.The older ones, maybe. The ones who remember the king’s father, or his court.” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “One of the laundresses, Mistress Bol, she said it different. She was folding linens and muttered to herself, ‘Looks less like a mistress and more like a wife.’ And then she clammed up like she’d spoken treason.”
The air left Charlotte’s lungs in a soft rush.A wife.
The word hung there, vast and unimaginable. It was a title, a contract, a permanence she had never, in her wildest or most desperate dreams, applied to herself. Her relationship with Lucian and Sebastian was a chaotic, terrifying, electrifying thing forged in necessity and longing. It was clandestine meetings and simmering tensions, fierce protection and whispered secrets in the dark.
It wasn’t… domesticity.It wasn’t legitimacy.
But then she thought of Lucian’s hand, steady on the small of her back in a crowded hall. Of Sebastian’s laugh, a private sound shared over a chessboard. Of the way they argued over her training, each wanting her strong for different reasons that somehow, underneath, felt the same. Of the quiet moments after, when the world was shut out, and it was just the three of them in a fragile, tangled peace.
Did she… act like a wife? Did she manage their tempers, speak her mind, hold a space that was uniquely hers between them?Did they consult her, respect her, see her?
And if that was true—a terrifying, enormous if—what did it mean?
Her voice was barely a whisper.“A wife.”
Evette watched her, eyes wide. “Well,” she said softly, her own realization dawning.“Which one?”
Charlotte stared at her. The question wasn’t malicious.It was purely, devastatingly logical.Which one?Her mind blanked. Then it filled with a cascade of images—Lucian’s intense focus, Sebastian’s reckless grin, the feeling of two sets of hands helping her up from a fall, two voices rising in her defense, two ancient, powerful beings looking at her as if she were the center of some impossible, shared gravity.A hysterical bubble of laughter caught in her throat. The sheer, monstrous absurdity of it.“I…” She shook her head, the world tilting on its axis. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”
Evette just looked at her, waiting. The unspoken question hung in the dusty sunlight between them.
Charlotte finally said it aloud, the words tasting foreign and too big for her mouth. “Does that… would that make me a wife with two husbands?”
The silence that followed was absolute. Outside, a hawk cried, a distant, solitary sound. Inside, the foundation of everything Charlotte thought she understood about her life, her heart, her place in this gothic, predatory world, quietly fractured. Not with a bang, but with the simple, bewildering echo of a question she had no idea how to answer.