'Water.'
That was the first thought. Not a full thought even, her throat felt like someone had lined it with sandpaper, and when she tried to swallow there was nothing there to swallow.
"Water," she managed. It came out as barely anything. "Water, please —"
"Oh, you finally decided to wake up." A voice from somewhere nearby, bright and sharp as a pin. "And already ordering people around. How impressive."
Lora's ears were buzzing too loudly to place the voice. She blinked at the ceiling, trying to get her bearings, throat working uselessly around nothing, and then —
The water hit her full in the face. A cold, solid cascade of it that filled her nose and her mouth before she'd had time to close either, and she lurched upright gasping, inhaling water, coughing it back out, It was everywhere, soaking her hair flat against her face, pooling in the shell of her ear with a low rushing sound that set off a high thin ring she couldn't shake, She shoved her hair out of her eyes.
A woman stood at the bedside holding an empty jug, watching her with the expression of someone who had enjoyed that considerably more than they were going to admit. Red hair, vividly so. A face that was genuinely beautiful in the specific way that made you watch your back.
"Good morning, Miss Rose," she said sarcastically.
The ringing in Lora's ear was getting worse. She could feel it mixing with the pressure from the injury there .She opened her mouth. What she wanted to do was scream. What came out instead was a wrecked, sandpaper whisper that cost her considerably more than it should have. "Why did you do that?"
The woman's eyes moved over her slowly, top to bottom, with the particular brand of contempt that took real effort to cultivate. "What exactly does the filthy blood of Draven think is happening here?" She tilted her head. "Is it a hotel and i am your servant that you are ordering me around the first thing you wake up?"
Lora stared at her.
"What?" The word scraped out of her raw throat. "Who are you—" Utterly baffled by what she had opened her eyes to.
The woman moved fast for someone in heels. Her hand shot out and closed in Lora's hair, yanking her head sideways, the other hand still holding the jug, She leaned in close enough that Lora could see her own reflection in those sharp, furious eyes.
"I happen to be the woman who was supposed to be married to Valentino if you hadn't popped out of nowhere," she said, low and deliberate. "You better stay far away form him. He is only mine. You do not exist here."
Lora grabbed the wrist in her hair and pulled. Nothing about the next three seconds was graceful, but she got the hand off her and jerked sideways hard enough that the woman, caught mid-sentence on heels that were doing her no favors, stumbled and went down. The jug hit the floor a half second after she did. It shattered.
The door opened in the same moment. Valentino stood in the frame, eyes moving across the room in one fast sweep, Foxy on the floor, water everywhere, broken ceramic, Lora sitting in the soaked bed with her hair plastered to her face.
A beat of silence. Then Foxy looked up at him and her expression completed its transformation so fast it was almost impressive , her free hand pressing lightly to the floor beside a shard of broken ceramic. She let the glass nick her palm.
"I was trying to bring her water," she said, her voice doing something gentle and injured that her eyes absolutely weren't. "She pushed me." Valentino looked at Lora.
"Is this how you repay the kindness of this house?" His voice was flat and cold. Lora opened her mouth.
Her throat seized. Whatever she was going to say dissolved immediately into coughing , ugly coughing that bent her forward over the bed, one hand pressed to her chest, her whole body shaking with it, because her throat was completely shredded and had apparently decided that now was the time to make that abundantly clear.
She couldn't get a single word out. Val clicked his tongue and looked at Foxy. "Clean this up. And bring another glass."
Foxy's wounded expression held for exactly as long as it took him to look away from her. Then she got up off the floor and left without a word, heels crunching over ceramic fragments.
Val looked at Lora. She was still unable to produce a single intelligible sound in her own defense, and he stood there and considered her with the detached patience of a man thinking through a problem he hadn't asked for. The role Jeremy had outlined for him sat in the back of his mind like something he'd agreed to do and was now actually being asked to do, and the gap between those two things was wider than he'd anticipated.
'Approachable,' he thought. 'Convincing.' His jaw tightened.
Foxy returned with a full pitcher and he took it from her before she could cross the room and walked it over himself, holding it out a glass now that he had filled with water. Lora blinked up at him ,a slow, confused blink, and then apparently decided it wasn't the moment to resist because she took it and drank.
She drained it in one go and looked at him. He refilled it twice from the pitcher on the side table and said nothing, and she said nothing, and by the third glass the coughing had eased enough that she sat up straighter and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and breathed.
Then "I didn't do anything to her." Just above a whisper. "She poured water over me," Lora added, with the careful
Val glanced at Foxy. "Out," he said.
Foxy left with considerably less grace than she'd have liked, and the door clicked shut behind her. He looked back at Lora, who was watching him with an expression caught somewhere between cautious and openly suspicious, like a person who had been shown two contradictory pieces of information and hadn't yet decided which one to trust. Her brows were drawn together and her eyes were doing the fast, quiet work of someone trying to read a room they didn't have the context for.
"Your words don't carry weight in this house," he said. Not unkindly just flatly, the way you stated a fact about weather. "That's something you should understand early." Her brow lifted.
"Especially," he continued, "given that your family and mine are sworn enemies. That is the only reason you are in this room at all." She went very still.
"What do you mean?" Her voice dropped. Her shoulders pulled back slightly, the automatic posture of someone whose walls had just gone up.
"Your family sold you to mine. I married you. Which makes you mine now, at my disposal, under this roof, subject to what I decide. " He held her gaze. "You do as you're told. You don't cause problems. And if you think about doing anything that reflects poorly on this arrangement —" he paused, just briefly, " your family will be the ones who answer for it. Not you."
"That is impossible! I would never marry you!" The words came out of her like something snapping, sharp and immediate, no hesitation, no processing time between hearing it and reacting to it. She was already moving, pushing the covers aside, swinging her legs off the bed.
"Don't —" Val frowned and reached for her shoulder without thinking.
She shoved his hand off. Not a flinch but a shove, palm flat against his hand, knocking it aside like it had no business being there. He stared at her.
"I don't believe a word of this." She was on her feet now, unsteady but refusing to show it, "How could this be my life? This is completely insane and I am not sitting in that bed and accepting it. I'll find out the truth myself."
She turned and walked straight toward the door.
Val stood for a full second doing something he almost never did, which was nothing, because the sight of a woman who had been bedridden and barely conscious twenty minutes ago marching across the room toward the exit in complete defiance of both her physical condition and his direct instruction had caught him somewhere between baffled and furious and he hadn't yet decided which.
Her hand found the doorknob.
He pulled her back and she was so much lighter, he kept forgetting that. The motion swung her sideways faster than either of them expected, and she made a sharp sound of surprise and then her back hit the door .
Val looked down at her. She looked up at him. Eyes watering slightly from the impact, jaw set, not even remotely backing down.
"Don't make me angry," he said, very quietly. his hand tightening to the side as he breathed slowly leaning over her. she didn't break the eye contact. His other hand was flat against the door beside her head and he leaned in just enough to make the size difference between them impossible to ignore. "Do as you're told. Or you suffer. It's that simple."
He felt the sheer grinding irritation of standing in front of someone who was refusing to follow the script he had written, She was like a splinter
His teeth pressed together. "Are we clear?" he said.
She held his gaze for one more beat. "NO! Not until you tell me the truth!"