A Broken Inheritance

Chapter 73: A Week in the Country

And Eurydice?

Eurydice had requested a spring wedding.

Tulips. White and yellow. Pale declarations of joy in the middle of rot. Anastasia remembered the letter from her aunt, full of enthusiasm about imported Dutch bulbs and ribbon samples. She had read it once, then again, and still couldn't decide which part of it made her want to retch more—the excitement, or the complete lack of awareness.

Her cousin Eurydice Selwyn was nineteen, top of her class at Beauxbatons. Pretty, composed, utterly unremarkable. She was marrying Adalric Selwyn, heir to the European trade route consortium and the fourth son of the ancient Selwyn line, who had finished his final year at Durmstrang just that winter. His family had suffered some scandal last year—a disinherited cousin, whispers of unauthorised contact with goblin banks—but it had all been smoothed over. His father was on the Wizengamot. His mother had the kind of old lineage that could still make Walburga Black bat her lashes.

Anastasia had only met him twice. Once at a winter gala. Once at a funeral. He had not struck her as cruel. Just... incurious. The kind of man who would know the name of every rose in a bouquet but fail to notice a woman bleeding beside it.

Eurydice and Adalric had met exactly four times. The contract had been signed before Christmas.

Her fingers found the edge of her schedule again.

Ten days.

Ten days of meetings and fittings, of scheduled silences and rehearsed smiles. Ten days of navigating a house filled with footsteps that weren't her own. Ten days of watching her every word, her every breath. Ten days of feeling Tom's gaze like a spell cast over her skin.

She could do ten days.

She told herself that, again and again.

Ten days.

The strange thing was—her mind felt clearer. Like a fog had lifted, but left behind its outline. Tom didn't scare her as much as he used to. His presence still scraped along her nerves, but something had shifted. Or maybe she had. Maybe she was finally waking up.

Or maybe she was being stupid.

She sat back in the chair, watching the rain trail down the glass in thin silver ribbons. Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed nine. The room smelled faintly of rosewood and ash. She'd have to dress soon. Tom would expect her to look presentable for the tailor. She wondered if Eurydice had chosen silk or satin. If her veil would be long enough to trip over. If she was in love with the man she was marrying.

Anastasia laughed at the thought.

***

By Wednesday, Anastasia had stopped asking when the stillness would break.

The fittings, to her surprise, had offered something dangerously close to relief. Mindless distraction. A catalogue of laces and hem lengths, veils too sheer to matter, silks in too many shades of green to distinguish. She let herself be measured, pinned, turned beneath golden sconces. She let her hands be arranged over her stomach like a doll in a vitrine. Let her spine curve the way Narcissa suggested—"No, darling, not like that. Arch it more. Good." She let it happen. All of it. Because it kept her from thinking.

From thinking about the journal.

The second one.

She had found it on Monday, late in the evening, tucked into the far corner of Tom's private library. It hadn't been hidden. Not really. Just waiting. The leather binding was cracked and ancient, but the inside—those pages, those scripts—burned. Blood magic, in a hand she recognised.