And she had spent the whole ride to the chapel telling herself the single reason that her love did not matter.
It was the only reason that had ever mattered to her: she loved him too much to take from him what she wanted. A wife. Children. A house full of small, loud people that he had told her,in a quiet voice, he could not give her because the cost of being made into something one was not had already been paid once in this family by him.
She would not let him pay it twice. She would not become the woman who made him do it.
That was her reasoning.
She had gone over it so many times over the past two days that it had worn smooth in her mind like a stone in a pocket. And it was sound, it was good, it was the kindest course.
The trouble with it, the single fatal trouble, was that her body did not believe a word of it. Walking down the aisle, her body wanted only to reach him.
Her feet wanted to carry her the last ten steps and put her hand in his and stay. Her heart, the traitor, was beating out his name against the warm stone of the pendant.
She had to remind herself with every step that what the heart wanted and what love required were two different things and that she had learned that lesson so early and so thoroughly that it ought to come easily by now, but it was not easy at all today.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she was doing it in front of two hundred people. She could not even let it show on her face because if it showed, Daphne would see, and if Daphne saw, she would understand.
The purpose of it all, from the staged kiss in the ballroom to this moment, had been to hide from her what it had cost.
She reached the altar. Daphne, beaming through her tears, brought Alice’s hand to Cassian’s the way she had been told, the way custom required, so that the bride might be given over.
Alice did not take his hand. Instead, she reached up with hands that she was distantly amazed to find were steady and unfastened the small clasp at the back of her neck.
She drew the gray pendant free, the diamond the precise cool color of his eyes, the thing he had given her in her father’s orangery and called nothing and meant everything by. She took his extended hand, turned it over, pressed the warm pendant into his palm, and closed his long fingers around it.
“I am sorry,” she whispered so that only he could hear.
The whole chapel had fallen into a particular silence that was louder than noise.
Cassian looked down at his closed hand. Then he looked up at her. Whatever it cost him—she would think for a long time that it must have cost him a great deal—he did not let it reach his face.
His face stayed exactly as it always was—cool, composed, and neutral. The face that had earned him the namethe Ice Duke. Except his eyes, the gray of the diamond now warming in his fist, were not cold at all.
“I am sorry too,” he said.
He turned slightly and lifted his chin toward the small door at the back of the chapel. Beyond it stood a carriage with its door already opened and a driver already up on the box, exactly as he had promised her in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room nine days ago. Whispers spread through the chapel like fire through dry grass.
Alice looked at the carriage. Then she looked at him. For one ruinous, unforgivable moment, she let herself wish that he would say no. That the Ice Duke would, for once in his disciplined life, lose control of the situation, take her by the wrist, refuse the offer he himself had made, and keep her.
He did not.
He stood with her pendant in his hand and her freedom standing open on the gravel, and he gave her the one thing he had in his power to give—choice.
Alice understood far too late that this was what love looked like in a man who had been taught it was weakness. It looked like a man handing you the door.
She ran.
She heard her mother cry out.
Behind her, she heard her father’s voice, sharp and rising. “Alice, you will stop! You will stop this instant!” She heard the heavyscrape of his chair and his quick, furious step coming after her down the aisle.
And then she heard nothing of him at all because the Duke of Langton had stepped directly into his path and stood there, a wall in dark blue, and let his bride run.
She did not look back. She did not dare.
She gathered her skirts and burst through the great doors and into the cool morning air. The driver unfolded the steps, she climbed in, the door was shut, the whip cracked, and the wheels caught the gravel and turned down the long avenue of limes.
Only then did she let herself look.