Page 8 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

She clearly mistook my frown for frustration.

“Stop your pouting. It’s faster if I help.”

“I know that,” I whined. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do without you.”

“Enora Camelia Wynn.” Joyce cut me an unimpressed glance as she sat back on her heels. “You’ve survived every one of your deployments without me and spent months holed up in inhospitable bases. You’ll do just fine there.”

There.

She said it like the word tasted foul on her tongue, and rightfully so.

After evolving from my nursemaid to the closest thing I had to a lady, Joyce was pouring steam from her ears when my brother first announced his grand diplomatic plans—after the ink dried on the marriage contract, of course.

“He’s selling you to our goddess-damned enemy!” she would bark as she tore around, tidying objects like they owed her a debt. And then, like clockwork, she would collapse on a sofa and question how in the hell I was coping.

Every so often, the barbed accusation of how I’d given up would come out too. For months.

And not that I was coping or had given up.

For fuck’s sake, I’d tried to bolt from our home twice! But on that devastating second time—after the King’s Guard hauled me, kicking and screaming, back to the fortress through the lower city—one of my departed father’s many wise teachings hit me with far too much clarity.

Know when to pause, when to yield, and when to raise hell.

My father lived by those principles until his last moments, and it made him a tremendous king. He knew when to roll in with the fury of a foothills storm, decimating all in his path. Just as often, he knew when to school himself into neutrality while he listened and learned. A little more rarely, my father knew when to back down.

I knew that day, when my brother’s personal guard tossed me back in my room, barred my windows, and posted a guard outside my door, that my time to yield—temporarily—had arrived.

My brother was my fucking king, and he had proved with swiftness the unchecked power he would rule Odessa with. I’d witnessed more public executions and acts of humiliation in the months since our father’s death than the rest of my life combined, and our people were ravenous for those displays of brutality.

Joyce could say I’d given up all she wanted.

Taking a page from my father’s book was the best thing I could do for my sanity, and he would have been so damned proud of me for finally listening to him.

That thought still didn’t ease the frown on my face.

“Chin up, hey?” Joyce pushed herself up with a soft groan. “We’re already late. Let’s get out to the stables before His Majesty ends up bursting a boil over your tardiness.”

If anything, I could always count on her to be as keen as I was to shove aside the blossoming threat of sentimentalities. Through a blur of service halls and back corridors, we didn’t speak another word until we’d reached the other side of the fortress. The doors to the lavish royal stables were all that separated us from our likely permanent separation.

A separation that neither of us had ever properly addressed in all our discussions of the utter absurdity of this betrothal.

Joyce may not have been my actual mother, but she was the closest damned thing I had after the woman who birthed me left and my eventual stepmother refused to associate with her husband’s past indiscretion.

Foolishly, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Joyce, tugging on my weathered leather riding gloves instead. A once-over of my jacket was next, fiddling with each fastening that needed no adjustment. I even inspected my boots again before Joyce clicked her tongue.

“Enora.” I could just hear how her hands were planted on her round hips before I looked up. The tears in her eyes, though, caught me off guard.

“Joyce.” My voice was unsteady as fuck. “Please don’t do⁠—”

All five feet of her nearly took me clean off my damned feet.

“You aren’t leaving without saying a proper goodbye,” she huffed into my jacket, squeezing my midsection. “Do me that much, will you?”

I yielded and wrapped my arms around her, fighting the wave of emotions that made it a little hard to talk. “Weren’t you the one who always told me goodbye was too finite? Only suited for executions and funerals?”

Joyce clicked her tongue with weighty disappointment, but those were words plucked right from her very lips. I was never sure if my father passed the belief on to her, or she to him, but it became one of the core tenets of my upbringing, and I would not let her forget it.

“I’ll see you again,” I added. “I promise you that much, Joyce.”