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Standing in the slim elevator, Thorn did everything in his power to push his tall frame into the corner panel. Careful to not brush against the small valet shivering there, he folded awkward limb over awkward limb.
Beneath him Ophelia shifted in her Mime Livery, sneezing with every floor they passed.
From the corner of his eye, he could see her staring up at him shivering with wide eyes searching his face for a reaction.
Thorn ached to give her one. To hand her his coat. To keep her warm. To protect her. He cursed himself for allowing that train of thought to pass. She’d never be anything but frightened of him. And why shouldn’t she be? He was nothing but the Dragon that led her to the lair and left her there to die. He let out a quiet sigh. No. She would never want him like he wanted her.
He remained silent.
Ophelia stumbled behind him as he led her towards the treasury. Thorn inwardly cringed as he looked about the office. His study was an austere, cold room that held nothing but somber furnishings, abacuses, maps, and graphs.
Ophelia stood still, staring at his window. Thorn stood still, staring at her.
“You can express yourself here without fear,” he said, after locking the doors behind him.
Thorn was growing uncomfortably warm as he tried to ignore the thought of Ophelia being here with him in his private study. Alone.
Feeling stifled despite the freezing cold study, He took off his uniform with the epaulettes. Now, he was just in a simple jacket buttoned over an impeccably white shirt.
Ophelia pointed to the bulls-eye cut out on the far side wall. “What does that window look onto?” She put her hand to her neck. Her voice rusty as an old gate.
Thorn tried to refrain from reaching towards her. Chiding himself for leaving her at Archibald’s retched Clairdelune.
“The outdoors,” he finally replied.
“The real outdoors?”
“Indeed.”
Ophelia perched herself unto the sofa, like a little girl, to press her nose against the glass completely mesmerized by the real open sky, a sight she hadn’t seen in months.
Thorn watched her carefully as she remained transfixed by the sight.
The shrill ring of a telephone snatched them from their thoughts and back into reality. Thorn answered the call.
“Yes? Brought forward? Four o’ clock, I’ll be there.”
Thorn placed the ear trumpet back on the hook and returned to Ophelia. Leaning against his desk he searched his mind for something to say. Something that would make her warm to his presence. He parted his lips to speak, but Ophelia beat him to it.
“Your ruse didn’t please your aunt. And, to be perfectly frank, I didn’t particularly appreciate it, either,” she added. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to phone Clairdelune?”
Thorn’s pointed nose emitted an annoyed snort. “The lines in Citaceleste aren’t secure. And it wasn’t my aunt I wanted to speak to.”
It was her. His fiancé. His Ophelia. He needed to speak with her. He needed to see her. Despite the fact he shouldn’t, he craved her conviction.
“In that case, I’m listening.”
He looked up at her words buried beneath her costume. His fiancé was under there. Thorn’s throat tightened.
“That disguise makes me feel uncomfortable,” Thorn declared, checking his watch, a nervous tick that increased in frequency every time she was near. “Remove it please.”
Ophelia shivered. A blush bloomed over her as she fiddled nervously with a button on her collar.
“I’m only wearing a shift underneath my livery.”
Thorn froze with a sharp intake of breath as all of the blood in his body decidedly ran south.
This was not the time for his nightly fantasies to come to life. Not when she still hated him. He cursed himself inwardly as the fabric in his pants began to tighten.
He cleared his throat. “Take a coat” he croaked. With a shaky breath he moistened his lips and motioned to the wardrobe.
As Ophelia stepped toward the coats, Thorn swiftly turned his back to her. He panicked with the thought of her undressing in front of him. He fought to keep his thoughts under control. She couldn’t notice. Not when they had just begun some semblance of an understanding.
He could hear her shuffling out of the clothes. Biting his lip, he grasped for his watch as she sighed softly with each shedding of the layers. Thorn suppressed a groan as the blood continued to rush to his groin so fast it made his head spin.
Thorn tried to ignore the sounds as each livery piece thudded softly against the floor. He didn’t want to imagine her dark curls brushing against his lips. Or imagine her softly tracing his scars with her fingertips or maybe even her tongue if he was lucky.
No—She would hate him for this. She would push him away. He was a monster in her eyes. An unfeeling, untouchable Dragon. Recoiling at the thought of Ophelia rejecting him, he managed to get himself under some semblance of control, forcing himself to remember his place.
“I’m listening,” Ophelia whispered once again.
He turned back towards her stifling a gasp at her true appearance. Swallowed in his own coat, her dark curls, badly tied in a bun, fell around her cheeks, emphasizing the paleness of her skin. Her gray-tinted glasses didn’t even conceal the dark rings shadowing her eyes.
Thorn’s fists clenched and shook with anger over the circumstances that trapped them as playthings of the court. He longed for the day he could leave this place. Lying awake each night Thorn dreamt of a different future. One where he wasn’t the beast. One where he could reach out and touch her, hold her face within his hands, kiss her eyelids, nuzzle his long nose against the corner of her neck, spread soft kisses along her jaw, and hold her close while she cried in his arms.
He would take her far away from the pole if she’d let him. He’d prove himself as her protector. He would do anything she asked him to.
---
They continued to argue over the blasted telegram. He watched her tuck the curl of hair bobbing at her nose behind her ear and felt that familiar pull in his navel. He was quickly losing track of the conversation.
“Do I have your permission to read it?”
Thorn looked at her and then down at the telegraph.
“I’m not the owner. You don’t need to seek my permission.”
“You were the last person to touch it,” Ophelia shivered in his coat,” I can’t avoid reading you in the process.”
Thorn swallowed thickly. If she read the letter would she know? Would his feelings reveal him? How would she react if she knew how deep it truly went? He reached for his fob watch and snapped the cover open and closed over and over again, in a poor attempt to self soothe. He looked at her round face again, deep into her eyes wondering if he should just tell her that he wanted more than a marriage of convenience.
Ophelia attempted to explain how the reading would be superficial, just a fleeting moment not a deep dive. However, Thorn remained tightly wound in a tornado of thoughts. How would she react to his desire? She was the only warmth in his frigid life. He clicked his watch shut one final time.
“You have my permission”
Thorn watched as she unbuttoned her gloves. His eyes followed every tremble of her slender, pale hands. He felt breathless. If she touched him, touched his skin, with her bare hands, would she know how it affected him?
“Can you read absolutely everything?”
Ophelia peered over her glasses at Thorn.
“Not everything, no,”
Thorn let out a small breath as visions of her ungloved hands danced across his mind.
“I can read neither organic matter nor raw materials. People, animals, plants, minerals in their crude state are all beyond my scope.”
Any form of relief Thorn felt by the admission was quickly vanished when he remembered the telegram. A solid way she still could read him.
He held his breath when she gently touched the paper. As she fled back in time into his mind, he rushed to distract himself. He tidied his desk, classifying, stamping, and filing bills. He was doing anything to keep his hands busy and his mind elsewhere.
Finally, Ophelia came back to Thorn, her eyes flashing towards him. Did she know?
He needed to control himself. Just answer her questions. He needed to prove he would help her especially with the missing mail.
She looked so tired almost at the verge of collapse. He would let her stay here, if she wanted. Have her fall asleep on the sofa in his arms, even if it ruined them. He’d take his pistol and fight off every single person that threated his Ophelia.
The clatter of an inkpot brought him back. Thorn swiftly saved his bills from the black tide, while Ophelia furiously attempted to mop up the dark ink with all her handkerchiefs.
“I’m so sorry!”
She looked down at Thorn’s coat and noticed an ink stain rivaling the deep blush across her face.
“I’ll take it to the dry cleaner’s,” she promised, even more embarrassed.
No one had ever shown such consideration for him before. Thorn gripped the bills in his hands to prevent himself from reaching out and cradling her to his chest.
---
“Have you heard of the ceremony of the Gift?”
“No.”
Thorn blinked thinking of how best to explain without her making a mad dash towards the window. The last thing he wanted to do was frighten her even more.
He busied himself with the register in the cabinet. He fiddled with the keys, hesitant to tell her. Thorn didn’t want to see her recoil from him and his monstrous family power.
“A member of the Web is present at every marriage,” he explained trying to sound anything but scared. “By a placing of hands, they forge a link between the couple that enables them to be ‘twinned.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” stammered Ophelia.
Thorn tried not to flinch.
“That soon, you will have taken part of me and I part of you,” he said while cringing at the euphemism. He had to be okay with the fact this could be the only part of her he might ever receive.
Ophelia shivered underneath his coat. “I’m not sure I quite understand,” she whispered. “I’ll make you a gift of my Animism, and you of…of your claws trick?”
Trick.
Thorn shoved himself deeper into the cabinet hoping to disappear from this conversion completely. He struggled with the idea that they would be so intimately bound together. He flushed with the thought of her taking part of him. He wondered if there might be other things she would be willing to take.
An ink-stained glove hovered into his field of vision, pressing down onto the page Thorn was reading. He froze as if all his thoughts were on display. Slowly he turned towards Ophelia, his eyes flashing at her sudden closeness. She was a breath away. He could smell her soap.
“When were you intending to tell me about this?”
“In due course,” he grunted.
Her proximity was inhibiting his thought pattern. All he could think was OpheliaOpheliaOphelia. Thorn shifted nervously under her intense scrutiny.
“Do you have so little confidence in me, to do all this hiding from me?” she persisted. “And yet I think I’ve shown plenty of goodwill up to now.”
Her voice cracked alongside Thorn’s heart. His stern features loosed with surprise. She thought he didn’t care. He had to find a way to mend this, to stoke compassion between them.
“I am conscious of the efforts that you make.”
“But that’s not enough,” she muttered, “and you’re right. You can keep your no-go world. I’m too clumsy to be entrusted with Dragon’s claws.” Shaken by a coughing fit Ophelia removed her hand from his register.
Thorn stared at the mark she made. Her finger imprinted on a piece of him.
How could she ever think she wasn’t enough? She was everything to him. His sweet, resilient Ophelia.
Thorn groaned internally cursing himself for upsetting her once again. He intended to woe her slowly not push her away. He needed time with her, time to show her he is more than his claws and scars and anger. He needed to show her that he can be good. He can be good for her.
“I will teach you,” he said in barely a whisper. A blush covered his pale face. He looked down swiftly.
“It would certainly be the first time you went to such trouble,” she said reproachfully and looking away.
Thorn’s throat went dry. If only she knew of the depths of trouble I would go for her.
He opened his mouth to say so, but the ringing of the telephone stopped him short.
----
“I better go back,” he hears her mutter.
She’s leaving? No, she can’t leave. Not yet. Thorn was desperate for more time with her.
“Are you coming back?”
Inwardly he cursed himself for sounding so needy.
“Why?”
Thousands of reasons flashed though his mind. Ophelia in her shift, Ophelia gloveless holding his hand, Ophelia on her knees, Ophelia kissing each and every one of his scars, Ophelia holding his child. None of which he could tell her.
“Thanks to your ability to travel through mirrors, you could keep me informed of the situation in Clairdelune, And,” he added more quietly, “I think I’m starting to get used to you,”
Thorn couldn’t even bare to look at her as he said it. His eyes fixed pointedly at his shoes. His heart beating out of his chest at the admission.
She’s not replying. Why isn’t she replying?
Thorn frowned hard enough to distort his scar while Ophelia studied him in the wardrobe mirror.
“I’ll lock the wardrobe when I’m receiving visitors,” Thorn continued, “If the door is open, it means you can enter here in total safety any time of the day, or of the night.”
Ophelia was silent. He studied her small frame in the mirror enveloped by the coat. His coat.
“Thorn, I must be honest with you. I think we’re making a mistake. This marriage...”
Thorn’s brow furrowed deeper.
“I know we can no longer turn back,” she sighed. “The future you’re offering me simply doesn’t appeal to me.”
Thorn clenched his jaw. His mind started racing even faster. He could give her a different life, one that she’d never even dream of. If only she would give him the chance. Thorn had to show her he wasn’t the monster she thought he was.
“I had predicted you wouldn’t last the winter, and you have proven me wrong. You deem me incapable of one day offering you a decent life; would you permit me in turn to prove myself?”
He was speaking in small bursts, his teeth clenched straining under the effort of revealing himself. The vulnerability of it all was tearing him apart.
Ophelia stared at her gloves.
“Could you send a telegram to my family to reassure them?” she finally stammered.
His stomach sank. She wouldn’t even dignify him with a reply. His veins pulsed with hurt and humiliation. He swallowed his shame and nodded.
Thorn watched as her figure disappeared through the mirror. He crumbled to the floor amidst the fallen bills and spilled ink. Dripping with nervous anticipation he stared at the wardrobe, calculating the next possible second in which she would appear in front of him again.