Read Chapter 2: A Vow of Chastity

The morning light came thin and grey through the tall windows of Ashworth House, and Cordelia had not slept. She had lain awake, the emerald brooch cold against her palm, turning the Marquess’s words over and over until they had worn grooves into her mind. *Never without purpose.* What purpose? And why had her gift—her birthright, her weapon, her shield—slipped off him like rain off slate?

She found her grandmother in the conservatory, as she always did at this hour, pruning roses with the brutal efficiency of a woman who had never once hesitated in her life. The Dowager Lady Ashworth was eighty-three years old, and her hands were still steady, her eyes still sharp, her magic still humming beneath her skin like a held breath. She did not look up when Cordelia entered.

“You’ve the look of someone who spent the night arguing with a ghost,” the Dowager said, snipping a stem clean through. “Sit. Don’t loom.”

Cordelia sat on the wrought-iron bench beside her grandmother’s chair, the brooch still clutched in her fist. She had meant to open with something artful, some careful circumlocution that would let her circle the truth without landing on it. But the Dowager had never tolerated artfulness in her grandchildren, and Cordelia was too tired to begin performing now.

“I tried to charm the Marquess of Ashworth last night,” she said. “At the ball. I tried, and it did not work.”

The Dowager’s scissors paused. A single rose head fell to the flagstones.

“Did it not,” she said, and her voice had gone flat, the way it did when a servant had broken something irreplaceable and lied about it.

“He felt nothing. Or—he felt something, but not what I pushed. I pushed warmth, and he gave me ice. I pushed admiration, and he gave me a riddle.” Cordelia unclenched her fist and held out the brooch. “He gave me this.”

The Dowager looked at the emerald, then at Cordelia, and for a long moment neither of them moved. Then the old woman set down her scissors, took the brooch, and held it up to the light. Her thumb traced the engraving—*Never without purpose*—and her mouth tightened.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

“A gift. A strange one.”

“It is a vow.” The Dowager’s voice dropped. “A message. From a man who wants you to know that nothing he does is idle, and nothing he offers is free.” She turned the brooch over in her palm. “The Marquess is not immune to our magic, Cordelia. He is armored against it.”

Cordelia’s heart stumbled. “What does that mean?”

“It means he knows what we are. What we can do. And he has gone to considerable trouble to ensure that we cannot do it to him.” The Dowager pocketed the brooch with a finality that made Cordelia want to snatch it back. “You will not see this again until you have earned it. Consider it in trust.”

“That is not yours to take.”

“I am your grandmother. Everything you own is mine until I say otherwise.” But there was no heat in it, only exhaustion, and the Dowager suddenly looked her age. She sank into the chair across from Cordelia and pressed her fingers to her temples. “I had hoped you would be the one to escape this. You were always so clever. So careful. Your mother was careful too, once, and it did not save her. Nor your aunt.”

The name hung in the air like smoke. Cordelia’s aunt, Juliana, had been dead for twenty years, and the circumstances of her death were never discussed, only gestured at, like a wound too terrible to look at directly. Cordelia had heard whispers, of course. A runaway match. A broken heart. A gift that had failed her at the worst possible moment.

“What happened to Aunt Juliana?” Cordelia asked.

The Dowager’s eyes went distant. “What happens to all of us, if we are foolish enough to love without magic, or with it, or despite it. She made a choice she could not take back, and she paid for it with everything she had.”

“I do not understand.”

“No. You are young, and you think understanding is the same as being told.” The Dowager leaned forward, and her voice dropped to a whisper that cut through the humid air of the conservatory like a blade. “The gift of House Ashworth is not a parlor trick, Cordelia. It is a fire, and it burns whatever it touches. We can sway the emotions of anyone—anyone in the world—except ourselves. We cannot make ourselves feel what we do not feel, and we cannot stop ourselves from feeling what we do. And when we use the gift in matters of love—when we use it to make someone love us, or to hold them, or to bind them—the fire turns inward. It burns the gift away. Every time. Without exception.”

Cordelia’s chest went cold. “You are saying that if I had successfully charmed the Marquess last night—if I had made him want me—I would have lost my magic?”

“Yes.”

“But I did not use it. I only tried.”

“Trying is enough. Intention is enough. The gift does not care about your finer distinctions. It cares about what you meant to do.” The Dowager’s gaze was pitiless. “You stood at the edge of a cliff, Cordelia. The only reason you are still standing is that the Marquess is armored against you. If he had been anyone else, you would be ruined.”

Cordelia’s hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against her thighs, but the tremor would not stop. “Mother told me to charm him. She told me to make him want me, to secure the match, to—she said it was for the family.”

“Your mother is a fool,” the Dowager said, with a calm that made the words land like blows. “She has spent her life pretending the gift is a tool to be wielded, not a force to be respected. She used it on your father, and for twenty years she has been hollowed out by the consequences. She cannot feel joy. She cannot feel grief. She feels nothing, because she gave everything to a man who never needed her magic to love her. And now she is a shell, and she wants you to be a shell too.”

Cordelia thought of her mother’s careful smiles, her measured words, the way her eyes never quite reached her heart. She had always assumed it was breeding. The distance of a woman who had been raised to hold herself apart. But now she saw it for what it was: absence. Something missing that could never be replaced.

“What do I do?” Cordelia asked. Her voice came out small, and she hated it. “I am promised to him. The contracts are signed. The wedding is in three days.”

“You marry him,” the Dowager said simply. “And you never, ever use your gift on him. Not in love, not in anger, not in desperation. He is armored, which means he will never be swayed by you, and that is the greatest mercy you could have been given. You will never be tempted to reach for the fire, because the fire cannot touch him.”

“But if I cannot charm him, how will I make him love me? How will I make this marriage anything but a prison?”

The Dowager’s expression softened, just for a moment, into something almost like pity. “Oh, my dear. That is the question every Ashworth woman has asked since the beginning. And the answer is the curse itself.” She reached out and took Cordelia’s hands in her own, her skin dry and papery, her grip still iron. “A man who loves you because you made him love you is not a man who loves you at all. He is a puppet. A reflection. A lie you tell yourself so you do not have to face the horror of being truly known. But a man who loves you without your magic—who loves you because he chose to, because he saw you and decided you were worth the risk—that is the only kind of love worth having. And it is the only kind you will ever be able to trust.”

Cordelia’s eyes burned. She blinked, and a tear slipped down her cheek. “But what if he does not choose me? What if he looks at me and sees nothing he wants?”

“Then you will be free,” the Dowager said. “And you will learn, as your aunt learned, that freedom is a colder comfort than you imagine. But it is better than the alternative. It is better than burning the only fire you have for the sake of a warmth that was never real.”

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That night, Cordelia stood in her mother’s dressing room, the candlelight flickering across her mother’s carefully composed face. Lady Ashworth—the younger, though she was not young anymore—was brushing her hair with slow, even strokes, watching Cordelia in the mirror.

“Well?” her mother asked. “How did you find the Marquess?”

Cordelia had rehearsed this lie a hundred times in the hours since the conservatory. She had told it to the ceiling, to the curtains, to the emerald brooch before her grandmother had taken it away. She had polished it until it shone.

“I did not charm him,” she said. “I did not try.”

Her mother’s brush paused. “You did not try? Cordelia, I told you—the match is signed. The settlements are agreed. The only thing that remains is whether he will enter this marriage with warmth or with ice. And warmth is our only ally in a house where we have no other power. Why would you not try?”

“Because it felt wrong,” Cordelia said, and the lie tasted like ash on her tongue. “Because I could not bear the thought of binding him to me with magic. Because I wanted him to choose me honestly or not at all.”

Her mother’s reflection went still. Something flickered in her eyes—pain, perhaps, or recognition, or the ghost of a girl who had once believed the same thing. But it was gone in an instant, smoothed over by years of practiced composure.

“You are a romantic after all,” her mother said, and it was not a compliment. “I had hoped you would be more practical. But very well. If you will not charm him, you will have to win him another way. And you will have to hope that your other way is enough.”

Cordelia nodded, and she smiled, and she let her mother believe the lie.

But as she walked back to her own room, the Dowager’s words echoed in her skull like a bell. *The only reason you are still standing is that the Marquess is armored against you.*

She had lied to save herself. But the lie sat inside her like a stone, patient and heavy, waiting for the day when it would be found out.

Three days until the wedding.

Three days until she became the wife of a man she could never charm, never sway, never truly reach.

Three days until she walked into a future she had chosen for herself, and she had no idea if it would be a refuge or a cage.

She paused at her window, looking out at the dark gardens, and she thought of the Marquess’s grey eyes, his careful words, the way he had looked at her like she was a puzzle he intended to solve.

She would not use her gift on him. She had sworn it—silently, to herself, in the dark.

But she had also sworn to her mother that she had never tried.

And she had meant it.

And she had lied.

She pressed her hand to the empty space at her collarbone where the brooch had rested, and she wondered, not for the first time, what the Marquess would have said if he knew he was the only man in England who could make her feel so magnificently, terrifyingly ordinary.