Tale as Old as Time

Chapter 1

Everything had been rushed.

The proposition.

The negotiations.

The wedding.

Like they could hardly wait to send her away. The weight of restoring their crumbling family honor nearly too much for her thin shoulders to bear. With the union complete, her parents could brag that they now held a claim to the King of Hearts position of the Chosen Thirteen.

Her feelings mattered not. Being the only daughter of the Atlas family, her fate had been sealed with her first cries in infancy, to be passed off as a bride for the family's glory. Her own purpose.

Greer sat rigid on the edge of the bed in the darkened room. Her chest rose and fell with heavy breaths. The corset anchored her torso upright, pressing her breasts in and plumping them up to display them nearly too much for her own liking in the wedding dress that dipped down into a heart shape. The lacing pulled so tightly that her spine threatened to snap.

Her father requested to speak to her husband, likely to spill honeyed words about how his daughter would be the perfect bride for him. That, at the very least, she could give agreement. Years of training, the whole of her childhood and youthful teenage years spent in lesson after lesson. Education came second in regards to her knowledge. Better to know how to cook and sew, to please her husband, more than to learn about things beyond reading and writing.

Skills. That's what her mother ingrained into her very core. Her vision of what was appropriate for a wife of a man such as Lancelot Kingsley.

There was once talk of other suitors, back when Greer had barely turned 18. To claim a higher status, her parents had investigated all the men of the Chosen Thirteen. The Seven of Hearts, Kyle Ash, had only crossed their discussion once. Her mother did not approve of his drinking habits. Further up the line, The Eight, and the Nine.

Neither struck her parents as suitable, as the kind of suitor they had wished for.

The highest three ranks, held by the esteemed Bright, Clemence, and Kingsley families. King of Hearts had been too unattainable, Lancelot's father having strict guidelines for marriage. The Clemence's as well, the head of the family turning them down without so much as introducing Greer to him.

That left the Jack of Hearts, Edgar Bright. An allusive family, drenched in secrets and blood, but the prospect of having a claim to the Jack position too great to ignore. All that had been needed was a formal meeting with Claudius to introduce the idea of marriage.

All their research and investigating into finding leverage to ask for a marriage proposition took nearly a year, and within that year, the former King of Hearts had been pronounced dead. Mourning ensued.

Plotting behind the scenes.

Greer gave a sigh, hands folded tightly in her lap in the darkened room. Lost completely in her thoughts, she did not hear the door open, nor the one she had married call her name the first time.

"Greer," Lancelot's voice cut through her divided attention at last. The King of Hearts gazing down at her with an unreadable expression.

Her heart skipped a beat in her chest, guilt washing over her as if the sky had opened up with rain above only her. "My apologies." Those two words not strangers to her vocabulary, spoken more often than most everything else. How careless to be so absorbed in herself to not notice his entrance.

A delightful way to begin their consummation. Her mother telling her that it would be less than pleasurable for her, as she'd been made chaste for this very night. It did not matter her feelings. How her heart pounded with fear, how her legs unintentionally squeezed together. Her breath caught in her throat, clawing to breathe.