A Beast's Tale

Chapter 76

The sound of our bedroom door opening and closing was almost imperceptible, but it was enough to wake me up. I lay still with my eyes closed, listening. No humming, no quiet movement in the room. That was Ivetta leaving. She wasn't making me breakfast again, was she? I thought I made myself clear that the way she expressed her gratitude last night was more than sufficient. We needed to get back to work today.

It was only a moment before the door opened and closed again, just as softly, and then her light footsteps crossed the floor toward the bed. She stopped briefly, and then she padded away. The chair at my writing desk gave a slight creak when she sat down.

She must have stepped outside to tell her guards something. What couldn't wait until Theresa got here? I ran through a list of possibilities and settled on the most likely candidate. The foreign princes were still here, and she usually ate breakfast with them when they were visiting. We hadn't done that yet. She was probably canceling our personal breakfast with the intention of us eating at the round table when I got up. I would prefer to eat in our room, but I wasn't going to argue. She was much better at hospitality than I was.

The room was silent except for the soft rustle of a page turning every so often. She was reading her mother's Bible. Every morning, she did so, with rare exceptions like the past two days. I didn't understand the appeal, and she offered no explanation. Nor did she talk about Sunday mornings, when she left me to sleep in while she went to church. I thought her interest in religion would stop after we got married, since she only picked it up after telling me that she wanted to wait until marriage. But it didn't, and it didn't seem to inhibit her in any way. Maybe it was something that helped her feel connected to her mother. It was odd that she didn't talk to me about it when she had no problem talking to me about anything else.

I couldn't get back to sleep.

I pushed the blankets back and stretched. Ivetta was seated at the writing desk in her dressing gown, her back to me, too immersed in her reading to notice me getting out of bed and coming up behind her. Her slender fingers slipped under the page on the right, preparing to turn it again. Hand-written notes filled the margins surrounding the text. The script was stronger and steadier than that of the letter at the end of her father's journal, but it was unmistakably her mother's hand.

That explained quite a bit.

I leaned in, brushing her hair aside to kiss her neck.

"Good morning, Chevalier," she giggled.

"Have you finished yet?" I asked, sliding my hands down her arms and crossing them in front of her. A rhetorical question. I could see for myself that she was just over halfway through.

"For this morning, yes," she said, leaning her cheek against mine as I rested my chin on her shoulder. "But if you're asking about reading it all the way through, I've done that many times."

"Then why do you keep reading it?"

It was a simple question. Her response was not. She hesitated, her shoulder tensing slightly under my chin.

"It grounds me, and I learn something new every time," she said slowly. "I don't feel right if I don't read it every day."

She really believed this nonsense. Learning something new every time? It was a book. I memorized each book I read, and although I knew she didn't, I also knew that she rarely read the same book more than once. How could a few lines of text hold so much interest for her?

Had she really not felt right the past two days, when she was with me, happy and smiling?

The thought brought a strange churning to my stomach, a strange sense of anger. Wasn't I enough for her? Why did she feel like she needed this crutch?