Merchant's Daugher

The silk nightgown felt like wearing spun air against her skin, nothing like the rough linen shifts she'd grown up in. Elara ran her thumb along her fingers—one, two, three, four—counting the way she always did when her thoughts scattered like coins from a torn purse. The fire in the hearth cast dancing shadows across the unfamiliar chamber, all dark wood and heavy tapestries that probably cost more than her father's shop earned in a season.

She touched her throat, feeling the rapid flutter of her pulse beneath her fingertips. Somewhere in the castle, servants were likely whispering about the merchant's daughter who'd bought her way into nobility through marriage. Silent daughters fetch the highest price, her father had always said, and she'd proven him right—nineteen years of careful silence had earned her a lord's ring and a room that smelled of lavender oil instead of wool dust.

The sheets beneath her were impossibly soft, embroidered with thread that caught the firelight like captured starshine. Her mother's silver ring lay cool against her chest, hidden beneath the fine fabric—the only piece of her old life she'd dared to keep close. Everything else belonged to him now. Her dowry, her future, her body.

Elara closed her eyes and tried to remember the baker's son's gentle kiss behind the grain stores, the way his hands had trembled when they'd touched her face. That stolen moment felt like something from another girl's life now. When she opened her eyes again, the chamber door's heavy wood seemed to loom larger, waiting for the knock that would change everything.

She straightened her spine the way she'd learned to balance invisible ledgers on her head, and waited for her husband to claim what her father had sold.