Betrothed

by Lola White

  Eliasz crouched down in front of Ileana, his tormented eyes examining her thoroughly. He wore only his pants, no sock or shoes, no shirt. His palm rose to cup her cheek and a searing wave of weakness liquefied her spine.

  Tears spilled down her cheeks. Eliasz gathered her close, sitting on the floor and pulling her onto his lap. He rocked her while she cried, pressing kisses on her hair until she got herself under control.

  She clung to him, to his strength and his heat, the sense of safety and comfort only he had ever brought her. He folded his big body around hers and held her close.

  “Millie and Hank will be removed to a different house, Ileana. You’ll be safe here, I swear it.”

  She pressed closer to him. “It was them? Before? The Matched pair.”

  “It’s all over now.” Eliasz slid his fingers under her chin, tilting her face to his. He placed a gentle kiss on her lips and pressed his forehead against hers. “I thought I was going to lose you. I can’t lose you.”

  “I was scared,” she admitted. “But then you came. You saved me.”

  “You’re mine, Ileana.”

  It was that simple.

  Ileana heard a gasp and lifted her head, surprised to see the old man watching them, his eyes filled with betrayal. “You would side with a Lovasz over a Levy? We’re your Family.”

  Eliasz’s eyes turned glacial. “She is my Family. My wife! She is mine.” He looked back down at her, his eyes immediately softening. “Signed and sealed in blood, Ileana. Mine, forever.”

  Fear fell away. She’d found more than she’d ever hoped for in Poland. Looking for freedom from her grandfather’s dominance, she’d found Eliasz.

  She smiled. “Forever.”

  Coming Soon from Totally Bound Publishing:

  Arcanium: Fortune

  Aurelia T. Evans

  Released 17th April 2015

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  “Young lady, if you don’t start behaving right this second, I’m going to leave you at the circus and go home without you. Do I make myself clear?”

  A tired, sunburnt little girl who was about eight or nine replied, “Maybe I want to join the circus. I bet it’s better than being with you.”

  “That’s it, missy,” her tired, sunburnt mother said. She grabbed her daughter’s hand. “We are going home right now, and I’m sure your father will have something to say when we get there.”

  “It’s just as well,” Derrick said as he slung an arm around Maya’s shoulders. “Didn’t she see the signs?” He nodded at the carved wooden signs at the circus’ entrance.

  Adults Only after 8 p.m. Wayward children will be fed to clowns.

  “That’s not going to help anyone’s coulrophobia,” Maya said with equal amusement.

  Derrick could joke, but the pale skin under his copious freckles was brighter red than the girl or her mother, which told Maya that however jovial Derrick was now, she’d get an earful in the morning. ‘Why didn’t you remind me to wear sunscreen?’ he would moan, conveniently forgetting or pretending to forget that she’d tried to get him to put sunscreen on multiple times. Each time he had declined the offer, saying he’d keep to the shade or didn’t like the smell of coconuts.

  “When did they start including a circus at the Renaissance faire anyway?” Derrick asked, squinting at the tan canvas faire tents to try to read the signs posted along the rows. It was hopeless, because Derrick also disliked wearing glasses.

  “I think this troupe started out here during the Halloween festival, and management thought they’d be good in summer with different costumes,” Maya said. “They said something in the paper about that.”

  “Doesn’t seem very Renaissance-y,” Derrick said.

  “Well, a lot of the stuff here isn’t very Renaissance-y,” Maya said. “It’s more like Indeterminate Fantasy Time Period Before the American Revolution. But they can’t fit that in the brochures. Besides, you’re not very Renaissance-y either,” she added, poking his side.

  After much cajoling on Maya’s part, he’d deigned to wear a tunic-like shirt that could pass for peasant. And his leather sandals got points for effort. But Maya was pretty sure neither medieval nor Renaissance men, nor men of Middle Earth, wore board shorts.

  Maya, on the other hand, had gone all out. Her corset was one of the main reasons Derrick had agreed to the peasant shirt in the first place. She wore a peasant blouse of her own underneath, but the buttons were completely undone over the top of the corset, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. What the hell—it was hot outside and the corset was binding enough. At least her legs got some air under the flowing skirt.

  And she had put on sunscreen.

  “You want to go in?” Derrick asked. “There’s still a few rows of vendors we haven’t hit yet.”

  “What, you want another fabulous jester hat?” Maya asked.

  “I can be your one-man circus, baby,” Derrick said with a grin. “I’m your clown, your juggler, your magician, and you can be my flexible acrobat.” He leered at the generous view of her cleavage.

  She usually didn’t expose herself like this, preferring to keep everything contained and maintained, but faires were different, like Halloween—one of the few times and places during the year where a lot of skin wasn’t out of the ordinary. She’d seen enough busty ladies this afternoon to feel like she’d have been more out of place wearing one of her normal, more conservative outfits.

  Anyway, the costume was kind of freeing, and how Derrick looked at her now—and the way that any number of people did a double-take as she passed by—made her feel not powerful per se, but desirable. The feeling didn’t suck.

  “I’m not exactly sure where you expect me to be flexible. My corset’s not Victorian regulation, but I can’t really…bend,” Maya said, demonstrating. “But yeah, sure, we can see the circus. I mean, the faire’s going to close soon anyway. You know, I think I read that the circus is supposed to have a human oddities section. I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

  “Human oddities? You mean like a freak show?” Derrick asked.

  “The article called it ‘human oddities’.”

  “Politically correct for ‘freak show’. That could be cool.”

  “Or not,” Derrick muttered at the plaintive expression Maya shot at him. “Unless my near-sighted eyes deceive me, I think there’s a midway down yonder aisle.”

  “A medieval pirate cowboy at a circus,” Maya said. “Saints preserve us, I’m confused.”

  “Nothing more multiple-personality than a cosplay venue,” Derrick said. “Midway, milady?”

  “Yes, let’s see more impressive feats of noodly-armed strength for dollar-store crap,” Maya replied.

  Derrick glared at her, and Maya knew she’d stepped over some arbitrary line between humor and seriously questioning his manhood—a line that shifted on different days, as though Derrick hadn’t known her sarcastic self intimately for the last three years.

  Then again, Maya had known about Derrick’s little sensitivities for the same amount of time. She hadn’t figured out when to shut her mouth yet either.

  It wasn’t like his arms were actually noodle-like. In fact, under the painfully pale skin and dense constellation of tannish freckles, Derrick had a good set of limbs on him. He was a little slender, but he kept himself fit with running and strength training, almost obsessively so, as though he needed to make up for what he considered embarrassingly red hair and fair, spotty complexion. He viewed the things that endeared Maya to him as things that made the rest of the world not take him seriously enough.

  Maya usually had to bite her tongue against pointing out that there were several attributes—presently airing themselves out over her corset, in fact—that made the rest of the world not take her seriously all the time either, and he didn’t hear her being all snippy about it.

  Maya glimpsed a carousel on the other side of the midway around the biggest tent, but before she could suggest it, something better caught her eye.
>
  “Oh, hey, fortune teller,” Maya said as they passed by the big top. The whirring from massive fans that cooled the interior hummed at a volume just above white noise. Underneath that eminently modern sound, however, Maya thought she heard the trumpeting of an elephant.

  There was another sign at the big top entrance. Chaos in the Ring at 8. Adults Over 18 Only, it reiterated.

  “Come on, you don’t believe in that shit, do you?” Derrick asked, apparently still irritable from her previous comment.

  “Of course not,” Maya said. “That’s the fun of it.”

  “It’s a waste of money,” Derrick said.

  “Fine, it’ll be a waste of my money, then,” Maya said. “What did we come here for if not to get massively sunburnt, eat too many fried things, and burn through too much of our hard-earned cash until we hate ourselves in the morning?”

  “Fair enough,” Derrick said.

  They ducked into the small tent.

  It checked all the typical fortune-teller boxes. Three dainty chairs surrounded a small round table standing in the grass, and a crystal ball stood on a pedestal in the center. The backdrop was a side table covered in a crimson gypsy cloth, accented with flickering candles and incense, but also giant geodes and wooden effigies. The incense had insinuated its sandalwood scent into the fabric draping every economical bit of furniture as well as the canvas tent around them. Strings of beads and fabric banners dipped down from the tent ceiling above, making the ceiling glitter like some kind of whimsical night sky that city folk like Maya and Derrick couldn’t begin to imagine.

  In front of the crystal ball, on the customers’ side of the table, read yet another sign— Unfettered Fortunes, $10.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to spend money on this,” Derrick said. He sprawled in one of the chairs. He wasn’t big, but the delicate wooden legs still looked like they might snap under his weight.

  Maya sat down more gingerly. “Remember, Derrick,” she whispered at him, “this is supposed to be fun.”

  “Whatever,” Derrick said.

  Maya rolled her eyes and pulled a ten out of her tie-dye cloth bag. She set the bill on the table in front of the fortune teller’s chair.

  “Is the incense supposed to drug us into becoming more gullible, or—?” Derrick began.

  A man slipped into the tent from the back.

  “Good evening,” he said, sliding the ten off the table and tucking it into the leather bag hanging from the side of his loose, tan pants. Beaded talismans dangled off the leather bag and from the leather belt that looped around his waist, but he wore neither shirt nor shoes. However, there was a metal medallion around his neck, a dark brass ring in one ear and a curling brass band around his right upper arm. Every piece of his outfit could have been lovely and androgynous on another body, but they only served to enhance his unobtrusive but undeniable masculinity.

  “I thought fortune tellers were women,” Maya said. The admittedly low filter on her tongue had short-circuited from the sight of his bare, tanned chest. Nothing wrong with enjoying what she saw…except when it made her sound like an idiot.

  “Sexism hurts everyone,” the man said with the subtlest of smiles curving his lips. “Shall we begin?”

  He held his hands out palms up on the table.

  “Oh,” Maya said. “I thought, with the crystal ball…”

  “Yes, it’s very pretty, isn’t it?” the fortune teller replied. This time his smile was less subtle. “Most of these accoutrements are for show.”

  Unlike the overly affected Shakespearean English most of the employees of the faire used, Maya couldn’t quite trace the fortune teller’s accent. But it wasn’t American either.

  “Isn’t letting your customers in on the tricks of the trade a big psychic no-no?” Derrick asked.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, young man,” the fortune teller said. “My customers already know most of the tricks of the trade. I sell the mystique because they like knowing some of those tricks. They expect them. It gives them comfort. The real trick is showing them a little and keeping the most important secrets to yourself.”

  He curled his fingers, beckoning Maya to give him her hands, and she did so. The warmth of his fingers caused little sparks of pleasure at the contact. Maya tried not to shift in her seat or let Derrick know that she was turned on.

  She didn’t usually get mad when Derrick’s eyes strayed toward some girl’s ass or breasts, but he tended to get a little touchier when she noticed another man—at least one who wasn’t a celebrity safely trapped in a television screen. Derrick never quite understood that even though men tended to appreciate the visual more than women, it didn’t mean women couldn’t like a view—or that certain feelings sometimes came unbidden with the brush of skin and amazing eyes staring directly into hers.

  She hoped she hid any sign that she had been affected, but somehow, Maya doubted it. Those pale hazel eyes of his, amber flecked with green, didn’t seem to miss much. That was the real trick of the fortune teller in the end—their ability to read people. And from the way this fortune teller ran his thumbs over her palms as he stared into her eyes, she thought he knew exactly how she was reacting, although he schooled his expression like a master.

  “Yeah, but you should want to give your customers something really authentic, not showing the man behind the curtain,” Derrick said.

  “Customers do not come to this faire for an authentic experience. They arrive for costumes, jousts, ye olde shoppes and turkey legs like the one which the two of you shared an hour ago,” the fortune teller said.

  Maya looked back at Derrick and raised an eyebrow.

  “What?” Derrick said. “He probably saw us walking around with it.”

  “Yeah, among the hundreds of other people, he zeroed in on us just in case we walked into his tent,” Maya replied, shaking her head.

  However, the fortune teller acknowledged Derrick with a nod. “It is possible that I simply have an excellent memory. Perhaps I also have an excellent sense of smell or you dropped a little on your skirt. Mentioning your dinner was hardly a psychic feat, nor was it intended to be.”

  He returned his attention to Maya, who was suddenly very aware of how his hands heated hers from beneath.

  “As a fortune teller, I am able to read not just your future, but also your past and present. Contact is not strictly necessary,” he added, stroking her again with his thumbs, “but it does help. If I wished, I could also read the lines on your palms, pull out my Tarot cards or peer into the crystal ball. They would all tell me the same things. But nothing is as powerful a conduit as the mind itself. It carries your memories in paths already created. Your futures—for we all have more than one possible future—are found in the tangled forests ahead where terrain has not yet been cleared. But I am an experienced explorer, have no fear, and I have your hands in mine to guide us.”

  The fortune teller’s warm, sonorous, slightly rasping voice cast a spell over her. She could sit there for hours just listening to him speak. Her body stilled and her heartbeat slowed. The world around her dropped away until there were only the contents of this tent, his hands on hers, her gaze caught in his.

  “Now, where would you like for me to begin? Past, present or future?” the fortune teller asked.

  “Oh, I bet present will be a real challenge,” Derrick said snidely.

  “Your negativity and skepticism doesn’t interfere with my ability to read people,” the fortune teller said, showing the first symptoms of thinning patience, “but it does interfere with my ability to concentrate. If you prefer, you may wait outside the tent.”

  “No way,” Derrick replied. He crossed his arms and slouched in his seat, but he didn’t say anything more. So maybe he did see the way Maya reacted to the fortune teller’s touch, his voice.

  “There are elements of the present I cannot know by conventional means. For instance, I have no way of knowing that you, sir, have a tribal sun tattoo on your hip or that you’
re craving an orange swirl shake on the way home. Your young woman would prefer a cherry Dr Pepper,” the fortune teller said.

  Derrick stiffened, his jaw tightening.

  “Holy shit, how’d you know that?” Maya asked.

  The fortune teller tilted his head, his enigmatic smile no less Cheshire-cat than before. “You did see the sign outside my tent, yes? It’s what I do. Now, relax, my dear. Where would you like me to begin?” he asked.

  “Well, I already lived my past, so you probably don’t need to tell me about that,” Maya said. “I mean, it would impress me if you knew about it, but if you do, I’d like to pretend that you don’t, okay?” She laughed a little.

  “So you would like to know your future,” the fortune teller replied. He leaned in and tightened his grip on her hands, pressing his thumbs into the center of her palm. “Then I must give you the standard disclaimer that while I am almost always right, there is a chance that telling you the future will change it. I’m obligated to remind you that my services are purely entertainment and not to be considered true forecasting.”

  Derrick snorted.

  “Also,” the fortune teller said, ignoring the undignified sound, “I am a fortune teller, and sometimes a person’s fortunes are not so pleasant. So I must impress upon you that you should not ask questions to which you do not want the answer. After all, a tall, dark, handsome stranger in your future might be a tall, dark, handsome criminal who will assault you in your sleep.”

  “Oh, please,” Derrick said. “This is fucking ridiculous.”

  “Please remove yourself from my tent, young man,” the fortune teller said. He dropped Maya’s hands and stood. “You have not paid for this service, nor do you intend to.”

  Derrick was taller but had none of the older man’s unaggressive confidence, which made the fortune teller’s stature seem more imposing. Also, Derrick still possessed some of the twitchy restlessness of his adolescence. The fortune teller, on the other hand, displayed uncanny stillness—as though he had convinced even his heart to beat less forcefully.