The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 795

Serena pressed her hand flat on the cloth. It kept shaking.

The glass tipped. Red wine ran across the white linen, between the candles, straight toward the lace of her wedding dress.

"Serena?" Gideon was half out of his chair, his napkin crushed in one fist. "Sweetheart?"

"I'm fine, Father," she said quietly.

She wasn't. This was how the dark had started, two winters ago. First the hands. Then the eyes. Then the voice.

Not again, she thought. Not in front of all of them.

"Oh dear," Patricia said from the family table, sweet as syrup. "Is she ill? She's gone so pale." She turned in her chair. "Doctor Reeve, shouldn't she have her drops?"

Every head turned to the doctors' table. Dr. Osmond Reeve had a forkful of salmon halfway to his mouth.

"I, no," he stammered. "No. No more drops. Not tonight, Miss Patricia."

"But she's shaking," Patricia said, loud enough for the back benches. "Look at her, poor thing. After everything she's been through."

"Perhaps the excitement," Reeve said weakly.

Marissa pulled her pink coat tight around her throat. "Is it catching? Gideon, is it catching?"

"It's not catching, Marissa." Gideon's voice cracked on her name.

Under the table, a hand closed around Serena's wrist. Warm. Perfectly steady. One thumb found a spot just below the bone and pressed, once.

The shaking stopped. All at once, like a bell when someone lays a palm on it.

Serena looked sideways at her husband. He was gazing down the hall at the wedding cake, wearing his mild, empty smile.

"Nerves," Cordelia announced brightly. "Brides always shake. I shook like a leaf at mine. Didn't I, Marissa?"

"You fell into the fountain," Marissa said.

"I slipped," Cordelia snapped.

"Nerves," Serena repeated slowly. She didn't believe a word of it.

Alexander leaned across, clumsy and slow, and picked up the fallen glass.

"You've spilled, wife," he said vaguely. "I'll fix it."

On the way, the rim passed under his nose.

Violets. Faint and sweet. He had smelled them once before, on a pillow in a locked tower, the night he pulled the dark out of her.

Somebody in this hall had tried again.

His face didn't move. The glass slipped from his fingers and burst on the stone floor.

"Oh!" Cordelia shrieked. "That's the good crystal!"

"Sorry," Alexander said, wringing his hands. "Sorry. It was wet."

"It's always something with him," Preston laughed from the family table. "Somebody give the idiot a tin cup!"

A footman hovered, uncertain. "Should I fetch a tin cup, madam?"

"Fetch a broom," Cordelia said.

The footman swept up the pieces and carried them off to the kitchen bin. The violets went with them.

Patricia watched him go. For one second her face showed relief, then annoyance, then nothing at all.

At the doctors' table, Reeve had turned the colour of old candle wax.

Alexander saw both faces. He set them side by side on the list in his head.

Serena waited until the next course came and the noise rose again.

"Your hand," she said, without turning her head.

"I was holding my wife's hand at my wedding," he said innocently. "I'm told it's allowed."

"Your thumb knew exactly where to go."

"I've held a lot of frightened dogs," Alexander said mildly. "They shake like that in a storm. You press there, and they stop."

Serena turned and stared at him.

"Did you just call me a dog?"

"A very good dog," he said seriously.

For a second she looked ready to throw the salt at him. Then the corner of her mouth gave way, and she pressed her napkin over her face.

"Are you laughing?" he asked, worried.

"No," she said, into the napkin.

"Good. Because Cordelia is looking."

She lowered the napkin. Her eyes were wet, and not from crying.

"My mother kept an old Roman by her bed," she said softly. "A thin brown book of letters to a friend. Whenever I was scared of something that hadn't happened yet, she read me one line. We suffer more often in imagination than in reality."

"Was he right?"

"I thought so, for years." She looked down at her hand, quiet now on the cloth. "Tonight it was real. My hand really shook."

"And now?"

"Now I think he left something out." She took a slow breath. "It's not that nothing bad happens. It's whether somebody's there when it does."

He didn't answer. Under the table, his hand was already gone.

The toasts went on too long, the way toasts do.

Halfway through Cordelia's, which was about her own wedding, Dulcie slipped up the side of the hall in her grey dress and stopped at the silver chairs.

"Serena," she whispered. "I wanted to say thank you."

"Don't thank me," Serena said gently. "I didn't choose him for you."

"I know. Thank you anyway."

Then she turned to Alexander and went pink to the ears.

"And thank you, Your Highness. For being chosen. I mean, for being there to be chosen. I mean." She stopped, mortified. "I don't know what I mean."

"That's all right," Alexander said kindly. "I'm an idiot. I never know what I mean either."

Dulcie laughed out loud, a small startled sound, then clapped both hands over her mouth and fled back to her mother.

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