"I believed him," Samira said with a sad, self-deprecating smile that said she understood now that it had all been a lie. "I’ll be twenty next year, and I should have known better, but I believed him. The Marquis of Lothian March was telling me I could help make sure that Lady Ashlynn’s killers were brought to justice and become a Dame for doing it."

"I thought it was a fairy story," she said as one hand gently stroked her belly in a gesture that had become increasingly comforting since she escaped the Summer Villa. "I thought I was the lucky one."

"At first, they just had me dress up in Lady Ashlynn’s clothes and had me stroll in the gardens or visit the markets with Lord Owain," Samira explained. "But there were some things I couldn’t avoid and I, I embarrassed Lord Owain badly because I didn’t know the things a proper lady should know," she confessed, remembering the disastrous tea party when she’d implied that she intended to cuckold Lord Owain because she hadn’t understood that noblewomen’s clothing could act like a second, secret language among each other.

"That’s when they rushed me off to the Summer Villa with a story that ’Lady Ashlynn’ was with child and needed peace and quiet to rest because her constitution was so frail," she said with a wry chuckle. As if there were anything remotely frail about Lady Ashlynn!

"During those early days of the deception, Lord Owain visited me often," Samira continued, pausing uncertainly as she glanced at Lady Ashlynn. Nothing she was about to say would be a surprise to the other woman, but saying that she’d been sleeping with Lady Ashlynn’s husband in front of so many people was still difficult, even for her.

"Go on, Samira," Ashlynn said gently. "It’s all right." The things Owain had done to Samira were another part of the debt that Ashlynn had come to collect on tonight.

There had been a time when it was painful to hear that the man she’d married had become intimate with the woman he’d dressed up like a doll in her clothes. She’d grieved for the marriage she lost and the life she thought she would have lived with her ’heroic’ husband.

That pain had long since faded away under Nyrielle’s tender, loving care. It no longer hurt to hear Samira’s story. Instead, it stoked the fury boiling within her heart that demanded to avenge not just herself, but all of Owain’s victims.

"He visited in the evenings, mostly," Samira said, lacing her fingers together over her belly to stop herself from fidgeting. "He would take meals in my chambers. He would tell me about his day and about the men who had displeased him, or about his plans for the war that was coming. He was..."

She faltered and looked at Ashlynn, biting her lower lip as she struggled to find the right words.

"You can tell them what he was, Samira," Ashlynn said in a voice that struggled to remain gentle as her gaze shifted to Owain’s brooding figure. "It is not a shame on you," she said with a heavy emphasis on the word ’you.’

"He was attentive," Samira said. "He courted me as though I were his lady. He brought me gifts. He gave me, he gave me the necklace of pearls that Lady Ashlynn’s grandmother had left her, and he told me to wear it because it suited me. All... All of the nice things he gave me, they were things that belonged to Lady Ashlynn... that he’d taken from her."

On the dais, there was a sharp indrawn his of breath among the ladies of the court, particularly Lady Tosha, as they realized how shameless Owain had been. The notion of wooing his mistress with his ’dead’ wife’s treasures struck a nerve with all of them.

"And, and he came to my bed," Samira added in a voice that finally cracked under the strain.

The air in the hall grew heavy. Here and there, a handful of knights or wealthy merchants looked increasingly uncomfortable as they listened to the story of a woman who had been coerced into sharing her bed with her lord. Elsewhere, an even larger number of noblewomen looked at their husbands with sharpened gazes that held both a question they would demand an answer to later that evening... and a threat should the truth offend them.

"He came to my bed often. And when we, when we were together, he called me Ashlynn," Samira said in a voice that grew small enough that she could only be heard because the entire Great Hall was hanging on every word. "He wouldn’t call me Samira; he called out Lady Ashlynn’s name. Every time."

"He told me, after, that I was lucky," Samira said as her face heated and her eyes grew moist. "He said that I was being given the gift of pretending to be a great lady, and that I should be grateful for the practice."

At the Otker table, Serge’s face turned sour as he listened to the chambermaid telling her story. The look he gave Owain held a strange mix of sympathy and... contempt.

It wasn’t like Serge had never gone looking through brothels for a woman who resembled the lady he fancied. For an extra silver penny, a whore would let you call them whatever name you wanted, and if he was willing to open up his purse-strings a little wider, he could even dress them up however he pleased.

Hearing that Lord Owain had done the same, dressing a serving girl up as ’Lady Ashlynn’ to have his way with her made the lofty, Lothian Lord relatable in a way that Serge Otker had never expected to relate to a man heralded as the hero of the march. It stripped away a portion of the aura of majesty that clung to Owain Lothian and gave Serge the momentary feeling that they weren’t all that different.

But then, Serge knew better than to believe that, and that was the thought that put such a sour expression on his lips. Serge knew full well that he wasn’t a man most women would desire... but what woman wouldn’t offer themselves up to a man as handsome, strong, wealthy, and powerful as Owain Lothian?

If even Lord Owain had to make do with fantasies, dressing servants up as the woman he couldn’t have... It was too pathetic for words.

Sitting next to him, Charlotte Otker’s expression was very different, and she shuddered as she looked from Samira to Owain and back again. She’d heard the things the men of the Lothian Court said about her. She knew that no one who married her would ever desire her for her body, and likely, not for who she was as a person either.

Whichever man finally took her hand in marriage would do so as a method of claiming a portion of her father’s immense wealth and little more. So, was this what she had to look forward to? Would she find herself standing as Lady Ashlynn did now, next to the pregnant mother of her husband’s child?

And if that was all she could look forward to.... Wasn’t that kind of fate just too cruel?