Since Esmera was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, the only person who has looked out for her is herself.
Until a lark starts visiting her, leaving behind exotic flowers and iridescent pebbles that the internet doesn't recognise.
Esmera...
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Tauram's speculation turned Esmera cold like a rain shower soaking into her clothes. Implication burdened his words, even if she couldn't grasp it, even if he was reluctant to speak it.
Silence encased them. Esmera wanted to shatter it with her words as a hammer would, but what could she say?
She was Esmera Castignani nèe Nicholas, barista and marriage deserter, not this magical baby who had somehow single-handedly outwitted her family's murderer. All the same, she couldn't deny the tiny, selfish part of her that wanted to be this person who had defied the fate that confronted her.
This girl, wherever she was now, would be beautiful and powerful. She would be a heroine, not a battered wife who could barely scrape by most days.
Esmera would've told Tauram how wrong he was in his suspicions if her mouth would only cooperate with her.
Before it could regain its function, Tauram fired a question Esmera's way. "What is your name?"
She held his intense gaze even as her stomach swooped like a bird of prey inside her. "Esmera."
Tauram's eyes went so wide that Esmera was afraid they'd pop out of his perfect face.
Esmera blinked. She had not just thought his face was perfect, not in the middle of her identity crisis.
Tauram ran his fingers through his hair. As bleak as the light passing through the window was, they glimmered off the black strands shuffling at his touch.
Shaking his head, Tauram sank back in his chair. Esmera studied him.
He was in a room with a wildcat who spoke to him in hisses and purrs. He had heard about a lark bringing enchanted presents to a random girl, but it was the identity of said girl that caused his suspension of disbelief to give way.
A violent exclamation exploded from Tauram. Esmera somehow understood the foreign sounds to mean "Jilhari, great mother of bastard tigers".
Esmera wondered who Jilhari was and whether bastard tigers were a thing, but Lundas drew her attention away from her irrelevant questions with his purr that somehow sounded like a triumphant laugh.
"Now, don't get too ahead of yourself." Tauram flicked the cat's ear in his typical light-hearted manner, but his hand quivered, the movement so slight that Esmera might not have noticed it if she wasn't watching him so closely.
She looked away. He was just a man and an infuriating one at that. She must've imagined the mesmerising grace in every flutter of his fingers and the power contained in every sweep of his arms.
"What do you know about your family?" Tauram looked up at Esmera, his face as pale as if a dish of water had diluted its colour.
Esmera's shoulders slumped as she turned back to the fire. It flickered with a life of its own. She had never noticed before that blue edged the orange flames. "Nothing."
