The Beast of the Briar Woods

Caspian had been working overtime through the entire New Year holiday. Veyra Solenne decided she would surprise him. She'd fly out, knock on his hotel door, watch his tired face crack into a smile.

Only business class seats were left. Although she felt bad about the ticket price, she thought it was worth it.

She sat there for a full minute, unable to figure out how to lower the tray table.

The woman beside her - polished, bored, gorgeous in the particular way that costs money - let out a short laugh.

"Never flown business before?"

Veyra managed an awkward smile. "Sorry. You must run a company or something. You've got that air about you."

"Me? No." The woman waved a manicured hand. "But my benefactor does. If I'm not in business class, he sends a private jet."

"A benefactor," Veyra said. "Those must be hard to come by."

"Not really." The woman's mouth curved. "I'm his subordinate. I keep making expensive mistakes at work. He scolds me until I cry, and then-" she smiled, letting the sentence finish itself.

A small chill moved down Veyra's spine, though she couldn't have said why. "Funny," she said slowly. "My husband has a colleague like that too. Always making mistakes."

"You're married?" The woman's eyes swept over her, cataloguing. "His wife's about your age, actually."

She examined her nails.

"He says he got tired of her ages ago. Says touching her feels stale. Less interesting than watching me flip my hair."

Veyra's stomach turned, quietly, the way it does before you know why.

"I told him I wanted to see him over the holiday," the woman went on, pleased with herself. "So he told his wife he had to work."

That was when Veyra saw it. The ring on the woman's finger. A diamond, cut exactly like the wedding band she had lost two years ago.

She went still.

Caspian is an ordinary employee, she thought. So, calm down. Similar rings don't mean anything.

Her eyes fixed on the ring.

"That's a wedding band," Veyra said, her voice coming out strange to her own ears. "Did you marry him?"

"This?" The woman - Xiomara, she introduced herself, admiring the stone as it caught the cabin light - "I made him take it from his wife."

The air went out of Veyra's lungs.

"I wasn't trying to make trouble for her, honestly," Xiomara said. "But on my birthday she had a miscarriage and dragged him to the hospital. I spent it alone."

Veyra's hand drifted, without her permission, to her stomach.

The memory came back whole and freezing: black ice on the walk home from the market, a fall she hadn't seen coming, three months along, and then nothing but blood on frozen concrete. Caspian at her bedside for three days straight, not sleeping. Waking to find her ring gone along with the child.

It's okay, he'd said, voice breaking. We'll have another baby. I'll make you a new ring.

Don't, she'd told him. They're doing layoffs. Save the money. When you make it, get me one then.

She had believed, at the time, that this was a small and noble sacrifice. She had not known she was negotiating away her own ring to a woman she hadn't met yet.

"So he gave you his wife's ring," Veyra said carefully.