Born to Serve Her by Nina Soelian
Born to Serve Her
Description
Vivien Winthrope found Jasper when she was eleven years old - half-starved, feral, eating from her family's rubbish heap - and she did what any sensible lord's daughter would absolutely not do: she kept him. Named him. Handed him a life with both hands and never once asked for anything back, because wanting something that badly from someone who had nothing felt like theft. For years, they circled each other at the edges of what was allowed - her, the girl who owned a piece of him she had no right to claim; him, the boy who would have given it freely if she'd only asked. But she didn't ask. And then he left to become a knight, and the letters never came, and then one grey morning a rider arrives with a royal seal and news that unmakes her entirely - Jasper is gone, and she never told him he was hers. Except grief, it turns out, is not the only thing waiting for her in the ruins of what they were. A king is coming to collect his bride. And the past, it seems, is not quite finished with Vivien yet.
Chapter 1
Mar 19, 2026
[Vivien’s POV]
Five years, three months, and eleven days since Jasper rode out through the eastern gate on a borrowed horse, wearing armor two sizes too large and a look on his face like I was the one sending him to die. I wasn't—that honor belonged to my father.
He decided the starving boy I'd dragged from our rubbish heap at eleven deserved more than serving a lord's household—even one as old and respected as ours. The Winthropes have held these lands six generations. Father has opinions about what constitutes a worthy life beneath our roof.
A real future, he called it. Knighthood, honor, a name Jasper could carry without owing it to anyone. Very noble. I'm sure it's a comfort to everyone except the two people it destroyed.
I've been counting the days since—not on purpose. My mind refuses to stop, the way a wound refuses to close when you keep pressing your fingers into it.
This morning I sit at my vanity dragging a brush through hair that won't behave, and I catch myself angling toward the window. The eastern road. I always look.
He'll ride back someday—mud-splattered, half-starved because the idiot forgets to eat when he's anxious—and he'll look at me the way he always did, like I'm the only solid thing in his world.
I will say something devastating. I will not cry. I will certainly not tell him the thing lodged between my throat and my sternum, pressing against my ribs whenever I breathe.
He once told me at fourteen, dead serious, that he'd get rich and build me a mansion twice this estate's size, with a garden for every day of the week. I laughed so hard I snorted.
He didn't laugh. He meant every stupid, impossible word, and that's the part I can't stop thinking about.
Margaret bursts in and murders the fantasy in its cradle. Her face is blotchy, red-rimmed, apron twisted between white-knuckled fists.
"Lady Vivien!" Her voice cracks on my name. "Your father demands your presence in his study. Immediately, my lady."
The brush stills. I have never seen Margaret look like this—like she's delivering a lamb to slaughter and feels sorry for the lamb. My stomach drops through the floor.
Father's study smells of tobacco smoke and old decisions. A letter sits on his desk like an accusation, royal seal broken, and I can't look away from it.
"Vivien. Sit down." His voice is too measured—the voice he uses when something is already broken and he's deciding how to present the pieces.
"I'd rather stand." My fingers lace behind my back, nails biting crescents into my palms. "What happened?"
He lifts the letter between two fingers. "A messenger arrived from the northern border this morning. Sir Renald's company suffered losses at Blackmere Pass."
Sir Renald. Jasper's commanding knight—the man who took a servant boy barely old enough to hold a lance and promised to forge him into something worthy. My throat closes around his name before I even speak it.
"Jasper?" The name scrapes out raw, and my hand flies to my throat as if I can hold the next words back. "Is he injured? When is he coming home?"
Father's jaw works once. His eyes are bloodshot, and that single crack in his composure terrifies me more than anything he could say. "He covered the retreat of the main forces." A pause long enough to bury me in. "He didn't make it back."
The floor tilts. The fire in the hearth turns decorative. The clock on the mantle ticks like a hammer striking bone.
"No." The word tears from my chest, and I grip the chair because my knees have stopped working. "You're wrong. Read it again!"
"I'm sorry, darling." His voice gentles into something worse than fury. "I'm truly sorry."
"Don't be sorry—check the name! People get names wrong in battle—" My voice cracks at the seams, but Father's tone lands like a door slamming shut.
"There is no mistake. This is official correspondence from Sir Renald himself. He would not err about his own squire."
"Then he's lying!" I slam my hand against the desk. The letter jumps. "Or he's blind, or someone—"
"Enough." Father sets the letter down, fingers trembling. "Jasper fell defending the northern border. Sir Renald commends his valor. He died serving the crown."
"Valor." I spit it like poison. "Pretty sentences, as if he was just some servant who got lucky."
"It honors his memory." Father's voice thickens, and the mask slips for half a breath. "The boy we took in. The man he became."
"He doesn't need honoring, he needs to be alive!" The sob I've been strangling claws free. "He promised me. He looked me in the eye and swore he'd come back."
Father's red-rimmed eyes hold mine. He loved Jasper too, in his careful, formal, insufficient way. But the mask slides back, because that is what men do when softness costs them something.
"It is unseemly to mourn a servant so openly." Quiet, almost gentle beneath the steel. "Remember your station."
My station. Nothing reminds you of the distance between a lord's daughter and a nameless orphan quite like being told you haven't earned the right to grieve him. I curtsy—my body remembers the motions even when my mind shatters—and walk out.
The corridor swims. My feet carry me where they always do—the old stables, rough stone and hay-sweet air. Jasper's cot is still here, straw flattened where his body once rested. I ordered the servants never to touch it. Pathetic? Absolutely. A girl is entitled to her shrines.
I collapse beside it and the grief detonates—sobs that crack my ribs, taste like iron. My fingers claw the pillow and something hard catches beneath the cotton. Metal, cold. An elegant dagger slides free, hilt wrapped in dark leather, fitted for my hand.
Paper wraps the sheath, edges yellowed. His handwriting stops my breath—slanted, careful. I taught him those letters in this very stable, back when a lord's daughter teaching a servant boy to write was merely eccentric, not yet dangerous.
'Vivien, I saved coins for months. It isn't grand, but it is good steel. I asked the armorer to fit it for your hand. He laughed when I told him it was for a lady, but he did it anyway. If anyone corners you when I am not there, you will not be helpless. You never were.'
He saw me. Every part I kept hidden—the anger, the defiance, the hunger for something beyond these walls—he noticed.
'I wanted to give it to you myself. I stood outside your door three times and I couldn't knock. I'm a coward when it comes to you.'
"You stood outside my door," I whisper, "and I was on the other side, pressing my palm flat against the wood because I heard your breathing. Two cowards separated by a plank of oak. We deserved each other."
'So I will plant it somewhere you always look. Somewhere you'll find it and know that I thought of you. That I always think of you. Please don't scold me. I just'
The ink stops mid-sentence. White space where his words should be, as though the world snatched him before he could finish.
I press the letter to my mouth, breathing in dust and old leather and the ghost of a boy who smelled like hay and copper pennies. The boy I named at eleven because he was too broken to speak his own.
"What were you going to say?" I ask the empty stable, pressing the paper against my chest until the edges bite.
I curl around the dagger and the letter, lying in straw where he used to sleep. Because I never told him either—five years of silence, and now the silence is permanent, and the only words left between us are his, unfinished, waiting for a girl who took too long to find them.
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Born to Serve Her
30 Chapters
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