Chapter Thirty-Nine
The hall buzzed with tension as he disappeared.
My cheeks were red—I couldn’t tell whether I was angry at him for leaving or embarrassed by the display Eliot had just incited.
Every one of my bridesmaids’ gazes, along with Adélard’s and Eliot’s, was fixed on me, as though waiting to see what I would do next.
Pushing aside my glass, I rose to address the group. “Excuse me. It seems my fiancé has decided to throw a tantrum. I’ll go and collect him.”
I stalked off before anyone could offer a word of protest. Outside, the storm had grown stronger still. The windows seemed painted with black, nothing visible on their other sides save for the icy glint of the rain.
I found my quarry in the old maidens’ corridor—one of the square halls which overlooked the central garden where Noé and I had first walked. It was the sound of him I noticed first: a frustrated grunting, as if he were searching for something.
He turned to look over his shoulder when he heard me approaching. He was standing beneath one of the open arches which bordered the passage, feeling around in a crevice within the low stone balustrade. Rain poured into the garden below, some of it dampening his hair and the fabric of his suit.
“Have you seen a packet of cigarettes?” he called out as I neared him. “I keep an emergency ration around here—aha!”
Triumphantly, he produced a pack from the crevice’s depths, flipping it open to reveal several wilted cigarettes within. I batted it aside when he extended it toward me.
“Put those away,” I said. “Noé, you need to control yourself and come back to the table right now. If the other girls think we’re fighting, they’ll strike at me all the harder—”
“Oh, leave off it, Tamerlane.” Noé waved me away. Leaning against the archway, he selected a single cigarette from the packet, bringing it to his mouth. The cherry ignited when he inhaled, winking at me. “Control? You truly think I have any of that left?”
I stepped closer to him, riled by his dismissal. “If you’ve run out, then find some more.”
“Why don’t you find it for me?” I stopped short at his rebuttal—so brashly spoken, so vastly different from the accommodating softness I’d begun to expect from him. “Yes,” he went on, watching me. “I rather like that idea. If you wish me under control, why don’t you control me, Lovett?”
I couldn’t remember the last time he’d called me by my first name. Hearing it leveled against me now, without any sort of warning, made my arms break out in gooseflesh, same as if he’d uttered a curse. At my reaction, Noé chuckled.
“I saw that,” he said. “Does it affect you, hearing me speak your name aloud? I know you realize what it does to me when you say mine.”
Lowering his cigarette to his side, he leaned closer to me. The archway yawned over us; standing beneath it with him, I felt secluded from the rest of the estate, cupped within a pair of hands.
“These past weeks I have been utterly torn apart by you,” Noé murmured over the sound of the storm.
“There is not a part of me—not a single internal organ, not a blood vessel—that does not bear the scars of our acquaintanceship. And then to be forced to sit at that dinner table and watch him mock me—to know that he has touched you in ways that I never will—that he has heard you tell him you love him…”
His voice cut out. I watched on, frozen and hardly breathing, as he lifted his cigarette to his lips again, averting his eyes.
“Just leave me be, all right?” he went on. “I’ll be back soon enough.”
Smoke had infiltrated my nostrils. I inhaled it for a moment, then reached up and snatched the cigarette from him, stubbing it out on the balustrade.
He startled. “Hey!”
“Get a hold of yourself,” I hissed while he flexed his jaw, irate.
“Who do you think you are, moping about like some petulant child? Prostrating yourself like a martyr?” I shook my head, my fingers hot where they’d brushed his.
“You are not a victim, Noé. All of us are hurting, do you understand? My relationship with Eliot is not something that was done to you.”
My voice wobbled; I was horrified to find that it was thick with the promise of tears. I swallowed them down, unsure where they’d come from, as, to my front, Noé studied me.
For a minute, he remained motionless, until he shifted against the arch and asked, “Do you still love him?”
“Sisters three,” I swore.
“Why did you come here?” His question came fast—quicker than I could prepare for it.
I pressed my lips together, seething. “Every person at that table knows my faults. None of them would find anything strange about me storming off—but you followed.” He leaned closer.
“This argument—this dinner—is not about the other girls. It is about what it has always been, since the moment you slipped my ring on your finger: you and me. Now tell me—if he came to you now and told you that all was forgiven, that he wished for you back. Would you answer his call?”
It was the very question I had tested myself against, time and time again.
I knew the correct response: that I was Eliot’s.
I had given myself to him; if he no longer wanted me, then I would remain alone, like a doll whose owner has grown too old for it.
That was how I would prove my loyalty. How I would show him that no matter his feelings, I was not as cruel as he claimed.
And yet…the longer I spent away from him, the more convinced I became that I had promised myself to an illusion—to a single facet of a gem.
When the Vainglory ended, I had known him for less than a month.
Were we truly as alike as I’d thought back then?
Or were we only two lonely people who had glimpsed our own isolation reflected in one another?
He had always been so good, so noble. I just wanted to be that way.
I just wanted him to tell me I was redeemed.
I didn’t know how to respond. “I…”
Noé exhaled. “How long are you going to pretend that you do not feel it?” he asked.
“For a while, I convinced myself that the…impulses…which have governed me since our meeting were my burden to bear, and mine alone. That any hints of reciprocation I thought I sensed from you were nothing but the hysterical imaginings of a desperate, deluded mind.” His shoulders lowered; I felt the tug of his movement like a tide.
“But I do not believe that any longer. I think that you have been gripped by the same fever as I have. That you feel it here.” His finger tapped my chest, just below my collarbone. “In your heart.”
My entire being was gathered beneath the tip of his fingernail. As steadily as I was able, I looked up at him. “I do not have a heart.”
He chuckled, his chin tipping down to take me in. “Oh yes,” he whispered. “You do.”
Bending his neck, he leaned closer. I could feel the warmth of him, a chilly heat like winter fire, and I had a decision to make, and I did not know what it would be—
In my head, something snapped—a clipped jerk like a string being cut. At once, Noé disappeared, my vision filled with the image of a peeling green door. As I watched, it creaked open before lolling closed again.
The picture flickered, a failing candle flame, then went out altogether, leaving only darkness behind.
Blinking, I came back to myself. I’d wondered—hoped, really—that given the opportunity, one of my bridesmaids would make a play for the gloves Manon had passed me after I’d mentioned them at the table, thereby revealing their own connection to the accessories.
I hadn’t meant to provide them with that chance so soon, but that wasn’t what bothered me.
At dinner, I’d said I’d left the gloves in my bedroom. Yet in reality, I’d moved them hours earlier, from my own chambers to the turret where Eliot and I used to meet.
The door which had signaled me just now—it wasn’t the one which led to my room, the place I’d claimed the gloves were. It was the turret door.
And someone had just opened it.