Chapter Twelve #2
“Oh.” Her hand goes to the pearls at her throat. “Oh. He’s gorgeous. He’s simply—Oh, the face of a pre-Raphaelite god. And the hair! The cheekbones! This is too much to bear.”
An odd heat flushes Evander’s ears and decides to recalibrate his definition of the word terrifying.
Because this woman surely is just that as she glides toward the staircase, framing him with her hands as if she’s envisioning how he’d look hung upon the wall with the rest of the estate’s musty art collection.
“Darling.” She pushes aside Laurie, who grunts as he’s overbalanced, and she takes both of Evander’s cold hands in her own.
“I am Azalea Adeline Lennox-Hall, and I should very much like to get to know you better. To be here for you in this difficult time.” She leans in so far he can see straight down the front of her dress.
He attempts to look everywhere else, his face burning.
“Hi, Auntie,” Laurie says, his voice pure acid.
“Laurie. How are you, dear?” She couldn’t sound more rote in her acknowledgment of her nephew, her eyes never leaving Evander.
“Your name is a mouthful of heaven, Evander. Evander. Your grief, my darling, is my grief. Uncle Byron was a man of philanthropic legend and wonder and we shall all miss him dreadfully.”
“I do love your mourning attire,” Laurie says. “Lean in a little more, Aunt Azalea, I don’t think Evander can see everything yet.”
This makes her straighten and release Evander, placing a delicate white palm to her throat. “Laurie, what an uncouth thing to say. You must try to be nicer.”
“I’m surprised Mother hasn’t knocked some sense into him yet,” Bane says nastily, though he only receives an unpleasant sniff from Azalea.
“Why are you here?” she says.
“Why are you here?” he shoots back.
“Why are either of you here!”
Everyone snaps around to look at the top of the grand staircase, where Oleander stands like a jaguar on the prowl in a frothy robe edged in fur.
From this height, her glower is monstrous, her disdain rolling down the stairs to smother the newcomers in intimidating scorn.
Both Azalea and Bane look skittish and uncomfortable, proving Oleander does, indeed, terrorize everyone.
There are too many people, too much to process, and Evander feels himself slipping sideways, at a loss on how to hold on to his own skin.
His lungs fill with dead leaves and the broken corners of sentences he can’t force out.
He is outside of himself, a ghost at his own viewing, and he wants to leave but can’t remember how to make his limbs follow commands.
“I told you not to come.” Oleander storms down the stairs, her robe cascading around her.
“I was in town.” Bane waves a hand vaguely. “It felt prudent to pay my respects.”
In town? The sentence cuts through Evander’s daze and he fixates on it.
He thought all the Lennox-Hall descendants lived far away, choosing lavish cities instead of sentencing themselves to the tiny rural town nearest Hazelthorn.
There’s nothing interesting there as far as he knows.
But if Bane has been living nearby all this time, then—
He could’ve had access to Hazelthorn.
“I’m just here for the funeral and to see my darling nephew.” Azalea suddenly reaches for Laurie and wraps him in a python hug while he lets out a surprised oof. “You wouldn’t deny him my love, would you, Aunt Oleander?”
Oleander’s lips peel back in an unfriendly smile. “And I suppose neither of you are here for the delights of the estate?”
“Whatever do you mean?” Azalea clasps a hand over her heart in perfect innocence.
Bane rolls his eyes.
The footman closes the front doors, blocking all views of those white vans and their cameras. The idea they might feed Evander to the press makes him want to vomit.
“Who else is coming for the funeral?” Oleander snaps.
“Well, the rest of your children. Larkspur, Wisteria … Oh, and Father’s cousins, too, I’m sure.” Azalea pats Laurie on the head and then shoves him away.
“God,” Bane says. “Now those are all people you can lock out.”
“I think we should lock you out,” Azalea says, tart and prim.
Evander’s head is swiveling side to side as he tries to follow their bickering, but Laurie takes hold of the front of his waistcoat and yanks him from the staircase. None of the adults seem to care that the key to the fortune is being towed from the room in an uncoordinated flail of limbs.
Laurie doesn’t let go of Evander until they reach an archway that leads deeper into the mansion.
Not that Evander minds; he almost likes the grip, the way it grounds him through the overwhelm of meeting these new Lennox-Halls.
He is the cuckoo in the nest of broken twigs and wishbones and bloody hearts, and he still doesn’t understand why he inherited Hazelthorn over everyone else.
Electricity skitters over his too-raw skin and he doesn’t know how to shape the words I’m not okay. Though he thinks, maybe, that Laurie knows and that’s why he bent himself to play guard dog, as if Evander is a thing he owns.
“The scratches on Bane’s arms,” Evander says suddenly. “You can’t even walk through the garden without being cut up.”
“He’s been on the property, then,” Laurie says. “Guess he’s the new top suspect.” He seems to have completely forgotten his apathy over playing detective.
But his inadvertent willingness to figure out the murderer is shifting Evander’s view of him too. One act of kindness isn’t enough to declare Laurie guiltless—but he surely wouldn’t be helping Evander if he needed to hide his own crimes.
“Maybe we should … Can we hire a real private investigator?” Evander says.
Laurie slows in an alcove papered with lavish prints of belladonna.
“Not when Grandfather’s official cause of death is ‘aneurysm.’ The police don’t consider there to be a case and Oleander would never let any sort of private investigator onto the estate anyway.
If I try anything, she’ll take my phone, and I can’t exactly drive off the estate to meet up with one either.
” He waves his brace, but he’s looking at Evander steadily.
“Which is fine, because I’m not leaving Hazelthorn. ”
As if this is the only way he can keep fingertips on his claim of the house, the gardens, the fortune. It makes Evander want to scream.
But there’s an ache in his chest, and it’s getting harder and harder to ignore.
Don’t trust him—
But I want to.
He yearns for what he lost, for the comfort of fitting beside a boy so confident and sharp and lithe.
If he could go back in time, he’d remember what kind of friends they were, which one of them was full of magic and which one was full of adventure.
If he could just be like Laurie, be normal, maybe nothing would have ever gone wrong.
Though it hurts, in a deep, wretched way, that he’s still chasing this goal.
Normal.
He doesn’t even know what that means.
He just wishes he knew what broke between them, wishes he knew if their severing was his fault.
“Come on.” Laurie leads them into the kitchen, where they’re enveloped in clouds of apple cinnamon turnovers and bacon and hot maple syrup as Oleander’s private chef scurries to prepare breakfast.
The glorious smells poke at Evander’s dormant hunger. He doesn’t want to think about his tongue, too long, too hot, as it licked over the bloodied plate last night.
Distracted, he almost runs into Laurie as he yanks open the back door. Evander takes an automatic step away, because things like this are not for him—the outdoors and sunlight and hot summer days. He is an autumn leaf, meant to be pressed between the pages of an old book and forgotten.
“What are you doing?” he says warily. “I thought we were finding Dawes?”
Laurie steps outside and it seems like every shrub along the overgrown path reaches for him, leaves brushing his calves and tender green vines coiling against his thighs.
“It would be very helpful if you got your memories back,” he says.
“They’re coming back.” Evander’s stomach tightens. “Slowly.”
“Not fast enough.” Laurie’s mouth is an uninterested flat line, but Evander is now realizing that this, too, is another of his lies. “I’ll show you the place you nearly died. Let’s see what you remember.”