Chapter Twenty-Two
TWENTY-TWO
He opens his eyes.
That alone exhausts him, and he lies for a long time with his eyelashes tacky with sleep as he stares at the coffered ceilings, floral motifs carved all through the plaster. He’s mapped every corner of this ceiling during his years of illness and it feels like time has slipped between his fingers.
Moving his body feels impossible. Muffled, cottony weight keeps him smothered deep into the mattress and the best he can do is rub his fingertips against the sheets. Continuous, soothing. If he tries to move, the room will spin anyway. He knows how it goes. How being ill works.
Except you were fine. You weren’t sick until they dosed you. Which means maybe you never were sick and it was never medicine. They’re poisoning you and they have been this whole time.
Pain splits through the gossamer fog before his eyes and he whimpers as something pulls across his chest with white-hot agony. His fingers drag over his ribs and catch on rough bandages.
“No…” He can barely get the word out through dry, chapped lips. “No, no, nononono—”
His next breath is too quick and he feels the stretch of the stitches, the tightening of bandages against expanding ribs.
Heavy sedatives are slinking slowly from his bloodstream and he can feel a phantom scalpel sliding across his skin with a deft snick snick to open him up like a ripe pomegranate.
But he didn’t need another surgery. Byron talked about it just before he died, but there was nothing wrong with Evander—
He was fine.
What have they done what have they done to him he was FINE HE WAS FINE HE DIDN’T FEEL SICK—
“Don’t.”
Cold, papery hands wrap about his wrists, tugging them away from where he’s tearing weakly at the bandages. He tries to wrest free, but it’s pathetic how little strength he has, how the lightest of touches can pin him back to the bed. “You brought this on yourself.”
Fever surges up his spine like a wick, and he blinks hard until his vision clears enough to make out the shape of Oleander, standing by his bed and backlit by golden afternoon sun pouring through his window.
She wears an expensive, elegant pantsuit, her nails polished a dark crimson to match the rubies set in her golden rings.
Everywhere he looks, he sees rubies now. It is so horrifyingly, sickeningly obvious where they came from.
“You’re poisoning me.” It comes out slurred as a tear carves its way down the sharp angle of his cheekbone.
“You needed emergency surgery,” Oleander says crisply. “Now is the time to rest and heal, though I suppose you’ll be bedridden for quite a few months yet. Unless of course”—her voice turns factual—“we come to an agreement.”
She will torture him into silence, into compliance, and she isn’t even being coy about it.
He lies motionless, staring up at the ceiling as it turns over in a slow, sickening spiral. Better than looking at his bedside table, at the place where his parents’ photo used to sit.
His “parents.”
“Who am I?” he whispers. “Am I … a Lennox-Hall?”
Agitation twitches in Oleander’s jaw as if she doesn’t have time for this.
“Of course not. All you need to know is that you were a feral little boy and my brother took you in out of the kindness of his heart. Your origin does not matter. Now listen to me carefully. You will stop prying into our family affairs, stop disagreeing, stop fighting against me, or none of this is going away, Evander.” She says his name as if it’s a thorn-choked curse, and then she leans in, her voice narrowing to a hiss.
“If you thought this last week was hard, it is nothing compared to the ways I will split you open next.”
He can’t breathe, his weak body strangled in such rigid terror that he can’t even try to move.
It’s been a week. A week like this. He is a hollowed-out husk of nightmares and fever-licked agony and he cannot catch himself before he slips down a hyperventilating spiral.
No memories exist of being taken to a hospital for surgery, but slow understanding is seeping into his skull.
How Laurie said his grandfather had sliced open his wrist to see if he could “fix it.” How Evander has never remembered surgeons or hospitals or leaving this estate.
Maybe they’ve always done what they wanted with him, right here, in Hazelthorn. Because nobody tells wealthy, vicious people no.
He wonders then if that’s all the garden is doing.
Telling them no.
Everything is steeped in a wrongness so terrible it takes his breath away, but worse is the indescribable, all-consuming panic of being trapped.
It doesn’t matter how many truths he unwraps and lies he burns to the ground and mysteries he solves.
They can do what they want to him and they always have.
“What did you take out of me?” His voice wobbles and he hates how debased he sounds as he looks down at his thickly bandaged chest, his hip bones that jut out like knives, and his skinny legs. “Where’s Laurie? Did you … kill him?”
There’s a flash of something in Oleander’s eyes, and for a second he thinks she’ll reach over and slap him.
“Why this obsession with Laurie?” She bares her teeth in the pretense of a smile.
“You will not be seeing him again, so burn him from your mind. And accept that I am a better option than what your life would be like amidst Bane’s greed and Azalea’s tastes.
From now on, you will not be leaving this room and I will take very good care of Hazelthorn while you are indisposed.
” She leans in and one crimson claw digs into his cheek for just a second before she wrenches away and sweeps from the room.
It’s only when she’s gone that he realizes her fingernails weren’t lacquered with fresh red polish. She has blood under her long nails. As if she hadn’t scrubbed them after being wrist deep in someone’s entrails.
Time is too slippery a thing to hold. He has no idea how long he lies in the suffocating heat of his closed-up bedroom, shifting in and out of consciousness while gray plumes of dust fill his lungs, his ears, his eyes.
His body feels wasted, atrophied, his tongue a shriveled worm in his mouth. They should be pleased with that.
He is no longer trying to scream.
They’ve thrown out the plants on his window seat, cleaned the vines from under his bed, and torn down his evidence wall.
The mess of scrunched paper scraps sticks out from his trash can under his desk, but he doesn’t care.
Naive, wasn’t it? To think he could go up against a family like this.
It’s over and he lost and this will be his life forevermore.
He doesn’t even have the energy to pretend turning eighteen will change anything.
He wonders where his own family is, if he was stolen from them or given up to the Lennox-Halls like an object, if he once had a name that suited him more than Evander. A name for an imaginary friend.
He still has no idea why they’re doing this to him, what they’re taking out of him, and he’s too exhausted to think.
Except that’s a half-truth. He’s thinking of one person, and he hates himself for being delusional enough to believe Laurie is any less cruel than the others, considering he once tried to feed Evander to the garden.
Evander curls into a ball amongst his dank, sweaty sheets, trying to ignore the dull throb under his bandages, and he almost misses the clack of something hitting his window.
It happens again. A definitive clack.
He forces his head up and stares at the window, his breathing a little too fast. A wild sort of desperate hope fills him. Ignoring the pain, the dizziness, he pushes himself into a wobbly sitting position, one hand gripping his headboard to steady himself as he stares at the window.
Laurie’s face is on the other side of the glass.
Anguish surges up Evander’s throat and he’s terrified that this moment is born of fevered hallucination. Any second now, Laurie’s face will melt away and Evander will be left staring at nothing. But it doesn’t happen.
Goddamn Laurence Evan Alexander Lennox-Hall has climbed the ivy trellis beneath his window and now stands on the sill with his brace hooked in the vines, his free hand holding a hammer.
Leaves tumble around him in shades of emerald and olive, and he looks like an absolute mess—white T-shirt rumpled with dirty sweat, muddy jeans and boots, his golden hair mussed.
A livid purple bruise crosses one cheekbone and there is something determined and violent in his expression.
Evander’s never even seen Laurie look like this, rough and unkempt and feral, and he hates how much he likes it.
Laurie is mouthing something, but it’s impossible to make out the words before he gives up with a shrug and simply swings the hammer straight through the window.
Glass sprays in ice-chip shards across the seat, the sound shrill and beautiful all at once.
Laurie shoves the hammer through the ragged hole and wedges the claw into the lock on the inside.
He wriggles it until the old mechanism buckles.
Then it takes only a second to yank the window so hard it hurtles open, a cool breeze sweeping into the stuffy room with sweet relief.
Leaves swirl inside and catch in Evander’s curls like a dozen viridescent kisses.
Laurie clambers through, everything about him rabid and lean and hungry as he looks at Evander. Only Evander.
“Hi, Rapunzel.” He is breathless, his eyes the bright, crystallized blue of the entire summer sky. “They’re going to kill me for this.”