1 #2
“I had no other choice.” A curt breath jolts her shoulders. “Oliver is the sort of man to put family and reputation first. He’s loyal to the gods, the covens, the Videralli, the Cravens—and if we married, he would be loyal to the reputation of the Vasiles.”
I turn my cheek to her and roll onto my aching back. I stare up at the ceiling that looks as though popcorn was tacked to it, then painted over.
I make a face. Odd design choice.
“I loved him,” she says, soft, and I wish she wouldn’t speak at all. “Even when he wanted to explore others. I learned that if I fought with him, I would have his attention. He couldn’t stand when I refused to acknowledge him. But when we were good, he wandered. Every time.”
Still, I stare at the popcorn ceiling, speckled with chipped, peeling paint.
“Year after year, he changed more and more,” she says, then pauses to sigh, and I don’t know why she’s still talking to me.
“I fought to just hold onto the part of him I once knew. Then this past year, I realised, I never knew him. I was only just starting to see him for who he really is. He’s just like Dray, isn’t he? He only smiles more.”
The huff deflates me, annoyed.
I shift to sit upright and slump my tired weight against the headboard.
“And what does any of that have to do with me?”
Serena turns a molten silver glare my way. “Oliver would take anything from me, including my child. I can’t let that happen, Olivia. You have to see that. If I told you the truth before we left, and you decided not to come with me, I couldn’t be certain that you would keep my secret.”
A strand of tawny hair falls over my face. I tuck it behind my ear, a little too harshly.
I get it. I get her reasoning.
It makes sense from her perspective.
An out of wedlock child is no safe thing in our world. I know that, but what I don’t know is why she thought she had the right to drag me into it with the promise of freedom, when now, I’ll be something of a nanny.
I never even wanted my own children. It was merely an obligation to be fulfilled.
Now, the hopes and thrills of a life away from the Videralli are spoiled.
And Serena is overlooking something.
She did to me what everyone else does.
She made my decisions for me.
Serena’s smile is tight, a grimace that she lifts to me, the corners of her mouth pinned to her cheeks. “If anyone in our society understands what it is to have everything taken from you, to have no autonomy, it is you.”
I shake my head with the disbelief of it all.
The audacity of it.
Serena roped me into helping her with her unsanctioned offspring.
Not conceived on the night of the wedding ritual, with the blessings of the gods, with magic at its strongest, and not within the magical sanctity of the marriage.
Children, like the one inside of her, are thought to be weaker, unhealthier, or even a spit in the face of the gods.
Those children are tucked away.
Somewhere like the Home for the Misplaced, or to be raised in a gentry home, I don’t know exactly. But yes, Serena is right—Oliver would remove any bastard child of theirs, no hesitation.
And it wouldn’t be my place to say anything about it.
“I did not mean for this to happen,” she says, soft, and it sours my insides.
The tone of my voice is as cold as my thoughts, “You weren’t taking the brew?”
Her voice comes thick with unshed tears, “I reached my lassitude limit. I didn’t connect the dots.”
I turn a blank stare on her.
It takes a moment for it to click in my mind—
The question spills out of me with a breathy tone of disbelief, “You sicked it up?”
Her face starts to wobble. “I didn’t realise… I took the brew that morning, and later that day, I was sick in the infirmary.”
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed to face her. “But the baby is Oliver’s?”
She touches her fingertips to the wet streak on her face. The dim light dances on the gloss of her manicured nails. “Oliver and I aren’t as intimate as we might seem. It could be Avi’s.”
The question arches my brow.
She clarifies, her tone subdued with the same heating her sunkissed cheeks, “Avi Kohen.”
“Zara’s brother?”
She nods.
And my eyes are wide.
Slack, I stare at her. Everything stills in the motel room, musty air stagnating around me.
“The…” My words, my accusation, fails.
I try again, clearing my throat first.
“The made one?”
Serena turns her cheek to me, flaming hot. Her lashes shut on the defeat sagging her shoulders.
“The made one?” I echo, like if I say it enough, it will make it better, or she can tell me I’m wrong, and there’s another Avi Kohen at Bluestone.
Serena sighs something curt, then runs her hands down her face. Streaks of pressure turn her complexion white, but only for a heartbeat.
“It’s either his,” she says, and her voice is almost swallowed up by the fluttering of the curtains as a breeze passes by and rustles her dark, glossy hair. “Or it’s Theodore’s.”
“Teddy?” I almost shout. “You and Teddy—”
“Once.” She holds up her hand. “Just that once. I… It was the night at that halfbreed party by the ruins.”
Dread floods my stomach as my mind is invaded with the memories of Dray finding me in the maze, looking after me in the cigar room.
I shake my head, as though I can shake the memories right out of my skull.
“Oliver was with you,” I say, and it sounds very much like an accusation. “That night, at the party, he was there.”
“And then he wasn’t.” Her smile is tight and watery. “He made some excuse, like he always does, and left me at the party alone. So while Oliver went off to find someone new and interesting to spend the night with, I found Teddy.”
Oliver didn’t leave her to fuck a random in some broom closet.
He left her to find me and Dray.
When I woke up the next morning, my brother was asleep on the armchair next to the couch.
He found us in the cigar room, and he stayed.
I don’t know why.
But I don’t bother telling her any of that.
I’m still too hung up on the Teddy part of it all.
“He and Oliver hate each other.” The look I give her is unkind. “Was that intentional?”
Her moon eyes glimmer.
She wipes delicately at her tears again, but they just keep on coming. “Of course it was. Oliver wouldn’t look at me unless there was a fight in it. Because—” she sighs, her face twisting with a mixture of pain and disgust “—his heart was in someone else’s hands.”
I stare at her, outraged. “If my brother loved someone else, he would have her for a bride.”
The shake of her head is slight. It loosens strands of inky hair from over her shoulder, letting some slip over the warmth of her cheek.
“Not her,” she says. “He can’t have her. So he played the part with me. It took me too long to realise that it was all masks.”
I look at Serena and her vulnerability—and I ache to strike her across the face.
I see tears, and I don’t feel any sadness for her.
I see pleading in her eyes, and I’m unmoved.
Not only did she mess up her brew, she chose not to have the situation dealt with, which would just be another brew, and the worst part is that she lured me into a runaway plot, which really, is another life of confinement.
She baby trapped me.
I fold over, burying my face in my hands.
But my mind starts churning through the months at Bluestone.
My voice is muffled, “So you slept with Teddy in October…”
My brain struggles to work through the maths.
That would mean she is five months pregnant, and she would be showing a lot more than the bloated appearance of her belly that she has been illusioning through the days at Bluestone.
A belly that—unillusioned—surprised me the first time I saw it.
But it is hard to calculate.
Witch pregnancies are not as straight forward as krum ones. The lifeforce growing within us draws too much from our powers, weakens us, as the babe and its power grows.
A witch pregnancy is often seven months long. But there have been weaker babies born after just six.