Chapter Sixteen
I’ve just finished crying when someone knocks at my door.
I’ve already had dinner alone, brought on a tray by Eloree.
“Leave me be,” I call, but deep in my rib cage, my heart soars, hoping Emmett has come back to tell me he’s sorry.
But it’s not Emmett who bursts through the door.
Faith takes one look at my tear-streaked face and widens her eyes. “Has something happened?”
“Emmett—” My voice cracks and I start crying all over again.
“What about Emmett?” Faith asks.
“I don’t think he wants me anymore.”
“Oh, Ivy, I’m so sorry.” Marion sighs. She’s got a gold diadem atop her loose dark curls, and her gown is the rich blue-purple
of spring violets. Beside her, Faith is a vision in molten silver. Her hair is half pulled back from her face, revealing a
pair of earrings that trail down the column of her pale neck.
Faith puts her hands on her hips. “Want me to kill him for you?”
“No.” I let out a watery laugh.
“Some light maiming?” she offers.
“Only if it’s very light.” I smile weakly.
Faith flops down onto my pillows and looks up at me, mischief playing in her pale blue eyes. “Cast aside by Emmett De Vere? Hmm, that story sounds rather familiar.”
My first instinct is to defend him, but it’s so much more complicated than that. They sit on my bed while I pace back and
forth in front of the fireplace, explaining the situation.
When I am finished, Marion looks at me with pity. I know by now she’s a true romantic. But Faith springs to her feet. “We’re
going to the revel.”
“Ugh, please no,” I protest.
“Emmett will be there,” Faith says emphatically.
“That’s exactly why I don’t want to go.”
Faith shakes her head like I’ve got it all wrong. “I know Emmett rather well. Well enough to know he loves you and well enough
to know how jealous he gets. Sitting up in your tower weeping over him will do you no good. Let’s make him cry over you for
a change.”
“I can’t bear to see Bram,” I protest.
“Bram won’t be there,” Marion pipes up. “He’s in England for the next few days. Rhion sent word this evening.”
“Rhion? After kidnapping you, that’s rather odd.”
Faith shrugs. “He’s an odd man.”
They stare at me expectantly, awaiting an answer.
I can’t help myself.
“Find me a gown.” I gesture to the wardrobe and Faith squeals.
I regret saying yes immediately. She riffles through the racks until she finds the most ornately beaded dress there.
She grins in triumph as she laces me into it.
“I can’t go out in this!” I gasp in horror, looking at myself in the full-length mirror.
The dress is constructed mostly of a pale blush chiffon, transparent and close enough to my body that I look practically naked.
The skirt and bodice of the dress are embroidered with beaded vines of jet-black, crawling over my breasts and hips, the only thing giving me even a semblance of modesty.
“You look almost good,” Faith says.
“Was that a compliment?” I ask in mock horror. The dress is borderline obscene. The mere sight of it might have killed Viscountess
Bolingbroke.
“He’s going to faint when he sees you, how about that?”
She slides open a velvet-lined drawer, selects a matching tiara of black diamonds, and places it on my unbound curls. “There.”
She smiles, then pulls out an aquamarine beauty and puts it on her own head. I raise my eyebrows at her, and she shrugs. “I’m
not entirely altruistic. Let’s go.”
The revel tonight isn’t held in the ballroom, but under a massive tent in the gardens. The court magicians put it up today
while I was napping, and I awoke to the sound of snapping sail flags outside my window.
Inside, the grass has been covered with a mosaic of carpets, and a rainbow chandelier illuminates the hedges and flower patches
in long, crawling shadows.
I find my sister as soon as I walk in. She’s standing near the edges of the party, but people still orbit around her.
She adjusts a tiara made of teal-blue dragonfly wings and blinks twice at my dress. “Are you trying to kill the poor boy?”
“Only lightly maim,” I shout over the music.
For once, I let the faerie music take me away on its current. I’m floating in it, lost in the rhythmic drum, so unlike the stodgy quartets back home. All around me are writhing limbs and bodies, seeking nothing but friction and escape.
I used to judge humans who got swept away in this and danced their feet bloody, but I understand now how good it feels to
remove your brain from your body.
Someone presses a drink in a delicate pink glass to me and I down it without thinking.
I might drink another. Time gets so fuzzy here.
The revel goes blurry, my head spinning, or maybe that’s my body. I’ve been dancing for so long.
There are flashes of clarity. Faith with her arms slung around my neck, grinning. Marion, asking if I’m ready to go yet, and
me laughing in her face.
Someone’s hands are on my hips, I don’t know whose.
I come to, slouched on a silk love seat. It’s set against the edges of the tent, hidden from the chaos by a series of geometric
hedges.
There’s a hand on my thigh. The gauzy layers of my dress are hiked up above my knee, so the palm covers an expanse of bare
skin. I watch in fascination as the long fingers leave dimples on my skin. They press nearly hard enough to bruise, as if
holding themselves back from trailing higher.
My mind is swimming, like I’ve been dunked in a glass of iridescent faerie wine. I am nothing, no one, just a bubble floating
to the top of the glass.
I follow the line up from the fingers, to the wrist, to the tan forearm, flexing with veins and muscles, until I finally reach
his face.
Emmett’s eyes are heavy, his full lips half-open, wine red, with a fleck of gold at the corner. The look on his face is absolutely desolate. An earring in the shape of a crystal flower pokes through the waves of his hair, curling gently around his flushed ears.
He lowers his mouth to my neck and I sigh.
“You’re touching me,” I say in awe.
“I am,” he replies, sounding just as surprised as I am.
“I thought you didn’t want me anymore.”
His lips brush over my sensitive pulse point and I moan shamelessly.
“I want nothing but you.” His voice is low, nearly a growl. “Every moment I am awake, there you are, in my head. Even in sleep,
there is no relief. Visions of you torment me in dreams. It’s nothing but you, you, you.”
The blood in my veins has been replaced with honey. My head swims with it, all sticky sweet and pulsating. I look deep into
Emmett’s eyes and in them I find a desire identical to my own. My own dark mirror. I suppose in a way, that’s what he always
has been to me—my most base desires, all my sins, reflected back to me in the shape of this brutally imperfect, beautiful
boy.
His chest rises and falls like he’s been running; his face is so open, so wrecked. I can’t believe I was ever angry with him.
Why was I angry with him? I don’t even remember.
“Ivy.” He moans my name and his mouth dips lower, kissing my flushed chest over the thin fabric. I want to tell him to tear
it, rip it with his teeth, that I don’t care, but I can’t seem to find my voice.
I’m swept away in a tide of wanting. I am reduced to nothing but Emmett and the warmth of his hands, his mouth.
That mouth. It’s sucking a bruise into the hollow of my throat.
I press both hands on his shoulders, and tip him against the love seat. His head lolls back and I hike up my skirts and climb onto his lap.
“Emmett,” I sigh as I capture his earlobe between my teeth, tugging on the crystal earring there. Was there a reason we shouldn’t
be doing this? The thought floats out of sight like a petal on a breeze and I no longer remember or care.
He captures my chin with his hand and turns my face to him. His lips catch mine with the force of an inferno.
Nothing has ever been sweeter than the taste of his tongue invading my mouth. My teeth clack against his as I try to bring
him even closer. I despise any space where we are not touching.
He winds one hand through the hair at the nape of my neck and presses the other against the small of my back. His wandering
hands have never been less polite.
I can’t break the kiss, not even to breathe. I’m drowning in it, but nothing, not even air, feels more important than him.
Emmett. Emmett. Emmett.
I want to die like this, pitched about like a sailor in a storm, lost in the tide of him. I used to think I’d never wanted
anything as badly as I wanted Emmett De Vere, but now it feels as if I’ve never wanted anything but him.
“What are you doing!” Lydia’s voice pierces the candy-floss-pink fog of my mind.
Still, we keep kissing. His mouth is so soft, so warm. I bite at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, then lick to soothe
the toothy bruise I just left there.
“Emmett,” Lydia says louder, and Emmett breaks our kiss with a gasp. He stumbles over his own feet as he stands up.
A sob starts in the back of my throat. “No, please. I need him.”
He turns to Lydia, his face shattered. “I can’t do this, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
The worst part is feeling the loss of his body heat as he runs away. The second worst part is that I don’t know which of us
he was apologizing to.
I’m properly crying now, hiccupping, barely able to catch my breath. It’s as if I’ve lost a vital part of myself, like I really
might die if he doesn’t come back and keep ravishing me.
Lydia sits down next to me and captures my face in her cool hands. My skin is burning as if with fever. “Ivy, calm down.”
I wheeze in a breath, but the tears just keep coming. “You took him from me.”
“What did you drink?” Lydia asks urgently.
“I—” I hiccup. “I don’t know.”
Lydia leans down and picks up an empty vial. The glass is an ornately engraved, soft fuchsia ombre that ends in a narrow,
rounded tip. “Did you drink this?”
“I don’t think so? Maybe while I was dancing? I wasn’t paying much attention.”
Lydia curses.
Through the pink haze, the logical part of my brain prickles with fear. I look up and see a crowd of faeries peering over
the hedges, laughing. Their open mouths look like jackals, their cackles sharp and animalistic.
“Get me out of here,” I whisper urgently, and Lydia hauls me to my feet.
I’m unable to stop crying all the way back up to my room. I try to run down the hall to Emmett’s door, the need for him still
clawing at my insides.
Lydia snatches my arm and pulls me back.
“No.” I struggle against her grip.
She kicks open the door to my room and tries to pull me inside. I plant my heels into the carpet and pull away from her. I’m
usually the stronger of the two of us, but the potion has left me weak and wrung out. Lydia slings my arm around her shoulders
and drags me over the threshold. I claw at the doorframe. “No, please!” I beg, but Lydia pries my fingers off and slams the
door behind us.
We’re both panting now, and Lydia brushes a sweaty lock of hair from her forehead. “You were given a love potion,” Lydia explains
while helping me out of my gown. There’s a fresh violet bruise blooming up my neck.
“Why would someone do that?” I sob. All the while my mind sings Emmett, Emmett, Emmett. It’s as if there’s a fist squeezing my heart and I’ll die if I don’t get back to him soon.
“Why do faeries do anything?” she says grimly. “For a laugh. I’d bet half the people in that room were dosed the same way
you were.”
“My friends—” I gasp, suddenly remembering how worried I should be for them.
“Are much smarter than you,” Lydia answers. “They went to bed ages ago.”
I sigh in relief.
“I was hoping you and Emmett were talking. I should have come looking for you both sooner, but I assumed Emmett knew better.”
“Why would he take it?” I ask.
“Because someone tricked him . . . or he thought it was something else.”
“You don’t understand. I need him.” A fat tear rolls down my flushed cheek.
Lydia brushes it away. “And you can tell him that in the morning, when the potion wears off.”
“Why does he keep pushing me away?” I sob.
Lydia’s brown eyes soften. We’re only two years apart, but her time here has made her feel so much older than me. “It’s his
story to tell.”
“Then why won’t he tell me?”
She shakes her head sadly. “Because he loves you too much to hurt you. It’s misguided but it’s true.”
I lie back on my pillows and watch the ceiling spin. Nothing feels real. “What about you? Don’t you care about hurting me?”
I think of the unicorn, the way Lydia tried to win so viciously.
“You’re my baby sister.” She helps me into a nightdress and leaves me with the curtains drawn and a carafe of water by my
bedside.
It’s only as I snuff out the lantern that I realize she didn’t really answer my question.