Chapter 18 Wronging My Rights
Wronging My Rights
Desdemona
F
leur glances up when I enter her room, her eyes wide and mouth agape.
“Who are you?” she asks, leaning back in her seat.
Tired and beaten, I sit on the bed. “Your new roommate.”
“I have a roommate.”
“Who?” I wonder aloud. Maybe the headmistress is testing me. She likes doing that.
“Eleanora!” Fleur shouts, jumping to her feet. “You can’t take her room.”
My mouth opens, then closes. She doesn’t know Eleanora isn’t coming back.
I try to say, “I’ll just be here until—”
Fleur cuts me off. “There’s no room for you here.”
Yeah, I’m starting to see that.
I shake my head, lost for words. “I don’t have any belongings,” I whisper. “I just need a bed. I won’t—” My voice shakes, but I’m not sure it’s guilt. “I won’t touch her things.”
Fleur walks past me, shoving into my shoulder. “Get your eye fixed,” she hisses. “It’s disgusting.” The door slams shut behind her.
It boils my blood—but I have no right. I killed Eleanora, her roommate, her friend. But she doesn’t know that.
Before I leave, I open the drawer next to Fleur’s bed and grab the first sharp object I find—a small dagger, mostly decorative, with green jewels covering the hilt.
Fleur’s name is engraved in cursive along the blade.
If anyone saw it, they’d easily track it back to her, which could be either the best thing or the worst. But no matter what, I’ll need it more than she does.
I tuck it up my sleeve and step out of the room—at the same time as one of my new suitemates. We almost run into each other.
“My apologies,” she says, looking up. Her hair is dark, and her eyes are as bright as the headmistress’s blue. A Lyrian. “Are you our new roommate?”
She studies my eyes as intently as I study hers. She’s thinking about my magic. I’m forced to trust in the headmistress’s glamour to hide the truth of it.
“Yeah,” I answer.
She leans in for a hug, and I resist the urge to step back. Her lips brush close to my cheek, almost a kiss, and I try to mimic her motion.
“I’m Artica. I stay across the way.” She points behind her.
“Desdemona,” I say.
“I’ll see you around. Probably in here. We won’t likely have any classes together.” She heads for the exit, and I follow, making my way toward the seamstress’s room Aralia showed me last year.
Where there was once a full rack of uniforms, only a few hang on the rod.
The seamstress approaches, spectacles perched on her purple eyes—a Drae. All the textiles in the world of the elite come from Draevia, so that checks out.
“How may I assist you?” the woman asks.
“I need a uniform or two.” It’s all she makes here.
With a quick glance over me, she says, “I’m afraid I don’t have your size in stock.”
I glance at the almost empty rack. “You don’t have much of anything.”
Her lips press thin. “No.”
I wrap my arms around my torso. I didn’t belong here before, but now it feels like I belong even less. Like The Void has fundamentally warped something essential inside me.
“Will that… change?” I ask.
I thought Draevia—and all the worlds—made deliveries to the elite daily.
“When it changes,” she says quietly. “Perhaps I can hem one of these.” Her hand settles on a uniform, fingers tightening slightly in the fabric. “It will have to do.”
“Thank you,” I say.
But the woman has already turned away.
?
My feet carry me to the combat room. I’d like to blame muscle memory. Inside, Leiholan is slumped against the wall, his prosthetic leg resting beside him—a reminder of what he did for me. He looks so far from lethal this way, and so close to the man I knew.
His eyes squint open, and he stares at me, taking a swig from his vesi. “Is it morning already?”
I step closer, desperate to be seen—even as I notice the bleary look in his eyes. It renders anything I say useless, which is freeing in its own way.
“Do you recognize me?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
Leiholan frowns as he assesses me. “Third period?” he mutters. “Girl in the back?”
I sit beside him, staring at his bored expression. “No, I’m not—” I stop talking. It doesn’t matter what I say.
With a sigh, I reach for my glasses and rip them off my face.
I just want someone to see me and not be scared.
Leiholan tilts his head as he stares at me.
“Scared?” I whisper.
He seems entirely uninterested as he takes another swig of vesi. “If you’re here to kill me”—he points his bottle at the stump of his leg—“I’m not gonna be much of a fight.”
“I’m not here to fight you, Leiholan.”
“And how do you know my name, little Arcane?”
“It’s Phoenician,” I correct him, even though I don’t care. “And I’ll need some alcohol to answer that one.”
With delayed movements, he hands me the bottle. Me. Nothing but an Arcane to him, and he still shares. The opposite of Lucian killing and tying me up. Maybe there are people who can understand. Or he’s just too drunk to care, and that’s all our relationship ever was.
“Do you make a habit of supplying your students with intoxicants?” I ask before taking a sip.
“Only the ones who need it.” His laugh rattles into a cough.
“My name is Desdemona Althenia.” A little shiver racks my body, maybe from the aftertaste of the vesi—or perhaps from my name. “That’s how I know your name.”
He pulls the bottle from my hand, drinking without taking his eyes off me. “Which Althenia was your mother?” he asks.
“Was?” I ask.
Which? I think.
“All the Althenia girls are dead, sweetheart,” Leiholan says plainly, though I can see a hint of torture in his eyes. I wonder how his wife, Anise, was killed. If he had to watch.
“Isa,” I answer, slightly short of breath.
“Hm.” Leiholan takes a long swig.
My mom had sisters, and I had a family I never knew about. Rage fills me, like kerosene in my bloodstream. One match would set me off, but I swallow the flammable liquid like I swallow the vesi.
Bitterly.
“So you’re not scared or disgusted by me?” My eyes drop to the floor.
“Your eyes are unpleasant,” Leiholan remarks with a soft chuckle. It almost feels like he could remember me but is just playing along with the ruse.
I smile a little. Of course, I could count on Leiholan to be the same sarcastic and rude person he always was.
Even without his leg. He lost a piece of himself, too, but he’s still here.
He’s still standing. I should say that out loud, see what he thinks.
Tell him I was there when he lost his leg. That he lost it saving me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Something I should have said when Leiholan would’ve felt the impact. “About Anise. I never said it before, so I wanted to say it now.”
Or maybe I just want to give him a hint—to try to spark something. A reminder of a memory. To tell him there is one somewhere. However deep. However lost.
Leiholan looks at me quizzically, which is the answer I expected. I reach for the wolf and spin it. The last thing I have left. Then I drink more alcohol. The last antidote.
“I knew you,” he mutters.
I chug, a bit too much. “You were always bright.”
Leiholan tugs the bottle back. “Either we didn’t like each other, or you’re just a brat.”
“A bit of both.”
?
Returning to class is a strange kind of haunting—like slipping into borrowed skin.
These corridors have felt my footsteps, this chair has cradled my weight, these faces have flickered before my eyes.
But the hallway forgets the echo of my passing, the seat bears no memory of my shape, and the faces glance past mine without even a flicker of recognition.
It’s worse than before—the way the kids don’t notice me. No one spares me a glance, let alone a second one.
I’m back in Psychology class. I feel like a ghost—hovering over the room, observing rather than sitting in my life, participating.
Fleur sits in front of me, but it’s Lucian, across the room, I wonder about. He doesn’t look at me—not once. I’m beginning to think it was all a dream or some cruel joke: the prince being interested in me.
If love is circumstantial for other people, then it’s circumstantial for me, too.
The person sitting across from me, the one who didn’t just try to kill me but actually did, is not the same boy who danced me around the room, brought me dresses and wine, and carried me just to step on my toes.
He’s not the same boy whose eyes lit up with laughter and whose lopsided grin was more endearing than it ought to be.
That’s not him—those were the circumstances.
He’s a prince who would kill me if he could only get around my pesky immortality.
Immortality.
Everyone I killed, for nothing.
But there’s a time and place for monstrosity. There has to be. If love is circumstantial, everything is. Including evil.
He rises from his seat and settles beside me. I let go of the stupid wolf, ready to throw it on the ground and let it go entirely.
It isn’t hard to hate him. I have a thousand reasons to. He’s made sure of that.
“Get out—”
Lucian shushes me. “I’m trying to listen to Mr. Bayley.”
Hogan drones on at the front of the classroom.
“Listen in your own seat,” I say.
Lucian turns to me slowly, chin raised as if expecting applause. One eyebrow arches high, and the corner of his mouth twitches in a smirk he doesn’t fully commit to. But his words, “Then how would I watch you?” ring through me in two ways.
The first: he’d said something like that before. He used to enjoy watching me. If I intrigued him once, why not now?
Circumstances.
The second: I scare him.
“Watch all you want,” I say, my eyes on the board. “If I want to hurt you, you’ll never see it coming.”
His eyes sweep up my body. “Go ahead and try—”
I grab his wrist at my side, twisting it as hard as I can. He hisses, pulling his arm away.
Hogan turns to us. “Is everything all right back there?”
“Perfect.” Lucian flashes a smile to the teacher.
I look over my shoulder. “Didn’t see it coming, did you?”
“It was rather petulant.” He clutches his limp wrist. “Perhaps I overestimated you.”