Chapter 14
Will had neither the strength nor the desire to return to the party.
He regretted grabbing Elodie like that, regretted that the first time he had truly touched her had happened in anger.
Even now, he could feel her throat beneath his fingers, the way he had pinned her against the wall.
But why had she done it? None of that made her betrayal any easier to forgive.
Frustrated, Will wandered through the townhouse. In the excitement of their arrival and the drama that followed, he had barely noticed how romantic the house was. Despite the dark fabrics, somber paintings, and heavy rugs, colorfully painted lamps formed welcome islands of light in the gloom.
Will followed them now, away from the voices of the party and deeper into the house. Around the next corner, he found an open glass door leading onto a tiny balcony, barely large enough for two people—the perfect place to stop and smoke a cigarette.
Sure enough, someone had hidden a pack behind the statue of a gnome.
Will had given up smoking after his first semester at the Academy, but he had not felt this transported back to those days in years.
The thought of tobacco on his tongue and warm smoke in his lungs was so tempting, so comforting, that he took out a cigarette and lit it with the lighter lying beside it.
With a sigh, he inhaled the nicotine.
It tasted bitter, like the loneliness overtaking him.
Life had forced Will to fight for himself time and time again, yet there were moments when solitude sharpened into something more painful.
Moments when he did not merely have no one, but felt abandoned.
Like the evening after the scandal, when he had gone to his usual café and found that his friends had deserted him, leaving the table empty.
“Is anyone else joining you?" the server had asked, but he had remained alone.
“Do you have a spare for me?”
Of all people, Mr. Arcos stood in the doorway, a coat draped over his shoulders. A single strand of hair curled across his forehead. Will wanted to smooth it back into his eternally perfect hairstyle.
“Have you come to admire your friends’ artwork?” he asked hollowly, making no move to offer him one of the stolen cigarettes.
Mr. Arcos gave him a crooked smile. “Katelyn does not allow us to smoke inside. I did not expect to find you here, but alcohol does encourage all my vices.”
It was strange to think that young people in Bloodgrove lived, celebrated, and drank just as they did in the Capitol.
That their lives were not all sacrificial rituals and chimeras.
That people here even knew the meaning of the word vice.
Somehow, the thought softened Will, and after a moment’s hesitation, he perched halfway on the stone balustrade and made room for Mr. Arcos.
The ambassador closed the glass doors behind him and reached for the pack of cigarettes. “Our hostess hates the smell,” he explained, which suited Will perfectly. He did not need more spectators.
Instead, he allowed himself to watch Mr. Arcos enjoy something. The rush of that first drag as the nicotine entered his blood, his eyelids closing as he tipped back his head and breathed out. Only pale marks remained on his face now, the cuts almost completely healed.
“The artwork suits you,” Arcos said at last, without opening his eyes.
Will laughed dryly. “An excellent joke. Everyone laughed.”
“You look like a berserker from the old tales.”
Will paused and studied him across the cramped balcony. It sounded almost like a compliment. “What was that thing?”
Arcos met his gaze, and his stern lips almost curved into a crooked smile. “Balto adores taxidermy. He skinned a vampire, stitched the hide back together, and filled it with reasonably fresh blood. The rest was simple enough—dress it and control the doll with a little blood magic…”
Will’s dinner rose in his throat. “That is revolting. I can still taste the pig’s blood.”
“If you were lucky…”
Mr. Arcos laughed at Will’s horrified expression and slipped his coat off. “Here. Put this on before you get ill.”
“But I’ll get it dirty.”
Unmoved, Mr. Arcos held the coat between them. “Then take off your shirt first.”
Had Will not already considered doing exactly that, he probably would have refused.
Everything about the offer suggested another trap, yet he also wondered whether anything could still shock him tonight.
So his fingers found the first button and struggled to work it through the blood-stiffened hole, then moved to the next.
All the while, Mr. Arcos watched with detached attention, following every movement from Will’s collarbone down his breastbone, across the flat plane of his stomach and his navel, until his gaze reached the waistband of his trousers.
Only then did a muscle tighten in Arcos’s jaw.
“Berserker may not have been the right word,” Mr. Arcos continued as Will peeled the shirt from his shoulders. Even beneath it, his skin was still sticky. “A fallen angel, perhaps…”
“In the Capitol, we call fallen angels demons.”
Mr. Arcos’s smile changed, regaining its confidence and its danger. “That describes you perfectly.”
“I do not believe in angels or demons.” Will slipped into the offered coat, savoring the warmth that enveloped him at once—and tried to ignore Arcos’s smell of sandalwood, pepper, and cloves.
“Then you have never looked in a mirror.”
Will dismissed the remark with a roll of his eyes and drew on his cigarette.
For a while, they stood in silence, looking down at the small garden at night while the distant howling of vampires carried through the darkness.
The garden was never particularly charming, enclosed as it was by high walls, but now, in autumn, only a few scattered roses remained in bloom; it felt like a prison yard.
“Elodie said you have served the Red Hand for ten years,” Will said, breaking the silence. When he turned toward the ambassador, Arcos was already watching him.
“Hmm… Ten years? It feels like an eternity.”
The intensity of Arcos’s gaze made Will fidget. “You can leave the city despite the curse.” The word felt too large on his tongue. Some part of him still resisted believing the stories told about this place.
Mr. Arcos smiled as though he had seen straight through him. “You want to know how much of it is true, do you not? Whether you can leave Bloodgrove if all of this becomes too much for you.”
“Everyone keeps talking about tickets and a blood toll. Duchess Ormonde secured my return journey after New Year’s.” Will looked down at himself.
“Did she?” Arcos raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps it is time you begin believing the rumors about Bloodgrove. No one leaves this city without sacrificing a great quantity of blood in a ritual, and most lose their minds before they can pay the price and turn a vampire. The real question, then, is why an interior designer?” He somehow made the profession sound like an insult.
“How do you manage it?”
“I receive my tickets directly from the King because I travel in his name.” Slowly, he exhaled smoke into the night sky, veiling his searching eyes for a moment.
Will wrapped the coat more tightly around himself. If Arcos was telling the truth, he was entirely dependent on Elodie.
“And what if I took a horse and rode out?” He knew the question was pointless.
“You would lose your mind before crossing the first mountain.” When Arcos saw panic beginning to rise in Will, his expression softened into a mild smile. “There is no need to worry. You are one of us now.”
“So I am a prisoner.”
“Do not worry. We have all made a bargain or two that turned against us.” The ambassador crushed his cigarette against the balustrade and flicked the remains into the darkness below.
“And having your wings cut off does not make you a demon.” He turned to leave, his smile lazy and at ease, as though he had gotten exactly what he wanted.
Will caught him by the arm. “I cannot make sense of you.”
Only then did Will realize that the ambassador was drunk—not heavily, but enough to soften the steel in his eyes.
“Nor I of you, Mr. Frank.”
“Then why not ask me?”
“Because I am not ready for the answer.” With that, he pushed open the door and was gone.
Will remained on the balcony for a while longer, looking up at the waxing moon, the dark rooftops, and the mountains on the horizon. There was so much more he wanted to ask Mr. Arcos, so much he ought to correct.
When he returned to the party and told Elodie he wished to leave, she did not object. But her gaze lingered on the coat, and something in it darkened. Something between them broke for good.