Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lucie spun to face the closed door. No Balthazar. Not even so much as a meow. Apparently the words Whatever you do, do not let the door swing shut meant little to a cat. In the thin strip of light beneath the door, she caught the shadow of him moving away.
“No,” she whispered. Then she lunged past Kazrian, seized the door handle, and pulled. The door did not move. “No!” She slammed her free fist against the wood. “No, no, no, open, you—”
Kazrian was beside her now, his hands on the frame, and she heard him exhale sharply through his nose.
“This,” he said, his voice low and tight and profoundly unamused, “is absolutely, utterly—” He reached in front of her to try the handle.
“Never in my life have I encountered such a darned stubborn, ridiculous, spectacularly unreasonable—”
He broke off and pressed both palms flat against the door.
Lucie turned away. She could not watch him work at it again, could not stand still.
She placed the folded coat and the molds on top of the dressing stool and paced across the small space toward the narrow high window where a thin, watery wash of light shone through from the street lamp on the lane below.
This is fine, she told herself. This is fine.
Rain streaked the glass in silver lines. Tree branches swayed and tossed. And there on the stone ledge outside, its dark purple-blue feathers beaded with water, sat a gossip bird.
Lucie and the bird regarded one another for a single, frozen moment.
Then it opened its beak, let out a piercing screech—“Scandalous!”—and launched itself from the ledge into the dark.
And in the space of that single word, Lucie saw the whole of it laid out before her, complete: She was here. Late at night. Behind a closed door, alone in a room with a man.
Never mind that she was human and he was fae.
Never mind that they had not done anything, nor did they intend to.
A woman shut alone in a room with a man at this hour was scandal enough on its own, ruinous enough, and the gossip bird knew it.
It would carry that morsel out into the wet dark and lay it down on a dozen window ledges before the sun was up.
Everyone will know.
The thought arrived not as words but as a sickening physical sensation.
The launch. Lady Rivenna could not have her confectioner at the center of a scandal.
She would have to let Lucie go—perhaps before the launch itself, so that The Honeycomb’s name was not tainted by association.
And it would not stop there. It would reach her mother’s place of work.
Her father’s. It would find Charlotte and Theo and lay itself down at their door too.
All of them. Tainted. Ruined. By her.
This was the exact thing she had been so careful about her whole life.
The thing she had given up everything to avoid three years ago, when she had looked at the boy she loved and lied to him because she knew, she knew, that a girl like her could not reach above her station without the reaching destroying everything around her.
She had been so careful.
And here it was anyway.
She reached out with one hand because the room had begun, strangely, to tilt.
She tried to breathe and the breath would not go down.
It stopped somewhere near the top of her chest, the way it had been stopping for days, only worse now, far worse.
It caught against something and would not pass it, and the harder she reached for it the higher it climbed, until she was pulling and pulling at air that would not fill her.
And her heart was doing something wrong, beating too fast and too high and too hard, a frantic stuttering thing, and she could feel it in her neck, in her ears, and her hands had begun to tingle, a strange, prickling numbness in her fingers, her lips—
“Kazrian, I can’t—” The words shredded on the way out. She tried again, a half sob, half gasp. “I can’t—I can’t breathe—”
She heard his footsteps cross the room. She heard him say her name. Her hands were at her neck, reaching for the chain, the lumyrite ring—but there was nothing there.
“Lucie.”
He said her name a little louder now, and then his hands were pressing something into hers, but it was dark, and she was dizzy, and she could not breathe, and—
It was a ring. Not hers. Heavier, broader, the metal warm from his hand.
“It is different, I know.” Kazrian’s voice reached her through the sound of her ragged, shallow gulps of air. “There is no stone set into it. But it has a flat face raised into a shape. Can you count the edges?”
Shaking hands and tingling fingers, and her chest had gone as tight as a fist. But her thumb pressed hard against the ring’s edge and it was … square. Four edges. One … two … three … four …
“Good,” he murmured. “Listen …” He was doing something else, something at the front of his waistcoat.
“Can you hear this?” He reached for her other hand, gently uncurled her fingers, and set something into her palm.
Round, heavy, the metal casing cool against her skin, a fine chain pooling after it. “Can you hear the ticking?”
It was his pocket watch. Focus on the ticking, Lucie. Focus on the ticking.
Tick … tick … tick … tick …
The unbearably tight band around her chest eased a fraction.
“Can you hear the rain?”
Her attention moved toward the window, the ceiling, the constant shushing patter.
The tightness began to loosen in small, grudging increments, as though her lungs had to be convinced one breath at a time that they were still capable of the task. Tears began to fall, hot as they spilled down her cheeks.
“Can you try to breathe with me?”
In the dim light from the window, she could make out the shape of him.
The rise of his shoulders as he drew breath, the stillness as he held it, the slow fall as he let it go.
She could not match him. She was nowhere close, her own breathing still hitching and shuddering and catching on sobs that came from somewhere she could not reach to stop.
But he kept going. Slowly in, then holding, then slowly out.
Her thumb pressed against the square edges of the signet ring.
Her other hand closed around the steady weight of the pocket watch.
And she watched his shoulders rise and fall, rise and fall, and tried, and failed, and tried again, and slowly—so slowly—her breaths began to lengthen.
Still uneven. Still hitching. Tears still tracking warm and silent down her cheeks.
But air, real air, finally reaching the bottom of her lungs.
She blinked through the blur and found the only stretch of wall not lined with shelving.
She crossed to it on unsteady legs and lowered herself to the floor, her back sliding against the wall until she was sitting with her knees drawn up and her head tilted back.
Everything in her had gone quiet and spent, wrung out, as though the panic had taken every last reserve of energy with it when it left.
She heard footsteps and opened her eyes to see the shadowy shape of Kazrian sitting on the floor across from her, a careful distance between the two of them.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think I have … ruined everything.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Do you mean for the launch?”
She shook her head slowly. “There was a gossip bird at the window. When the door locked us in. It saw us alone in here together. It will …” She lifted one hand and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “You know what will happen now.”
He heaved a breath. “All right. Yes. I can see how that would be concerning. Well.” He appeared to think about this for another few moments.
“The Whispermists and Thornharts dined with us this evening. They will account for my presence at Rowanwood House for the duration of the night. Both families carry considerable influence, and if any rumor surfaces, their word will be more than sufficient to put an end to it before it takes root.”
Lucie blinked and wiped her cheeks and thought about this for a moment. “They did not see you leave with the half-drowned cat that came racing through your house?”
A quiet breath of laughter, barely more than an exhale. “They did not. They left just before that.”
The rain filled the silence between them for a while, and Lucie sat and wondered whether it could truly be as simple as that.
Gossip birds were not known for their dedication to accuracy.
It was entirely possible that by morning, the bird’s version of events would involve her and some other young man entirely.
Still, Kazrian’s quiet certainty was a steadier thing to hold than her own spiraling dread, and she chose it.
She would put the gossip bird out of her mind.
There were other things to think about. The bees.
She still had to make the bees. And the honeycomb beehive needed assembling, and the marzipan flowers and leaves had to be attached one by one to the framework, and there were dozens of them, and—
She felt her pulse climbing again, that telltale flutter at the base of her throat.
All right. Do not think of the launch either. Think of nothing. Think of—
“Lucie,” Kazrian said eventually. Gently, carefully. “You do not have to do any of this if you do not actually want to. The over-the-top launch, the extravagant showpiece. If it is only about feeling indebted to my grandmother and not wanting to let her down, if you do not actually enjoy—”
“No, I do!” She had said it a little loud perhaps, leaning forward abruptly, hands tightening on the ring and the pocket watch. “I do. I love it. It is just that … I do not want to put a single foot wrong. I need everything to be perfect.”
“Why?”
“Because … everything will fall apart if it is not.”
Another pause, and she wondered if she had come across a little too dramatic.
“I do not think everything will fall apart,” Kazrian said eventually.