Chapter Fourteen #4
Arden’s mouth felt dry, but he forced himself to speak. “But if you get the two million from Oriana’s dowry . . .”
Mavis smiled then, but it was a shadow of a thing. “Then we’ll truly be free.”
Arden inched toward her, drawn by some unseen tether he had no hope of fighting.
He did manage to fight the urge to reach for her, though, aware of the crowd around them—with the final race yet to start, Arden wasn’t keen on giving them a different form of entertainment.
“You should have told me the truth,” he told her quietly.
“Five years ago, you should have told me.”
Now, he didn’t have two million solas to his name, but five years ago he did. And if she had told him the truth, if she had asked him for help . . .
Mavis’s smile turned sad. “What would you have done?” She asked the question without judgment, only amusement. Before he could answer, she continued. “You would have had me arrested and not spared me another thought.”
Arden felt like he’d been slapped. “Of course I wouldn’t have. If you were in trouble, I would have tried to help you. I would have . . .” He trailed off, the silence deafening.
“It’s all right, Arden,” Mavis told him as she pushed to stand, her soft voice all but lost to the summer breeze. “I’ve never asked for anyone to save me, but I won’t apologize for how I chose to save myself.”
Mavis felt the cold fingers of the past grasping at her as she walked away from Arden, leaving him sitting alone on the sand bluff as she went to join the crowd of spectators crowded along the shoreline.
She’d made an excuse about wanting to create a scene to embarrass Thaddeus, but the truth of it was that the longer she sat there, combing through the hard years that chiseled her into the woman she was today, the more she felt like the raw wound of a girl she’d been once, one who didn’t know how to do anything other than hurt.
She was not that girl anymore, she hadn’t been for more than half her life now, but when Arden looked at her like that .
. . like he could see through space and time, through every layer of ice and steel she’d built around herself to the heart of who she’d been, she felt like she hadn’t changed at all.
But whoever the girl he saw was, Mavis knew she was every bit as much of an illusion as Delphinia Lindcourt or Arabella Strickland or any of the others that came between them.
Was there any part of her that wasn’t an illusion? Mavis didn’t know. She had spent so much of her life pretending to be someone else that if Arden pulled the wrong thread, she would unravel, a tightly wound string of aliases, affectations, and lies, until there was nothing left at all.
It was easier, for once, to surround herself with the Lusters, to make small talk about the races or how unbearably hot it was.
“Thaddeus and Oriana are the favorites to win,” Mrs. Hoxha told her, offering Mavis a glass of champagne poured from the half dozen bottles her family brought in a bucket of ice that was now half melted.
“Well, I could have told you that even before they won the first race,” Mavis said with her Delphinia Lindcourt laugh—a light trill that sounded more birdlike than human. “Thaddeus was very confident—he said there was little in the way of true competition this year.”
Mrs. Hoxha huffed at that—her sons had come in a close second in the Luster race and were still in the final, and with any luck, word of Thaddeus’s arrogance would spread quickly. No one liked a braggart, after all, even less so if they did end up a winner too.
Mavis tried not to look back at the bluff where she knew Arden was still lingering, but she felt his presence all the same.
When the starting pistol finally rang out, Mavis felt a swell of relief. Soon, this would be over, and she could put the day behind her. She just had to do a little more work needling Thaddeus.
She sipped her champagne and considered that as the crowd around her erupted in anticipatory murmurs. Thaddeus would win, and when he did, she would fuss and preen over him like a mother would a toddler. Oh, he would be absolutely mortified.
The thought of that cheered Mavis up just as the first boats sped into view—Thaddeus and Oriana a hair ahead in their bright-blue boat, with the Hoxhas’ just behind and . . .
Mavis blinked, certain her eyes were misleading her, but when she heard a murmur go through the crowd of Lusters around her, she knew she wasn’t seeing things.
The boat that won the Lack race was there too, its engine almost louder than the cheer of the Lack crowd farther down the shore.
And as Mavis watched, her glass of champagne forgotten halfway to her lips, the Lack boat pulled ahead of the Hoxha and Mayles boats, breaking through the finish line ribbon by what looked to be no more than an inch.
The cheers of the Lack spectators were so loud it took Mavis a moment to realize just how quiet the Lusters had become, a puzzled murmur making its way through the crowd.
The Lack boat was taking its victory lap now, zipping back and forth along the shore to celebrate their win while Thaddeus, Oriana, and the Hoxhas pulled into the dock to disembark.
“Surely there is some mistake,” Mrs. Hoxha said to Mavis, her expression the very definition of befuddled.
Yes, Mavis knew she was supposed to say. How odd. Unfortunate, really. A travesty.
For once, though, she couldn’t bring herself to recite her lines, to play her part. Instead, she looked down the shore, to where the Lack spectators were cheering, many of them jumping up and down, exchanging embraces. Half a dozen bottles of champagne popped seemingly in unison.
Perhaps there was something of the real Mavis left in her after all, because in that moment she would have given every last bit of Luster finery she owned to be able to celebrate with them instead of pretending she was ever rooting for any other outcome.
No doubt the champagne she was sipping cost ten times as much as whatever was being poured by the Lacks, but Mavis was certain whatever vintage they had would taste finer.
It should have been impossible—Leif said as much, and he was never wrong when it came to odds—but with one boat race, the impossible was suddenly within reach.
Mavis couldn’t help but wonder what would follow.