Chapter 1
The plane engines roaring from the runways reach us all the way over here, under the flat tin roof of the private terminal.
I pop and pop and pop my eardrums against the echoing rumble, but to no avail.
It isn’t helped by the three Rolls Royces lined up and waiting for us, engines purring.
The stink of petrol is starting to burn my nose.
But the families loiter.
Gathered around the glossy grills of the cars, everyone performs drawn-out farewells that grate on my patience. Apparently, all the time we shared at the Palace of Versailles, and the flight back to London wasn’t enough for everyone.
I stand like a sagged puppet, the toll of the past week weighing on me. Behind wretched Grandmother Ethel and her wicked cane, I stick to the border of the group, as though the distance will keep the others away from me—away from lingering goodbyes.
Around the narrowness of Grandmother’s bony arm, I watch Dray and Oliver over by the second Royce, standing close together with their phones out, screens lit.
Aligning their schedules, I guess.
It’s something they could have done on the jet, but instead they waste my time after landing.
Their mouths move with murmurs that don’t reach me over that constant echoing noise out on the tarmac, between the blare of machinery and the engines roaring on the runways.
I tug at the sleeve of my Ralph Lauren sweater and wish I was back home already, not just to escape the noise that makes me feel like I’m standing alone in a tunnel, but to get it over with.
The car ride home.
It will be no ordinary car ride.
One whole hour in the Royce with my family, it’s a chance to do something about my fate.
I’m going to beg, plead—and if I have to, I’m going to tell Father everything.
It might be the only chance I get.
Just days before I’m back at Bluestone, and who knows how many of those days Father will be around?
I’m not privy to his schedule, like Oliver is, like Mother is.
I wake up one day, and he’s gone away on business. I come to dinner in the dining room, and he isn’t there, no word given on his whereabouts, not to me.
But in the car, I’ll get a whole hour with him, uninterrupted.
It’s not like he can throw himself out the door to escape me.
The only problems are working up the nerve and figuring out how to talk to my father.
‘Dray hurts me.’
I can’t lead with that.
‘Dray has bullied me for the past ten years.’
No, that won’t fly either.
It’s what I want to say, and it’s the truth.
But truth isn’t always the right thing to say to them.
If Grandmother Ethel cared anything at all about me, I might pull her aside and whisper pleas into her ear, and beg for her help, her advice on how to get what I want, what I need: Father’s ear, and an escape from Dray.
She’s a cane in her own right, and if anyone could help me, it would be her.
But Grandmother Ethel is just another sharp face in a line of my enemies.
The ones who claim to love me, like Mother, like Amelia, won’t be any help at all.
Now, after the ball, after learning the truth from the smoky lips of Landon Barlow, I know they are all in on it, and they have been for a while.
Mother, Father, Amelia, Harold, even Oliver.
Grandmother Ethel must know, otherwise she might have whacked Dray for stopping her from caning me, or she would’ve lashed out with her sharp tongue at least.
But she sank back into her seat and took her cane with her.
She accepted his authority—
Something he boldly performed right in front of my eyes.
For someone who doesn’t want me to figure it out, he makes too many mistakes.
Are they mistakes?
My mind reels in sync with my lurching gut.
I blink in the pollution of the roofed terminal, tasting the fumes on my tongue, but I’m suddenly swept back to the dance at the ball. I’m in Dray’s arms, the waltz moving us, and his words echo—
‘I have shifted my attention. Are you enjoying it?’
‘Enjoying what?’
‘All this attention you have tonight…’ and he gestured to the watchers, the audience, the aristos and the gentry, and that fooled me.
He was toying with me.
He was playing in the mud of my ignorance, swimming in the pool of my tears, and those smiles of his in that dance, the daring touch of his fingertips down my nape, it was all a game to him.
More than I gave credit to at the time.
Dray isn’t just one step ahead of me, he is a mile in the distance, laughing as I try to catch up.
And he stands with my whole family.
Even Oliver…
Why that betrayal stings as much as it does, I don’t know. Yet, my insides twist as I look at him, my bloodshot eyes burning behind the shield of my sunglasses.
My brother, my twin, once a friend to me. But he and Dray are more like siblings than Oliver and I have ever been.
Looking at them, the pair of them are night and day.
Not a single similarity in their appearances.
Oliver’s coffee-hued hair slips out of place, over his furrowed brow. The richness of his Italian complexion is deepened from all his recent sunbaking.
Dray stands as his opposite, with his sawdust hair combed into place. Only a strand escapes and brushes over the darkness of his shaped eyebrow.
I consider his warm, smooth complexion, a perfect beige. Utterly flawless. Not a blemish or a mark in sight. Not even on those full, pink lips murmuring inaudible words.
Even their styles are opposite.
Oliver wears the wrappings of Prada. From plain slacks and glossy shoes to a tailored shirt and a woollen coat.
Dray has slipped into something more relaxed for the return home, something casual he pulled on this morning in his private room at the Palace of Versailles, an ensemble he picked out knowing he is victorious—that he can do whatever he wants, and face no consequences, ever.
In that triumph, he chose black jeans and a dark Ralph Lauren sweater, then he had the fucking audacity to roll up his sleeves, like it’s just another day, just another victory.
I look at their differences and I see their twinship in their rotten souls, the evil that lives in them.
I always had a sort of hope for Oliver, that he was secretly good, loved me more than he let on, and was just playing the game.
That hope is dead.
It was snuffed out when Oliver drugged me—and now, watching them, my throat thickens.
Rage should be barrelling through me.
It doesn’t.
I just want to cry.
The farewell chatter around me buzzes too much, goes on too long—and watching Dray with my brother, the brother who forced a brew down my fucking throat so I’d pass out and he didn’t have to deal with me, it… hurts.
It just hurts.
An ache, a rip, a wound spreading in my chest.
Behind the shield of my shades, a prickle stings at my eyes, the faint itch of a burn, of tears coming.
But I still can’t tear my loathing gaze from them.
Oliver’s bright green eyes are a lie, they are warmth, friendliness, a fucking deception.
Dray’s eyes don’t lie. There is no lushness of nature, no false allure, no deceit in who and what he is.
His eyes are the truth.
A blue so striking, so pale that it borders on inhuman. Cruelty is in those crystalline eyes, blue-tinted glass—a sword that suddenly lifts from the glare of his smartphone and cuts me.
I blink under the assault of his stare.
Like he can sense me…
Now I know he can.
All those times I’ve tried to sneak away from him, creep by him in a crowd, join the veil queue in London heads behind him, he knew I was there.
Dray has an essence of his mother’s print layered somewhere in his makut, and for some reason, whatever reason, it senses me.
I’m only left with the question, does it only sense me, or can it sense everyone? Does it have to be a person, or can it detect more, like lies and nerves and deceit?
Still, through my spiralling thoughts, those crystalline eyes pierce into me, through the darkness of my shades, and I feel my insides hardening.
All that pain, those tears and sobs and aches—they fade under his stare and are replaced with something harder.
Loathing.
I hate, hate, hate him.
Dray considers me, entirely unflinching.
Beside him, Oliver is still murmuring on.
But Dray’s stare stubbornly invades mine.
Invasion.
That’s the word.
That’s the piercing intrusion of his eyes through my sunglasses, into my mind and soul.
The victory that filled him this morning when he picked out his clothes, when he showered and washed his face, then stood in front of a mirror combing his hair, it’s still in him.
He just doesn’t know I can read it for what it is.
He doesn’t know I am aware of his victory.
So when his mouth curls, a slight tilt of pink lips, he might think it looks like a simple smile, a curt, short one, but just a smile.
I see it for the smirk it is.
I look away.
I fold.
I always do.
I look anywhere but him.
The terminal ceiling is peppered with skylights that glare against the moody grey fogged over the tarmac. But even England’s winter can’t compare to the drab sag of my posture, the dullness of my face.
I hate that we linger.
Mother and Amelia are too deep in a rattle of last-minute whispers, and so it’s either gossip or Mother unloading her pain about having a daughter like me.
Harold and Father have wandered down between two Royces, far away enough that I can’t hear the cross words exchanged between them.
And those are undeniably cross words.
Harold’s face is beetroot. An ugly purple to replace the warmth of his complexion that Dray inherited.
Father is stone-faced.
Their hands snap and cut through the air with their hissed words.
Grandmother’s cane hits the hard ground.
Tension is already too deeply wound in me, threaded into my muscles and bones, so I startle with a jerk of the shoulders.
I loosen a curt breath just before Grandmother turns her chin to her shoulder, angling her slitted stare at me.
“I should take her with me,” she says. “When will your lessons be done, girl?”
My shades shift with the wrinkling of my brow. I must have missed a chunk of the conversation.
By lessons, I think she means punishments.