Chapter 2
The weather slows us down, and each agonising minute to pass is another minute I am fighting the sobs jutting in my chest.
I can’t stop the tears.
They come freely down my face.
No one says a fucking thing about them.
Not the whole ride home.
And, as the car is pulling up to Elcott Abbey, and the front doors are heaved open for us before the Royce has even stopped to idle, I’ve already popped the button for the seatbelt and wrangled myself free.
The car stops—and the very second it does, I’m fumbling for the handle.
I don’t wait for a servant, not anyone, to open the door for me before I’m spilling out of the car in a frantic, stumbling heartbeat.
I race through the rain to the front doors.
My pace doesn’t falter, not once in my frantic rush through the manor for my bedroom before I’m bursting through the door.
The chamber is prepared for my arrival.
Flames stroke gently in the hearth, a tray is set out on the coffee table, a steaming teapot and cups and some biscuits.
I snub it, all of it, and storm into the walk-in wardrobe across the bedchamber.
From the shelves of bags, I snatch the biggest one, the Vuitton overnight bag, then chuck it across the room.
It hits the dresser before thudding to the floor.
I move fast.
I pack underwear, folded jeans, a dress, a jumper, then kick the bag into the bedchamber.
I need money, so I stuff my black card and some jewellery into the bag.
Then I pause.
My mouth still wobbles with the tears hitching through me, shuddering my bottom lip.
What else does one need to survive out there?
I look around my room, the lounge, the bed, the door to the ensuite.
Toothbrush.
Toothpaste.
Hand cream. Retinoid. LED mask. Collagen peels. Face massager. Cellulite massager. Ultrasonic fat burner. Under eye roller.
And all my haircare, serums and rollers.
The overnight bag is bulging by the time I’m hauling it out of the bathroom and back into the bedchamber.
A watery film distorts my sight. I consider my desk, papers and pens, then the bookshelf—and I head for the photo album Nonna made for me years ago.
It’s bulky, but I pack it.
Then—gaze latching onto the armchair—a fright lurches through me.
The book.
‘THE IMPACT OF DEADBLOODS’.
Can’t forget about that.
I dig it out from under the seat, then stuff it into the bag.
What else?
What would I need for a life out there, away from Elcott Abbey?
My pillow. It’s chiropractic. I even take it to Bluestone. It won’t fit in the bag, but I lodge it under my armpit as I haul the bag strap over my other shoulder and waddle for the ajar door.
I falter in the threshold.
The brass handle digs into my hip as, slowly, I arch my neck back and look around the door.
My eyes narrow on the orchid.
Not just any orchid.
It’s a Shenzhen Nongke—one of the very few genetically altered orchids made in a lab before the funding was cut.
I got one of the orchids at auction.
Well, Father got it for me.
Yellow and green, it’s budded.
It only blooms once every four years. It just bloomed last year.
It was a big deal.
The whole family came to watch, and we trolleyed the orchid out into the gardens near the tea table.
I rest my forehead on the bite of the wooden door.
That day was so pleasant, a day I felt like the favourite. A day we shared under sunshine, clear skies, with laughter and champagne.
Even Oliver joined in, lounging on the grass, shoes kicked off, his warmth returned.
Now, I stare at the orchid and see it for what it is.
Made in a lab.
It’s a lie.
Like everything else in this home, in this life, it is a cold, empty lie.
A bitter twist snares my mouth.
I tug away from the door then stomp out of the room.
The soles of my loafers are thudding on the runner rug, all the way to the main staircase that spills down into the foyer.
I tackle the steps, balancing a pillow under my arm and a lumpy overnight bag that clatters and clangs against the hip of my slacks and pulls down on my shoulder.
Mother is expecting me.
Down there in the foyer, she waits for me.
Lingering by the fireplace, the family portrait looms above her, and as my steps clump on the stairs, she turns her sad, pinched face to me.
I snub her.
I snub the gentle call of my name, the sigh she gives as I stalk through the foyer for the main door.
No one stops me.
Father and Oliver are nowhere in sight.
Mr Younge is gone, too.
Just two servants in the foyer, both trailing me with their gazes, but no order barked to stop me—and so I leave with only Mother’s echoed sigh, my voice, a plea.
I leave it all behind and storm out into the rain. It is quick to pummel me.
A mist when we pulled up into the driveway, a mist with a drizzle and a stagnant dampness in the air, but now rainfall is battering me, striking the grass, and coming down on the driveway like bullets.
It’s suddenly all I hear.
But it doesn’t stop me.
My steps are quick with purpose, thudding on the eternal driveway that stretches all the way through the grounds, the gardens, past the barns, for the whole mile it takes for the driveway to end in arched iron gates.
I am soaked through to my prickling skin by the time I leave the grounds and turn left for the main countryside road, the one that has maybe a dozen cars on it in a busy day, sometimes cattle just hanging out—but most importantly, it’s the road with the bus that comes through the village.
I march for the bus stop, like I’ve done so many times before.
But this is it.
The last time.
The moment I reach it, my fatigued steps swiftly pick up, and I duck under the arched plastic roof that’s cloudy and scratched.
A breath fogs at my face as I drop onto the metal bench. My backside is quick to ache.
I hug the overnight bag to my middle.
And I wait.
Rain pelts down all around me, unrelenting. Puddles swell over the dark road, splashes splintering off with enough force to wet my loafers.
The pillow is soft on my sopping wet lap, the bag on top of it, and my arms hugged tight.
I rest my chin on a hard angle of the bag, and just wait.
The rain doesn’t let up.
It batters the roof of the shelter.
Beneath the soggy cotton of my sweater, my skin is dewy and pebbled. The cold is starting to knit into my bones, set against the whistle of the wind.
Should’ve brought a jacket.
Now that I think on it, I’m not even sure I packed one.
But I can’t go back, not for a jacket, not for anything. I might miss the bus if I do.
That’s what I am waiting for, isn’t it?
The bus to come through—and I just step on, maybe I have to pay some money, I don’t know.
I could give one of my earrings to the driver.
I’ve never taken a bus anywhere before.
I know I am waiting—but I don’t quite know if I’m waiting for that bus…
Or my mother to come get me.
Or a car to skid off the road and strike me dead.
I just sit here, hunched, my tailbone already aching from the pressure of the metal bench, the tears softer now, but still falling.
The downpour is so dense and violent, smacking the road, pelting the metal shelter, that I don’t hear her approach.
I don’t hear the rainboots soft on the wet road, the rustle of a coat, the screech of the umbrella.
So when Mother comes around the metal wall of the shelter, then slips under the safety of the roof, I flinch with the fright—and the bag slips over the pillow pressed onto my lap.
I hug my arms tighter around the lumpy overnight bag, then draw up my knees. For leverage, the heels of my shoes dig into the edge of the bench, locking in my huddled position.
I slide my gaze to Mother as she shakes off the umbrella then sets it aside to lean on the plastic partition. Unhurried, she slips onto the bench, so close to me in this small shelter that our arms touch.
For a while, Mother sits. She says nothing.
Neither do I.
Together, we watch the rain batter the road.
Minutes pass, long and quiet minutes, before Mother finally speaks, and her voice is almost drowned out by the noise of rainfall on the roof—
“I believe the bus of the day has been and gone.”
I stare at the road, wet and sleek, freshly repaired potholes darker than the grey.
“The next should come by tomorrow,” she adds.
I’m not so sure she’s telling the truth, or that she would even know the bus schedule—but that’s irrelevant.
Because we both know that if it was to pull up right now, I wouldn’t get on it.
Just like I don’t get on any of them whenever I run away.
Like Mother knows but won’t say, what will I do without my family?
Where will I go on that bus, once I figure out if I have to pay, how much to pay, and if earrings are an acceptable form of payment?
All the times I have come here, sat in this shelter, a packed bag on my lap, in my arms, never—not even once—have I boarded the bus.
When I was only thirteen and was fleeing from my new life at Bluestone because my father refused to have me homeschooled, Mother followed me to the shelter. She sat beside me for a long while. Then she told me I won’t ever get on the bus, because out there—without my family—I am in danger.
‘It’s a foreign, dangerous world out there.’
She told me I don’t know the krums, what they are really like, how their world works, and that if my magic ever triggered around them, the krums would harm me, torture me, burn me. But she also told me that, at home, I am loved, accepted for who and what I am.
‘Home is the only safe place in the world for you.’
Mother says none of that now.
No words of comfort, no false masks, pretences of love, of care, of protection.
The masks are off now.
They were shed in the car.
Mother looks out at the fog thickening on the road, and she does what we are not supposed to do—she talks about the things unsaid.
“Some men are born of discipline,” she tells me. “Their views of the world are strict, their values are rigid, their ambitions are steel. Dray is one of those men.”
I turn a faint, wet frown on her.
Tears and rain have mixed together on my cheeks, weighing down my lashes.
Mother’s cheek faces me. Glossed, satin, smooth. Not a drop of rain on her. Her inky eyes are aimed at the fog—as though she can see through it to the truth of the world, where all the answers lurk.
She shares those answers with me. “Loving a deadblood does not fit into the life he pictured for himself. It is a wrong brushstroke in the painting of his future—but it is there.”
‘Loving a deadblood.’
Her answers are skewed, wrong.
They are lies.
A sigh deflates me, exhausted, frankly over it all, and I speak forbidden truths, “Dray doesn’t love me. Dray wants to own me.”
Mother’s answer is silence.
Still, she doesn’t look at me. Just watches the fog.
“He’s always wanted to own me,” I say, bitter, my mouth twisting into something ugly.
“Dray has tormented me for most of my life. He has locked me in closets for days, he has thrown food all over me in the mess hall, pushed me over in the corridors, frozen me in the cigar room—and all of this sounds so pathetic and petty and like it’s nothing, but it’s everything, because it’s all the time, and it means others can come after me, like Mildred Green, and it’s fucking relentless, and I can’t do it anymore, and now…
Now you and Father and Oliver... you want me to spend the rest of my life with my bully. ”
Mother flinches at the word.
Bully.
Simple, plain—but blunt.
Too blunt.
Not the kind of word thrown around aristos, elite circles. Not even in the rain, under a small bus shelter, with my mother.
“And for what?” My twisted face is angled at her unreadable look, the tears running fresh down my cheeks. “For alliance—an alliance that would stand firm without me?”
Mother turns to consider me, her inky stare running from my head down to my lap, then back up again.
There is nothing kind in her stare, the way she regards me, but nothing cruel, either.
Her mask has faded, melted away, the witch in the rain, and she bleeds an honest truth that shows me another side of my mother—one that stills me.
“You underestimate your power, Olivia. You underestimate the control of a wife over a husband who will always yearn for her.” Her slender hand reaches for my chin, then pinches it between her thumb and finger, locking me in place.
“Yearning is desperation—and for you, that is power. I know this. Amelia knows this. Serena knows this. Do you never question Des and Isabella? An elite aristos male who married a whore?”
My brows raise.
Mother’s raw regard of Isabella startles me.
We don’t say things like that—well, actually, we do. We just word it differently.
My throat bobs with a thick swallow.
Unflinching, her stare bores into mine. “Do you not question your father, Hamish Craven of all men, meeting a gentry girl at school… and marrying her against the wishes of his family? That he went against Ethel—” She lets the name snap through me. “—for a gentry nobody?”
My head is immobile, trapped in her tightly pinched grip, her unfriendly face mirroring mine.
“And of Harold Sinclair? He is displeased by this new arrangement between you and Dray—but he is silenced by Amelia.” Mother’s teeth are bared, the reveal of her rage at me, that I need to be told this, that I haven’t learned it on my own.
“Amend your childish approach to Dray—and see the power you have in your hand, girl. His sanity.”
She chucks my chin out of her grip.
I recoil.
My wide stare is locked onto Mother.
And right in front of me, she changes.
She softens.
The rawness of her dark eyes and snarling teeth, it all fades into something lovely, a small smile, a loving look she lingers over me.
My bones tingle with ropes of ice.
Mother’s hand suddenly moves like silk, gliding for the wet strands sticking to my temples, and she peels them off my skin, delicately. “You should wear your hair up for New Year.”
My lashes flutter.
Stupid, I just blink at her.
Her smile lingers. “If you receive earrings, you can show them off.”
Mother’s hand lowers to my shoulder, then presses once, a not-so-gentle squeeze.
I steel myself against the bite of pain.
“Now, let us return home before we catch our deaths out here.”