Chapter 9 #4
“Yes.” My voice is a whisper, and almost as soon as it comes, he’s off of me.
The loss of his hands, his mouth, his weight, his hardness, it’s coming up from the water and breathing for the first time in too long.
The air floods my lungs.
Dray stands back a step, slipping his hands into his pockets, and he watches—he waits it out.
Waits for my breaths to steady, for the tears to stop spilling silently down my cheeks. He watches, patient, as I swat at my face, then smoothen out the wrinkles on my skirt, my knees bolted together.
But when he decides the moments I’ve had are enough, he presses, “Your father, Olivia.”
That lifts my weary gaze to him.
The heat still flushes him, slight pink etchings over high cheekbones, and a faint gloss of my tears or taste on his full lips. “Tell me what issue he takes with the books.”
I notice he stands close enough that if I slip off the table’s edge, I’ll be sliding my body down his.
That keeps me planted in place.
I look down at my lap. If I lifted my gaze a touch higher, I would find the residual excitement tightening his trousers—
But I leave that to my peripherals and, drawing in a deep breath, I decide to give him the answer he bargained for.
“Father doesn’t want me to read those books,” I start, and hope this will be enough to keep Dray off of me for the rest of the semester, “because he… He knows I feel isolated in this world. And he thinks if I read too much on what I am, and how I’m different, then I’ll feel even more separated from the other witches. ”
I lift my gaze, but only to his clavicle. The collar of his shirt is a touch ruffled now, but the smooth black of his cashmere sweater is tidy.
“Father thinks that the more I obsess over my difference, the more I might lean towards others who are more like me.”
It takes him only a heartbeat before, “Others, like the krums?”
I nod, faint. “Because among them, I might not feel so different, so… ostracised. That’s why he doesn’t like me reading too much into any of it.”
A moment passes before I drag my gaze from his collar, up his sunkissed, unblemished complexion, to the hardness of his face.
Unreadable, Dray considers me for a long time.
Hands in his pockets, the sawdust strands of his hair fall into his eyes, and he just burns that cold stare into me.
Then he jerks with a curt hum, and his brows tug. “That explains why you aren’t given a phone. I always wondered about that,” he adds, and his expression settles as he looks me over. “It’s all krum culture on there.”
I nod, because while I don’t have a phone, I do know that witches can’t exactly be obnoxious and open about our existence on the internet.
Dray turns his cheek to me, his gaze finding the storms out beyond the window. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Do you resonate more with them?”
I don’t think about it. I just shake my head.
It’s a non-factor for me.
No matter how bad it gets for me in my world, among my kind, even with Dray, running off to be with the krums is just…
It’s not a real option.
In all the times I ran off to the bus stop, I never really believed I would get on the bus—and go be with the krums.
I wouldn’t know anything about living out there with them. I don’t know how to get an estate to live in, or find servants, or what to do to make money, or how to drive, or… anything, really.
What if I can’t find a servant who washes my clothes really well, and I have to walk around like some of those krums who have creased trousers?
“No.” My answer is absolute. “But that doesn’t mean I like it here, either.”
Dray turns his gaze on me. “The life of a pampered aristos isn’t one to complain about.”
The look I aim at him is nothing short of incredulous. “You have made my life a—”
He holds up his hand to silence to me.
It does.
I can still taste him on my lips, feel him between my legs, the bruises springing over my thigh.
I don’t need to go breaking our deal now, while he has me cornered.
“Your past is your past. I am speaking on your future.” His stare is unflinching.
“No matter what path lies ahead of you, it is a plentiful one. You will want for nothing, you will have everything—and that, Olivia, is nothing to complain about. It isn’t the same out there, for them.
” The way he spits that word tells me he means krums. “And who knows, maybe your husband will not be so restrictive as your father is.”
I arch a brow.
“Perhaps, he will even allow you a phone.”
Something splits in me, a flurry of hope, and a sudden crashing of loathing.
“Lucky me,” I gush, then end with a face. “A leash of diamonds is still a leash.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Will you want a pretty collar to go with it?”
Before I can retort, a woman’s voice snakes through the aisles. “Sinclair?”
My frown turns around his arm to the exit, the gap between two shelves that leads to more shelves, and a spiralling labyrinth of books.
“Dray Sinclair?”
The clipped steps on the floorboards are growing louder, closer, with determination.
I don’t know how this woman is having such ease at finding us, finding Dray in this maze, but she is gaining on us.
Her print, maybe, is to locate. To track.
The hope springs up in my chest.
An escape.
Headed right my way.
Dray traces my gaze to the exit, and he hums.
It steals me back to the old Faculty Quarter, when he had me up against the wall, tasting me, and the only thing that pulled him away was Melody’s call as she searched for him.
The scoff jolts me.
I guess the reason he’s in the library in the first place is that woman. A fling, a hookup.
I run him over with a dark look.
How so many of the women at this school can fall into his arms, or onto his dick, just turns my stomach—and baffles me.
I get the appeal of Dray, physically.
If he wasn’t the worst witch in existence, yes he would be smoking hot. But he is one of those people that are so rotten on the inside that it distorts their beauty.
I can’t wrap my mind around anyone wanting him.
Dray slides his darkening gaze to me—just as the woman finds us and pauses at the exit.
Vaguely, I recognise her, and it takes me a moment too long to place her as one of the administrators from the offices near the headmaster’s office.
So, not a hookup, then.
“Mr Sinclair,” she says, “you are needed with Mr Craven.”
It’s odd to hear him as Mr Sinclair, when I know that to be Harold. But the Mr Craven is what snares me.
“Oliver?” I ask, a stupid look on my face.
Dray lets a dark smile slink over his pink mouth. “Your father.”
“What business do you have with my father?”
The question is out of my mouth before my mind can even answer it.
Me.
I’m the business.
I don’t know much about how these arrangements are done, not from the business side of it. I don’t know how many contracts are passed back and forth, edited and re-edited and renegotiated until they fit both parties.
But I bet my lovely new leather backpack that I am what this meeting is all about.
Without another word, Dray turns on his heels and follows the administrator out of the nook.
I watch them go.
And still, I sit on the edge of the table, like I’m stuck here, trapped in the whirl of my mind.
The fact that my father is in the school right now, but not summoning me, not saying hello, and instead doing everything he can to put the absolute finishing touches on my engagement to Dray, it’s infuriating.
I haven’t seen Father since the morning of New Year. He didn’t even come to say goodbye the morning we left for the academy.
Mother said goodbye, but it was cold and stiff, without a hug or a kiss on the cheek.
But Father being here, it explains why Oliver was not in the mess hall after class.
Father would have summoned him first, and this is how Oliver learns—learns how to one day sell his own daughter to another aristos.
I’m practice.