Chapter 16 #2
I abandon my tray and, without a goodbye, leave the mess hall before Dray notices and decides to follow me.
The atrium is so empty that my steps echo up the walls and staircases as I move for the corridor that leads to the Living Quarter.
But just as my boots thud onto the runner rug, my head almost goes knocking off a collarbone—and I stagger back a step to glare up at him.
Eric Harling jolts with the surprise.
His face shutters.
He doesn’t move.
Doesn’t step aside for me to pass him, doesn’t give that awkward side-to-side thing the gentry often do before we finally slip by one another.
He gathers himself, his face softening, and still blocks my way down the corridor. “Did you see?”
His question hesitates me.
I falter, close enough to see the stirs of honey in his eyes, eyes I once thought so pretty.
“See…?” My brow furrows. “See your test?”
Those eyes glitter just that bit brighter. “It was good, right?”
The cringe reaches all the way to my bones.
For a flicker in time, I feel like an adult, listening to a child swell with so much pride over an accomplishment.
In that flicker, I see my future—
Little Drays begging for my attention, for my praise, because they swam a lap in the pond, or because they managed to tie their own laces.
My insides chill.
Suddenly, I’m not feeling so well.
I sputter the answer, unenthused, “Yeah—it… it was good. You got the answers right.”
He did.
His practice exam was to pinpoint moments in history based off old maps and coordinates of planetary alignments.
I’m not so sure what the purpose of it is, like how that is going to help him in our world, in our society, but the pride burns in him like a blaze.
“I know a lot of people favour print prediction to star-based prediction, because it’s more localised, but,” he shakes his head, the grin ear-to-ear, “I feel like I showed the value of generalised prediction in that test. And if I can prove that value, it adds prestige to the print, you know?”
For a beat, I just stare at him, like his audacity has frozen me in place.
Then I force a smile to pin to my cheeks.
I force on the mask.
“That’s great,” I say, and the words are yucky in me. “You certainly did. If you focus on future predictions and past ones,” I add, “for the final exam—then that showcases the contrast.”
His smile fades, but his eyes are wider, brighter, hungrier. Then he nods, too fervently. “Right… Right! That’s, yes, I could showcase past predictions with accuracy and detail—then how that implicates future predictions.”
I don’t like Asta one bit.
But I feel sorry for her a little.
Does she have to fluff this guy up often? Pat him on the head and tell him how wonderful he is?
My insides are twisted, sickly, and it’s an effort to keep the polite, soft smile on my face.
“That’s just perfect,” I tell him. “You should do that. Carve out a place for your print in this world if no one else does.”
The grin splits him, the dazzling kind on such a handsome face that I feel little for.
Then my shoulders bolt.
Dray’s voice comes down the corridor from the atrium, his tone cool and firm, “Olivia. Come here.”
I don’t look over my shoulder at him.
The image flashes in my mind, hands in his trouser pockets, cashmere sweater perfectly fitted to his form, brogues coming down on the floorboards softly, quietly, but a feathered jaw and diamond-daggers for eyes.
Eric’s darkening stare aims right over my head, his face hardening as he slips a step to the side, allowing me passage to the dorms all of a sudden.
Without a word, Eric stalks off to the mess hall and leaves me with my not-so-secret fiancé.
‘Come here.’
How he takes to prematurely ordering me around.
But I’m not his yet, so I start down the corridor.
Longer legs mean longer strides, and in seconds, Dray has caught up to me with a leisurely pace.
I was right about the hands in the pockets thing, and the feathered jaw.
He’s predictable.
More than how he looks, I expect the question before he even asks it.
“What were you and Harling talking about?”
A scoff catches at the back of my throat.
My steps down the corridor are unhurried, since we have our truce, but I don’t stop to chat, either.
“How great he is.”
Sandy hair strokes over his furrowing brow.
My smile is filth. “He was baiting me for praise for his practice exam.”
The corner of his lips curve. “Paper men need others to prop them up.”
“Is that what you need from me?” I slide a dark look to him, all signs of my smirk vanished. “To tell you how impressed I am with your print?”
He turns his faint smile on me, an echo of it softening his not-so-murderous eyes. “I need nothing of the sort. I know it frightened you.”
Words gather in my throat—but before they reach my tongue, a string of girls skitters by us, full of whispers and hushed giggles.
The one from the gondola queue is among them, the girl that Oliver checked out after we came through the veil.
I was certain then that she dropped her glove on purpose, but as I watch her now, I see no real intention in her, no schemes or grand plans of stealing an aristo’s attention.
Her cheeks are flushed with the rush of no-good-deeds, and though she is at least eighteen years old, there’s something more youthful about her, like she has an innocence not yet poisoned by the Videralli world.
I lean back into the wall, letting the girls pass without getting my shoes all trampled.
They scamper up the way to the atrium.
It’s passed their curfew.
By the colour and patterns of their uniform ties, I can tell they are not yet juniors. A year shy of university years, I guess.
Definitely up to no good.
But it’s Friday night, and they should have their fun. So long as my shoes are unharmed, it doesn’t worry me.
“You wanted that.”
Dray’s words snag on my mind for a beat before I turn a frown on him. “What?”
“The camaraderie in our earlier years here.” He leans against the opposite wall. “The fun, the mischief, the connection. But you have it now.”
The smoothness of his calculative face is too calm, too soft.
That senior exhaustion is getting to him—or he’s just really unbothered by my existence now that he’s set on marrying me.
I push from the wall and start down the runner rug.
He follows at my side, matching my pace. “I expected you would be happier about that.”
“Happier about my bullshit friends?” I choke on bitterness. “Serena who uses me, my brother who hates me, Landon who’s there because it serves him?”
“Isn’t it what you wanted all these years?”
“I wanted it from the beginning, not at the end. Too much has happened.” I fix a steel look on him. “Too much has been done.”
“That outlook will make for a bitter, unfulfilled life.”
My shoes halt on the rug, suddenly rooted in place, and I turn a scathing look on him. “Are we friends now, Dray?”
The fuck off is implied.
He reads it all too easily, a smile curling his pink lips, and a warning flashing in his sharp eyes—but his answer is rattling, “Do you wish to be more? There are plenty of broom cupboards down here, and I have all night.”
The tut of my tongue just widens his smile into a lazy grin.
Still, he shadows my side to the hook of the corridor, and down the final passageway to the dorms.
His hand reaches in front of me, flattened against the door as he pushes it open.
He follows at my heels.
I don’t get far in the packed Friday buzz that floods the grand parlour, not before Dray has stolen me by the elbow and steered me into an alcove.
My heart skips in my chest.
So many people in the grand parlour, but that won’t stop Dray. An audience rarely does.
I turn a wary look up at him.
But Dray just reaches around me for the bookshelf against the wall and pushes aside the tome ‘A HISTORY OF VEVILLE, THE FIRST WITCH SETTLEMENT OF EUROPE’.
From behind it, he tugs out a bottle of amber liquor, two crystal tumblers, and a sleek black cigarette case.
I don’t watch as he sets out the glasses and pours two serves of scotch.
I scan the parlour instead, locking onto curious glances aimed our way—but as soon as my gaze catches theirs, they look away.
Cowards.
The lot of them.
I turn my back on the rats in the parlour and point to the cigarette case. “Why do you have those?”
The table is tall and narrow, not the kind with chairs or the kind to lean on. So I perch myself on the windowsill and steal the closest glass into my grip.
Dray traces my gesture to the case.
He reaches down and presses the silver side button.
The case springs open to reveal a row of all-white cigarettes.
French by the looks of them.
“I celebrate a win,” he says, and slides one out, “every week, with one of these.”
I bring the tumbler to my lips. “Why?”
His eyes lift—and cut into me like shards of glass.
Dray holds my gaze, hooked, as he brings the cigarette to his lips and, in just two steps around the table, comes to stand in front of me.
My peripherals go wild. The instinct to search for a way out, if there is one. But it’s new that I don’t need one.
Dray reaches around my hip for the window latch and, tugging the handle, unlocks it.
The draught is instant—
And it’s freezing.
A shudder strikes me, violent.
I make to shimmy off the ledge.
Dray is an unmoveable statue, trapping me on the windowsill.
His smile is lazy around the unlit cigarette.
He reaches aside for the spine of an armchair, then draws off the blanket from the smooth leather.
He hands it to me.
I don’t hesitate.
I snatch the blanket and throw it around my shoulders, because there’s no point in trying to get away yet or fight him on this.
It’s not part of my game plan.
The article is.
At the thought of it, the reminder, a sudden surge of anxiety lurches through me.
Dray lights the cigarette, then swaps out the lighter for the tumbler. “I’m not going back on our deal.”
It takes me a moment—but then I realise, he’s just misunderstanding my unease.
I let him believe the fear is for him, not the article.