Chapter 18
The days go by at the academy, and though it’s only the fourth week, it feels like months have trudged by since I left Elcott Abbey.
The academy newsletter must be coming soon, just around the corner.
I wait for it, my anxiety growing by the day, eating at my insides. I wait for the newsletter to be printed and stacked on a trolley by the buffet in the mess hall.
Each morning, I walk into the mess hall, feeling like each step is a step towards my end.
Landon is a breath of relief with his easy grin every time he drags me to the slopes.
The air is knife-cold down my lungs, and the world feels far away when I’m up that high. The trees below look like veins of white lightning cutting through the pines.
Landon snowboards like someone born to compete, sharp turns and easy landings.
I flounder a lot.
I can stay upright, but it hurts like hell by the time we’re on our second round.
My thighs burn, my calves scream.
I’m toning up gradually, but when I collapse face-first into the snow, Landon laughs until he’s red in the face.
It’s hard not to start liking him.
It’s harder to keep Serena at bay, always beside me at the table, scooting into the chair next to mine in our shared classes, throwing herself on my bed to tell me the latest issue she has with my brother.
And it’s hardest to pretend I don’t enjoy the change, the warmth from them, even the occasional brushes of affection from Dray.
Like when I was fumbling with my backpack and books in my arms, and he took the books, carried them all the way to class without a word, or when he took it upon himself to make me coffee at the station in the grand parlour, no request for it, he just did it.
I hate that those simple things are affecting me.
I hate that they are working—because I have the thoughts, here and there, to approach Courtney… and kill the article.
But those moments are rooted in fear.
I know that.
I know that, really, I need this article to sever the cord between Dray and I, a cord that seems to have never left in all the time at the academy.
How he always needed my attention.
Even if it was the worst kind.
But in the time I’ve lived this new life, and how easily I’ve melted into it, it’s all starting to feel dreamlike.
It’s distant, muffled, as if I’m underwater.
Everyone keeps moving—laughing, studying—but I’m only pretending to keep up.
I find out I was right about the sports thing.
Oliver and Dray might have pulled back from their weekend sports, snow rugby and hockey, but neither of them has walked away from sparring.
Tuesdays and Fridays, they are gone for hours in the evening through to night, and they return with fresh cuts and bruises and stretched t-shirts that have been pulled to ruin.
This Friday is no different.
I somehow breathe easier with them gone.
And I’m easier roped into a party with Serena.
In the dorms, I fit into one of her slip dresses, but the academy is cold, so my flesh is quick to pebble as I shudder through the corridors with her.
She rambles on about my brother, his disinterest in the wedding arrangements, and I get the sense she’s chewing back words about my mother, because when she lets it slip that the calls are becoming an everyday bother, her face tightens and she silences herself.
I can’t keep the hurt off my face. “My mother calls you?”
Serena slides a curious look to me as we climb the atrium staircase to the upper levels.
The party is for half-breeds, hidden in an old classroom on the fifth floor of the academy, but that classroom has been gutted over the years and refurnished with armchairs and pool tables.
It’s not the best sort of walk for these shoes, strappy heels with the constant tickle of pinkish fluff strips.
“All the time,” Serena says, her inky hair roped down her back in a braid from a high-pinched ponytail, the sort of hairstyle I would need a professional to achieve.
“I understand the stakes for her, and she thinks she’s helping, since my mother can’t, but I have my exam coming up, just like Oliver does, and it’s as though that doesn’t matter. ”
Because she’s a woman.
The truth of it slants my glossed lips.
“It’s different for you,” Serena goes on, her silvery dress shimmering in the dusky light. “You don’t have a print, you don’t have the distraction of the exams, and as for your wedding, you won’t have to lift a finger between Ethel, your mother and…”
She trails off.
Her throat thickens, as though she traps words in there before they can spill onto her tongue.
In her rant, she forgot.
She forgot the secret.
My smile is bitter. “Amelia?”
Serena stills.
The heels of her python boots root to the floor, and she turns a slack look on me.
Not exactly surprised, but stunned—maybe that I say it out loud, maybe that I address it so openly.
“So you do know.” There’s a firmness in her tone, matching the steely look she runs me over with, studying me. “I wasn’t sure if—”
“He isn’t exactly subtle.”
Serena hums a curt sound, then continues down the corridor. Her silence holds as we pass Dragana, doubled over in a doorway.
My face contorts as a heave pulses through her, and she sicks all over the door.
It’s only when the retching is far behind us, and we turn onto the final, dusty corridor, that Serena asks, with a bite, “And you are fine with this?”
No.
I’m drowning.
I feel like I’m dying and no one cares.
They all watch me sink underwater, reaching out for a hand, but no help is given.
“What else can I do?” The mutter fades under the growing noise of the door with light creeping around its border.
Serena can’t get another word in, because I’m done with it, the conversation, her, and I push through the door with a rushed, marched step—
It all hits me at once.
Cackling, guffawing, shouts, music, the scraping of chairs over neglected floorboards, the crack of pool cues on hard balls, the fairy lights strung around the rafters, the smell of cheap wine and liquor, spilled beer, a little sick somewhere, smoke from cigars and cigarettes and joints.
I welcome it.
All of it.
Distraction.
Relief.
I slip into the chaos, gaze flinging around the room for my landing spot.
If Serena follows me, I don’t know, I don’t look back as I weave and wind around the students.
Most of them are seniors, blowing off the bottled steam from the first month of the semester.
How they will all get through the rest of the semester without throwing themselves off the tower, I don’t know.
I squeeze by Piper and Delia—and I know the moment I do, I’ve interrupted something.
Piper’s annoyed glare flashes at me for just a moment before my face registers in her boozed mind, and a grin splits her.
But I don’t stick around to chat.
I choose a destination.
The sticky table with a punch bowl, rows of half-empty glass bottles, paper cups, napkins, and no snacks at all.
I’m not here for snacks.
I reach straight for the tequila and lemon juice, bottled, not fresh, and I start pouring myself a margarita. No shaker or ice, but it’ll do, and I down the whole thing before Serena gets through the packed room to join me.
“I didn’t know you could make those,” she says—and the implication lingers. She wants one.
I set out a second paper cup, then stir round two. “I watched your brother make them.”
The go-to cocktail guy at the gatherings of the families.
Serena’s smile is sincere, memories illuminating her eyes. “I forgot about that. It’s all he made when he first married Isabella. And she doesn’t even like them.”
I almost laugh.
A faint choke in my chest, a jolt of the shoulders, but it vanishes the moment Landon comes crashing into the table.
“One for me,” he slurs.
Teddy comes up beside Serena and smacks his hands down on the sticky surface. “And me.”
He doesn’t slur nearly as much, but he wears mischief in his eyes.
I rush the task before anyone else can demand a crappy margarita mixed with awful, cheap tequila, triple sec, and bottled lemon juice.
The moment the cups are filled, I steal two for myself, down one, then nurse the other as I dip back into the crowd.
Leaving them behind, I follow the beat of the music. Music that isn’t ever played at Elcott Abbey, a kind never found on my MP3 player.
I’m derailed, thoughts and body, as Landon comes tumbling into me.
A violent wave of margarita lurches out of my cup and splashes all over the front of his shirt.
Landon doesn’t notice.
His hands are gripped onto my shoulders, his nose too close to mine. “You’ve got to help me.”
That’s all he says, with the stink of cigars and booze and brews, before he yanks me out of the crowd.
My fluffy stilettoes clack on the floorboards, all the way to the window in the corner with panes painted black.
Landon spins me around to face him.
I don’t get the chance to ask him what happened or if he wants a breath mint.
“Dray wants James,” he spills out the stress, his face twisted in frowns and creases. “He said you suggested it.”
My expression is wiped clean. “I… I didn’t. I literally said the opposite.”
His hands on my shoulders tighten, urgency in his dark eyes. “What did you say to him exactly?”
The wonder of ‘what does it matter?’ crosses my mind, but I doubt that’ll go down so well right now.
“Dray said to me,” I enunciate, firm, “that James might make a good… well, not his primary assistant, but someone on the payroll, for his print.”
Landon doesn’t blink, doesn’t nod, doesn’t breathe.
“But I said Dray already has the sense—”
He blinks. “What?”
“The sense. Like Amelia, his makut… it’s all prints, isn’t it? Just fainter.”
A crease knits between his eyebrows.
This is news to him.
Not a thought he had before, not something he considered.
Can’t judge him for that.
I didn’t figure it out until over the break.
“Because he has that,” I go on, “he doesn’t need James. I said to leave him for someone else—like you. Someone who could use his print.”
For a moment, he just stares at me. Hazy eyes and a potent breath.