Chapter 18 #2
Then his hands slip from my shoulders, and he falls aside to slump against the wall. “Dray will never give up a print like that. James is too valuable—and he proved it in front of everyone.”
I look down at his shoes, stained with the spill of margarita now gone from my cup.
I finish off what’s left.
“Does he know?” Landon turns his steady stare on me—as steady as it can be while he uses the wall to keep himself upright. “Does Dray know?”
I shrug before the lie comes smooth, “If he does, he didn’t say anything to me about it.”
It’s a half-lie.
Dray didn’t specify it.
He left me to wonder.
But I get the sense Dray knows all about James and Landon, like he’s had a niggle every time James walked by, and Landon lingered a look too long, or maybe he saw them like I did, and keeps the secret in the vault for a time it might come in handy.
Landon doesn’t know it yet, but he might be deeper in Dray’s pocket than he ever imagined.
“You can still help me,” Landon says.
The sorrow paints onto my face in a sad smile. “I can’t even help myself.”
Landon doesn’t care about that.
He cares about himself.
About our alliance—and how it elevates him.
So I’m not surprised as he snubs my self-pity. “What should I do?”
I slide a look over the room, from the dancing crowd to the ones gathered around the pool table, and the ones on top of tables, or pouring drinks—
I pass him the empty cup. “Get me another.”
He grunts, but swipes it all the same, and dips into the crowd.
For a beat, I watch him go, then he’s swallowed up by the dancers, the ones squatting and shaking their asses, moves that would have my mother striking me again, no hesitation.
If Grandmother Ethel saw these moves…
I shudder to think of the welts from the cane. She might just beat everyone in here.
I sag against the window, no doubt getting dust and grime all over the back of the slip dress, but I care nothing about it.
My mind is on Landon’s great invasion, while I plot my great escape. Both drowning, but I’m trapped on the inside, while he drowns on the outside.
My gaze snags on Serena—standing with Asta under the strings of fairy lights, as though someone gave up, tangled them all together, and just stuck them to the beam.
Asta goes without a drink, so her hands flail with frantic urgency as she mouths words I can’t hear.
Serena’s face is firmer than stone, her eyes harder than steel.
Whatever Asta is saying to her is falling on deaf ears—but it strikes something in me, a thought, an idea…
And Landon bustles back to me, a whirl of staggered steps and filled cups.
I steal one.
Before I even bring it to my lips, I voice my idea, “Marry Asta.”
His face contorts. “What?”
“Marry Asta,” I echo, firm.
He traces my gaze across the room to the silvery beautiful witch with poison in her heart.
“She’s with Harling.”
“Is it announced?” I challenge. “Have the contracts been signed?”
Landon slides a humoured look to me. “How much have you had to drink? Have you been digging into the punch?”
I tut. “Your betrothed is some gentry you couldn’t care less about. Asta is aristos—and your friend. She’s also about to marry a gentry. I don’t see the confusion. Two aristos together is better than losing two aristos to gentries.”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs, a knitted frown on his forehead. “She’s a friend—she’s… Asta. She loves Harling, always has.”
“And you’re gay,” I whisper.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
It takes a lot in me to not knock him upside the head and restart his brain. “You said to me that we would be one of the happier aristos couples, because I’m deadblood and you’re gay. But you and Asta would be even happier—as long as you’re both very, fucking discreet.”
He turns to mirror me.
I have his full attention.
“Asta stays friends with Serena, who will be a Craven then—and so you’ll be around Oliver… a lot. Hard to fall with your claws already stuck in the core.”
It’s slow.
The smile on his lips.
But it grows, and it grows, until it’s a toothy grin of pearly white teeth and lovely full lips.
“Asta can have her secret affair with Eric, while you keep James as your aide, or at least on staff, right?”
Still, that grin is slapped onto his face, seemingly permanent.
“And you’re both still aristos. You are my best friend, so you will be around Dray often, and Asta is Serena’s best friend, so you’ll be with Oliver, too. It will be the six of us.”
He likes it, my idea, he loves it.
But there’s a snag.
The obvious.
The Barlows aren’t the only ones losing their grip on their aristos status.
The Stroms are, too.
“There’s no money in brews,” I tell him, and he doesn’t need me to say it, because he knows. “Prediction kept your family in the tech world, but since your mother’s print started to fade, it hasn’t been good.”
Landon runs me over with a hard stare, waiting to see where I’m going with this, or if I’m just having a dig for the sake of it.
“Asta’s father has manipulation for a print.
If you’re his son-in-law, he’ll be willing to help you,” I go on, my mind whirling, like I’m figuring out pieces of a puzzle.
“Put brews and manipulation together, and that’s good business.
That’s…” I shrug as I scrape around my brain for something, then land on, “pharmaceuticals.”
He crosses his arms, concentration tightening his face. “I’m listening…”
“If you have James, Asta, Mr Strom, Dray and Oliver on your side—I don’t see why you can’t become a pharma giant. That is money.”
Serious money.
Landon throws his arm around my shoulders and tugs me into him. “Well if it isn’t the best friend I should have had for the past decade. Were you always this conniving?”
Yes.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve always known I belong with them—the Snakes. Even when it hollowed me out to know that.
Landon nuzzles into my wavy hair, disturbing the styling done for the party.
His affection is unwanted.
But the performance demands it.
We stick close to each other for the next hour or so, playing pool—after he shoves a half-breed out the way and resets the game—and drinking more than we should.
But then Teddy comes to whisper in his ear and, without a word, not even a goodbye, he’s gone.
The pair of them sneak off.
I doubt it’s to do good around the academy.
I wander from person to person, play some cards with Piper for a bit before darts with Serena and Asta, who just tolerates my presence now.
I end up stumbling for the doors around midnight, my bladder full and ready to burst.
Good thing there’s a bathroom just down the corridor—and I rush my scuttled steps all the way there.
I go uninterrupted, but as I come out of the bathroom and into the corridor, the sight of Eric halts me.
Quite obviously waiting for me, he leans against the wall, hands folded over his chest, and an anxious gleam in his honey eyes.
I sigh at the sight of him. “If Asta sees you talking to me—”
“She won’t.” He pushes from the wall with a single step. “She’s preoccupied.”
Last I saw, she was more than that. She was absorbed by the game of darts, took it to a whole new level of competitiveness against Sara Horvat, who beat her in the last round.
“She didn’t see me follow you out,” he adds, as though that’s meant to make me feel better, but it doesn’t sit right with me that he’s sneaking around chasing me through corridors, while his girlfriend, his betrothed is back at the party.
“I don’t need any drama,” I tell him. “I have enough of that, Eric. Asta’s already suspicious.”
A sudden surge of passion alights his eyes. He takes another step closer. “Do you know why she’s suspicious?”
“Yeah, people saw us in London, rumours went around, they reached her.”
Something stirs in his eyes, honey turned to the deeper, richer shades of caramel in the dim corridor lighting.
His lips part around words that don’t come, and for a beat, he just stares at me.
“She found out,” he starts, delicately, and runs his gaze over the arched door behind me, as though he’ll find the words he’s looking for in the grained wood, “that I, uh, I didn’t withdraw my offer on your contract.”
I give a faint nod.
Because, duh.
My father rejected the offer, all of them, when he accepted Dray’s.
No one stood a chance.
But then Eric adds, “I should have withdrawn when Asta was cut loose by Dray—but I didn’t. I held onto the possibility of yours, too.”
The timing tangles in my margarita-infused brain, and my face twists as I mentally sort through the memories of the ball, the first offer from Dray—
But all that does is make me dizzy, so I stop.
“I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to tell me,” I confess, and the dress is starting to become too cold against my skin.
Eric’s gaze cuts down—and so I know the cold is reaching my breasts—before his throat thickens and his cheeks flush.
The corridor is hushed.
The lights hum faintly, and snow presses against the windows in thick white sheets.
“I wasn’t sure if I would choose Asta over you.
So I held onto your contract until it was officially unavailable—and that was the day before the ball.
” Guilt flattens his mouth, a stroke across his sunkissed face.
“Asta has been pissed about it ever since your father mentioned it in passing—to Mr Strom.”
My lashes shut.
For a beat, I scrape for the strength not to call my father. Not a pleasant call. But not a call I would survive, especially since neither of my parents have phoned me at the academy since the semester started.
No one in the family has.
Not Nonna, not Grandmother Ethel (though she rarely does, and when she does, it’s usually a call of mostly silence, some barbed words, accusatory questions, and she always hangs up without a word, often while I’m in the middle of a sentence).
But this news on Father, it’s a niggle of annoyance darkening into anger.
He knew what he was doing, dropping that information casually into conversation—to Mr Strom of all people.
He was digging the knife in, twisting it, with a smile, while the dances and delights of the ball spun around them.
Father in that moment would have felt victory.
His daughter, the deadblood, the untouchable, the lesser beauty, got Dray Sinclair.
But in his petty battles with his so-called-friends, I’m thrown into the storm.
No wonder Asta’s been a bigger thorn in my ass this semester.
“I’ll be sure to stay clear of her,” I sigh.
“Wait—”
I arch a brow, my strappy heel slid a half-step back and halted on the runner rug.
“Just… You didn’t hear it from me, but… don’t sleep in your bed tonight.”
That brow tugs a bit higher.
“Asta might have let Mildred into your dorm room, and maybe I overheard something about itching powder in your sheets, so… Bunk with Courtney, maybe?”
My face falls—and darkens.
Fucking bitches.
I’m not in the mood to wait for the imps to change my bedding.
The margaritas, the bad wine, the spirits and the high of the smoke in the party, it’s got me in need of collapsing into my plush bed.
Slipping into Courtney’s for the night is so not an option.
Maybe I’ll steal Asta’s.
Since she’s still at the party, I’ll be fast asleep by the time she’s back in the dorm—and the joke will be on her.
That’s it, decision made, firm in my mind.
And maybe, if I’m extra salty tomorrow, I’ll let it slip to Dray what Mildred did, what Asta helped her do, and see what happens there.
The article will kill all my influence stone dead.
Got to use my power while I have it.
The smile on my lips is tired, but sincere. “Thanks for the heads up.”
Eric’s cheeks still wear the rosiness from when he glanced down.
It’s new—the sudden interest in me.
Before, he was courting my contract. But I never felt any sincerity in it. I just needed it to work, feelings be damned.
Now… I swear the stirs of honey in his eyes are swirls of desire, of lust—and he fights his gaze from dropping back to my nipples.
Where was that in the park?
Might have made him more interesting to me.
I have half a mind to fuck him just to spite Asta.
Instead, my smile stays pinned on my face, glossed and peachy with everlasting balm, and I take a decisive step away from bad, drunk decisions.
“Goodnight.”
With that, I turn my back on him—and I feel him watch me go.
He doesn’t follow.
The corridors are mazes, but I have mapped them out over the years, and I make my way to the main staircase with a drunken stroll.
The staircase drops level after level, down to the atrium. I’m careful going down the wooden steps.
My heels clack and clack and clack, too loud in the quiet of the academy at midnight.
But the academy isn’t asleep.
Distantly, the calls and shouts and laughs of drunken students wandering around from party to party reaches me. I’m certain if I pulled open the doors of nearby broom cupboards, I would find at least a handful of students hooking up.
But I descend the main staircase alone, not a soul to be seen, only heard, and I make it to the second floor, the atrium in sight, just down a dozen more steps—
When a thunderous blast rips through the whole fucking building.
A shout pins to my throat.
I drop to the polished floorboards.
My hands come down on the poles of the banister, gripping tight, and I brace myself against what comes—
Billows of thick, total darkness.