Chapter 22 #2
He peels his hand out of Asta’s firm grip, Asta who looks like an ice sculpture sprouted in the hall.
Eric aims a furrowed look at her as he finally gets his hand free from her grip. “I just signed on this morning.”
His gaze shifts around—and he realises that every face aimed at him is steel over churning magma.
And the fucking idiot throws a questioning look right at me.
Eyes wide, I shake my head, a swift gesture, rapid and tense—an obvious shut the fuck up.
But it’s too late.
Everyone saw it.
The Vacheron Constantin.
Same collection as the one I picked out for Oliver.
Identical to the one he has safely stored at home, because the piece is too much, too formal, to wear to Bluestone.
A shadow strokes across Dray’s jaw before he traces Eric’s stare to me.
I shrink in my seat.
Landon, in a stuttered scoff, asks, “No offense, but how the fuck did you get your hands on that? Someone gambled that away?”
Shut up, Landon, shut up, shut up.
Eric falters, panic alighting in his honey eyes.
He glances around the hard faces aimed at him, then looks down at the elegant watch clasped and poorly fitted on his wrist.
“A New Year gift.” His pitch hikes as he lifts his sleeve just a tug and shows off the timepiece, completely fucking ignoring my warning. “I’ve been saving it, actually—for when the stars are brightest.”
My lashes shut as those words stir nausea through me, but not before I saw the flash in Dray’s eyes—the only stare locked onto me.
Slowly, my lashes lift.
And I lift a dark stare to Eric.
He forces a tight smile before he backsteps. “See you at dinner?”
The question is directed at Asta.
She only stares at him like a ghost caught between realms, and Eric now finally realises he’s in the middle of what’s about to be a catastrophic explosion.
His throat bobs before he leaves—just stalks off in the direction of the buffet.
My heart thumps particularly hard, a pulsation that swells in my head, my throat, my gut—and I swear, they hear it, each one of them, because at that moment, the rest of the stares are slowly turning back to me.
Oliver speaks, slow and glacier, “I happen to have that exact one in gold.”
Elbows planted on the table, I bury my face in my hands.
My groan is muffled.
Oliver’s gravelly voice follows me into the dark, “You bought that for him, didn’t you?”
Could this be anymore colossally fucked up?
Yes.
Yes, of course it could.
My luck brings a clatter to the table. There’s a thud, like the drop of glass on wood—then, after a pause, glass shatters into glitter.
As always when a glass breaks in the hall, gazes are lured in from all angles.
But there’s no humour in this one.
No one calls out, no jeers or mockery.
The glass is shattered all over the floorboards—and as I look up, Asta’s sharp face is aimed at me with a flush of fury.
Landon has her by the midsection.
Arm looped tight around her wriggling body, he holds her back, like she’s tried to lunge at me.
A feral scream erupts from her.
I shrink back from her flailing hands, like she can still reach across the table and grab me.
She obviously tried.
And she knocked off the empty latte glass which has smashed over the floor.
Asta’s scream drops into a guttural sound, something animalistic—but Landon has her in his hold, and he drags her out of the mess hall.
Mildred hesitates for a beat before she follows them.
I watch her go, but she stops in the doorway—and so I know they don’t venture any further than the atrium.
There goes my shot at making a run for it.
Oliver breathes the word with the same dread swaying in my gut, “Fuck.”
He turns his gaze down on me.
I might be sick.
I might be sick all over the tray, the table, my lap, the floors. And that, still, would be better than what’s about to happen.
Oliver yanks away from the table—and marches right out of the hall with the same determination that had him stalking towards me from the buffet.
On a mission.
It takes me a few seconds, but I land on that mission—and the panic has me scrambling out of the seat.
I chase Oliver’s swift steps through the atrium.
Asta shrieks the moment I’m within her line of sight.
Landon snatches her up again.
I don’t have more than a fleeting look for her, or for the footsteps that follow behind, because Oliver is starting up the staircase.
And my worst fears are confirmed.
He is heading for the phone booths.
“No,” I shriek, and snatch for the back of his sweater, “don’t call him, don’t tell him!”
Footsteps are rapid and messy behind me, charging and chasing and storming up the staircases, but my full panic is aimed at Oliver.
He shrugs out of my grasp.
His pace doesn’t break, doesn’t falter all the way to the landing, then he stalks down the corridor.
Distant background noise reaches me, “You bought him a fucking Vacheron?”
I hardly hear it or register it as I snatch out for Oliver’s cashmere sweater again.
He whirls around to shove me away from him.
The newsletter falls from his grip as my plimsoles stagger on the runner rug—all muffled by the second shout from the background, “A fucking Vacheron?”
There’s a hiss behind me, a shush, shoes thudding on the rug, shadowing me, but I fix my pleading, watery eyes on Oliver.
My begging comes out in a whine, “Please, don’t.”
Face of stone, he turns his back on me.
He marches for the phone booths.
“Please, please, please!” I scramble around him, then shove my hands against his solid chest. “Please, I’ll tell him. Let me tell him, when the time is right.”
I block his path.
But that means I have a line of sight to the audience gathered some steps down the corridor.
Landon still has Asta by the middle.
Mildred lurks behind them with too much light in her eyes… aimed down at the newsletter in her hands.
Serena paces by the wall, worry chewing her cheeks, and she throws uneasy glances at Dray—
He advances.
Slow steps that gradually bring him closer to the flailing Asta, and his gaze is too calculating, too intense, too cutting that I force myself to look at Oliver.
“You’re such a fucking weirdo!” Asta shouts, but it’s guttural, it’s heaving with rage, and it booms down the corridor. “You’re just running around the academy, trying to buy people’s boyfriends? What the fuck is the matter with you, you freak?”
I turn a wild look on her. “I didn’t fucking buy it for him! It was an accident—” I swerve that plea back onto my brother, my hands slapping together in prayer.
But no words come.
Oliver’s face is purple.
Not red.
Purple.
He might just explode in a burst of curses.
“You want me to not tell Father that you spent fifty fucking grand on some gentry?”
“Seventy-five,” Landon grunts.
I flinch.
Oliver towers over me and shouts right in my face, “Seventy-five thousand pounds?”
“It was an accident,” I heave the plea, and press my hands together, as though to pray, to beg.
“It was meant for him—” I throw a flailing gesture around his arm, right at the one who passes Asta, her wild advance halted by the firm grip Landon now keeps on her forearm, like she got loose for a second.
But no one is holding Dray back.
He moves for me.
His steps are calculated, but his rage is lashing inside of him, burning his eyes.
I stagger back, but my words don’t stop coming, even with his advance, “It was meant for him. I didn’t mean to—I don’t know how I mixed them up, but I did and…” I swallow back a lump in my throat, slick with unshed tears, “Please—oomph.”
The pleas are knocked right out of me.
Dray’s hand is a blur through the dimly lit air before it’s firm on my throat—and he smacks me into the wall, hard enough to gut me of breath.
My tear-stained lips part around nothing.
The filmy distortion of my vision clears with a blink, and the moment I look into his crisp blue eyes, the confliction of a frown creasing his brow, my mouth twists and the sobs arch up me.
“You thought it was Harling?” His voice is soft, a whisper, a breath—but it’s a mask stretched over pieces coming together in his mind, of a sword being sharpened. “You thought I was Harling?”
Dray didn’t spend his time thinking about the watch going to Eric. He’s been figuring out what that meant with the cologne, that I thought Eric had it.
Words die on my tongue—
Oliver isn’t done with me, and my gaze is yanked back to him as he takes two crashing steps towards us, like Dray doesn’t have me pinned to the fucking wall by the throat.
“I’m telling Father, with or without you,” he shouts. “So I advise you get your fucking arse in the fucking booth, now Olivia!”
The sheer boom of his shout shudders down the corridor.
I hear the wince from one of the booths, a student hiding out probably, too scared to make a run for it, and a distant murmur that sounds so much like Serena’s voice, an “Oliver, please.”
“Shut your fucking mouth!” That’s his answer to Serena—that’s the swerve of his rage from me to her. “Mind your place and stay the fuck out of it!”
I only realise now that his shout silences the others that Mildred was even speaking. Her whispers are cut off, sharp.
I don’t look at her.
Not as fingertips dig into the bone of my jaw.
“Look at me,” Dray’s dark tone is quiet, a warning, a threat.
I lift my watery gaze to his again.
Shouts are lashing around us, Asta throwing more and more insults my way, but for a moment, I can only see him—and what looks like the faintest flicker of something behind his eyes, something like… hurt.
His jaw feathers.
His grip flexes.
Oliver’s shouts have directed back onto me, “You can kiss the fucking academy goodbye—do you think for a second Father’s going to stand for any of this?
Never mind the watch, when he reads that…
” His voice drops into a growly sound, “When he reads that paper, Olivia, you are done for—and you know it.”
Dray’s voice shudders, it seethes and trembles with the same rage crystallising his eyes. “Why would you fuck Eric Harling in the blackout?”
A silence strikes down the thick tension.
Then—