Chapter 23
Detention usually comes with a task, but I didn’t make the detour to check the list in the parlour and see what that task is, Witchdoctor Urma just dismissed us to the storage room.
My back slides down the wall, my shoulder down the wooden cupboard door, and I drop to the floor in the dusty room.
I cry.
I cry a lot—and for a long while.
Serena drags a chair out from under a stack of boxes, and they all come crashing down on the floor. She kicks them aside, plants herself on the chair, then smoothens out the newsletter.
She reads, sometimes aloud, mostly in silence.
“I guess he’s always been viciously obsessed with me.”
My face twists.
“He’s no different to the brat he was when we were kids. His tantrums were violent then, too.”
A sob catches in my throat with a hiccup.
It comes with aches and nausea.
“My father doesn’t care about Dray’s character, he doesn’t care what he’s done to me, because Dray is Dray Sinclair, so what does Olivia Craven matter?”
Dread is spilling through me, like icy waters creeping through the network of my veins. It all gathers in the worming of my gut, and I run my hands down my middle to hold my belly, as though to soothe it.
But there’s no soothing this.
This is catastrophic.
It’s everything I aimed for when I gave Courtney that interview, when I gave her the article that would end Dray’s chase of me.
But it stretches so much further than that.
And the trouble I have is more than this.
I face Asta, whose almost, maybe certain, fiancé I’ve tried to steal away.
I face Dray, who I’ve publicly humiliated in that article, who realises that I’ve been fucking Eric, not that the last one matters anymore.
I face my brother, who realises the mistakes I’ve made—the confusion in the gifts, pricey and not meant for Eric fucking Harling of all people.
And I will soon face my father…
Who will have all sorts of consequences for me.
This reaches beyond a few nights at Grandmother Ethel’s or a week of confinement to my bedroom.
I did it to myself.
But what else could I have done?
I did the worst because it’s all I had left.
But now that Father will probably be on his way, called by Oliver or a master, my resolve is wavering.
Serena exhales a whooshing breath. “You haven’t read this, have you? Want to hear Courtney’s concluding paragraph?”
I get the feeling she’s going to read it to me either way.
I’m right.
“In a society ruled by men, women and currency are interchangeable. Even the quiet deadblood who sits alone at lunch is a commodity to be exchanged from hand to hand. But then the great sin occurs—a man is told no. The girl tells him she does not love him. The girl begs to be left alone. So he will take her, as men do. This world is not for aristos, made ones, elites or halfbreeds. This world is not for witches. It is for men who have never been told no.”
The rustle of the paper lures my watery stare to Serena.
Inky strands of hair frame her face.
“That was certainly a choice. I can’t sugarcoat it. I don’t know how anyone comes back from this.”
The newsletter is folded in her hands, the heading angled up at her, and it still hooks her gaze. “But that’s the point, I suppose.”
And I suppose she’s talking to herself.
The watery glare I aim at her fades and I turn my cheek to rest on the cold bite of the wall.
I stare at the cupboard doors. One is crooked, hanging slanted off the hinges, and doesn’t close all the way.
The gap is dark, shadowy, but the longer I stare at it, the clearer it becomes. A lot of phials and syringes and IV bags, toppled baskets of black bandage rolls and I think the glitter up a few shelves is shattered glass never cleaned up.
“I didn’t expect it,” Serena folds over the paper one final time, shielding the headline from herself. “I thought you were in two minds about it. The desire to be accepted by him, by us, while grappling with your pride. I underestimated you... and your mask.”
Out the corner of my filmy gaze, I see that she tosses the paper aside. It rustles and thuds and slips over mounds of fallen boxes.
I don’t turn to look as she stretches out her legs, then rolls back her shoulders. Her snowsuit rustles with the practiced stretch—and I guess her plans for the slopes are out the window.
I bring my wrist to my sore face. The delicate watch jingles faintly before my teary gaze can settle on the time.
It’s one in the afternoon.
I loosen a weighted breath, it puffs my cheeks, and the stings are quick to spear through me, like hot iron.
A wince cuts through me.
I can feel the silvery stare from Serena running me over as I gingerly touch my fingertips to my sore face.
Asta really walloped me.
But the remnants of Dray’s strike is among the ruin of my face that I’m sure is purpled in spots, bloody around the corner of my mouth, and in dire need of balms.
Serena’s relaxed voice sounds so far away, “What time is it?”
“Two-forty.”
Something twists in me.
I left the dorm moments after the clock struck twelve—and now, less than three hours later, I’m sore and swollen and defeated in detention.
If I had just fought off my hunger a bit longer…
The article would’ve still been printed and delivered to the mess hall.
I wouldn’t have avoided that.
I nudge the cupboard door open that bit more. I scan the shelves within view for any jarred salves or balms. But it looks like it’s just storage, not a medicine cabinet, so I give up and let my head fall back into the wall.
I ignore the burn of my scalp from Asta pulling my hair.
“Is your father home?” she asks.
I would frown if I could, but it all feels so swollen, so tight, like I’ve had a facelift in the past hour.
“I don’t know,” is my mumbled answer, an echo to my own ears.
Father hasn’t talked to me in a while. Hasn’t called me once in the weeks since the semester started.
“Say he’s home,” she starts, “and he was called right after Master Milton found us—which was about an hour ago?”
I shrug.
“It will take your father how long to get here?”
Still, my mind is as distant as my voice, “Three or four hours, depending on traffic.”
Whatever’s going on in her mind, it doesn’t interest me as I slip into my catatonic state.
“So your father should be here around dinner time.”
My hand moves on its own accord.
Serena’s thinking-out-loud nonsense is just background noise as I reach into the shadows of the cupboard, through the narrow gap between the doors, and I lure out a glass phial.
“The gondolas don’t stop running until five on Sundays. It’s almost three now.”
I bring the phial to my huddled knees.
It’s exactly like the one my blood samples were deposited into. Not regular blood phials. These ones have solid metal lids that screw on—then seal. The base is latched in lattice leather for grip. And the middle is bulbous, like Master Welham’s midsection.
“The atrium should be packed from four until six, between the curfew rush, the gondolas, and dinner in the mess hall.”
I turn the phial over in my hands. “How many blood samples did your witchdoctor take?”
There’s a beat of silence, of hesitation before—out the corner of my swelling eye—Serena turns a frown on me. “Um… three? Why?”
I just shrug my shoulders. “No reason.”
Same number for myself.
Three samples of blood drawn.
Phials pressed into a briefcase—that had three other samples in it already.
“Are you listening to me?” Serena chides, and it sounds so much like Mother that I swerve my panicked gaze to her—as though I’ll find Mother sitting in that chair.
“If Master Milton called your father right after the fight, that would’ve been around one thirty, and if he leaves straight from Elcott Abbey, and there’s no traffic at the veils, then he’ll be here by four thirty. That’s less than two hours away.”
I blink at her.
The phial creaks in my firm grip, my hand fisting and fisting tighter the more rapid my heartbeat gets.
My icy panic fixates on the phial, on the memory of Witchdoctor Dolios pressing the samples into the foam slots in the sleek briefcase, where there were other samples already inside.
Serena throws me a weathered look before she pushes up from the chair. The old wood creaks under the shifted weight.
She advances on me, her snowboots thudding heavily on the rotted wooden floorboards. “How badly do you want out of this?”
My frown aimed up at her is stupid, dazed, and puffier than I care to see in a mirror. “Out of what?”
“Out of the engagement—”
I cut her off, “That won’t stand anymore.”
No way.
Dray will rip up that contract first chance he gets. He’ll probably steal Asta back as a fiancé and be done with me.
Good.
It’s what I want.
It’s the whole point.
But then Serena adds, “Only if it worked. If it didn’t, you’ll be paying for it longer than sanity allows.
” She boots open the metal cabinet tucked beside the cupboard.
“Dray will be fuming. There’s no doubt about that.
But end the engagement? He might not be so hasty with that one.
You underestimate him,” she adds and looks over her shoulder at me, arms buried inside the cabinet.
“You underestimate how far he’ll go to win.
And you just made this an interesting game. ”
Blank.
That’s what I become.
Blankness on my face, in my stare, consuming my mind—and I just watch as she turns her cheek to me.
Serena continues to rummage through the cabinet. The clinking and thudding of jars being lifted, discarded, shoved aside, it’s a song that floods the storeroom, a background melody to her words.
“And say it does work, and Dray cuts you loose, what about your family? You know you won’t be allowed back to the academy. Maybe you like that, maybe you realise that it means you’ll be sequestered indefinitely. You might be discarded altogether.”
My mother would never.
I know that.
But Father might push for my move to Grandmother Ethel’s… permanently.
Of all the fates I stare down, the part of each that hurts the most is to be pushed out of the home, out of the family.