19 #3
There is no winning with Father, and there never has been with Dray.
It just took me too long to figure that out.
He lifts the glass again. “Why do you do that?”
I watch him take too long of a sip, too generous, and then I steal my own glass.
I drop onto the windowsill opposite him. “Do what?”
He answers, “Focus on your father and the tension of your return.”
I force a smile, one that isn’t in any way polite or kind. “Hard not to.”
Dray is unfazed. “You could easily focus on the joy in the parlour room. You could focus on our mothers in tears over your return, or even your grandmother’s relief. But you seem determined to dampen your own spirits.”
My frown is aimed down at the amber liquid sloshing in my glass.
Dray adds, “You are glad to be home, so why not allow yourself to feel that?”
“I don’t know how I feel.”
He is quiet, watching, as I down the scotch. It scalds all the way to my stomach.
But it’s pleasant.
The first real drink I’ve had in so long.
Dray pushes up from the arm of the couch and pours me a refill. “Tell me.”
I watch the liquid splash and wave against the glass walls of the tumbler. “Why would I tell you anything about how I feel?”
Dray pours his own next, and it’s a healthy amount.
“Who else do you have to speak to?” He leans on the side of the desk. “With Serena gone into obscurity, who’s confidence do you have?”
My mouth flattens into a bitter line.
I hide it behind the glass.
Because, even with Serena as my rogue companion for years, I didn’t have her confidence. Not really.
I could never tell her the layers of every feeling I had out there.
There was a disconnect between us.
If I was a full-fledged witch, I know now that Serena and I wouldn’t have been best friends. Friends, yes. Allies, definitely. But that same disconnect would have been wedged between us, because we are fundamentally different.
I roll the glass. “I feel…”
My whisper is weak, and it trails off.
But Dray is patient, and he waits.
I speak stronger, “I feel fractured. Like I’ve been someone else for so long that I forgot who I really am.
And now she’s coming back because there’s space for her, but it’s two masks colliding, and they’re cracking.
I feel like two different lives are crashing inside of me, and I’ve only existed as a second mother for so long—a nanny—and now I’m Olivia Craven again, and I don’t even know what that means. ”
My throat thickens.
My breath shudders out of me, thick with restrained tears. But they aren’t restrained.
I taste them on my wet lips, I feel them on my cheeks and slipping down my throat.
And Dray sits there, on the edge of the desk, patient. “You feel relieved.”
He’s right.
But I hate that he is.
So I lift a dark, wet glower to him. “You know don’t know anything.”
His smile is small. “I know that you missed home.
That it started off small. Thoughts that you let intrude into your mind, perhaps only at night when you were falling asleep.
Then those thoughts came in during waking hours, and you fought them a little less each time.
The more you realised the freedom you chased was a lie, the more you started to yearn for home.
“Perhaps you didn’t yearn for anyone in particular. Not your grandmothers, your parents, your friends—if you ever truly had any.
“Perhaps you simply yearned for the comfort, of everything being done for you, of being doted on.
“That yearning grew in you until it overpowered the sense of obligation you had to Serena. And I know this, because that—” he lifts the glass in a salute gesture “—is how we managed to stay on your trail.”
I stare at him.
Unblinking, unmoving, I just stare.
The shame is searing my cheeks.
Dray finishes his scotch, then sets down the glass. “The thing about shields is that they only protect you from the outside. But inside, yearning is a rot, and you decayed your shield each time you let yourself miss home.”
A pang hits my chest, hard.
The phone booths.
Sofía warned me about thoughts of home.
I didn’t just reminisce. I parked at phone booths, let my mind fall into my family, and invited them in.
Dray pushes off the desk. “Even now, you are trying to convince yourself that you should be ashamed of picking up that phone and calling us. But ask yourself, aren’t you happier already? Aren’t you relieved to be home?”
That breaks me.
And I crumble.
The tears roll over me like waves, and I toss the tumbler at his shoes. The glass bounces off the edge of the rug, scotch splashing out, but if Dray makes any move for me, I don’t see it, because I bury my warped face in my hands.
The sobs shudder me.
Because he’s right. I did it.
I yearned—but I also picked up that phone in the booth and called home.
I gave the address and hung up the phone, then parked houses down from Ms Brown’s…
I knew what was coming.
I gave us up.
I…
I wish I was stronger.
I wish I was better.
It’s a shameful thing, something that must be deeply wrong inside of me, broken, because I have every reason and more to not want to be here.
But I don’t regret it.
I run my fingers down my wet cheeks.
The breath hitches in my chest. “I… I shouldn’t…” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t want to be here.”
Dray hasn’t moved from the desk. “But you do.”
My mouth twists, wobbling, wet. “My family—they don’t love me—”
“Olivia, don’t be na?ve.” He sighs, soft.
“You are our only peer who never realised that all children, all offspring, come second to the gods. Our duties are aligned with the gods. It does not mean your parents do not love you. They just understand the way it is, and you have never cared to comprehend that.”
“That’s not fair,” I say and fall back against the window.
“I wasn’t raised the same way as you were, as Asta or Serena.
I was diagnosed as a deadblood, and that meant I would be lucky to marry anyone.
I didn’t have the same expectations pushed on me—and I was told to just accept it when my whole life got flipped upside-down. ”
“So you ran.”
I fight the urge to meet his gaze. But I lose and I look.
The warning is sharp in those cold eyes.
He slips his hands into his pockets and, pushing off the desk, wanders to the window next to me. “It was two years before we got close enough to your trail to learn you were travelling with a child.”
A snivel hitches through me, and I frown up at him. “So?”
His gaze slides down to me. “That night in the blackout. We had no way of knowing whose child it was. I was relieved to learn that it was Serena’s bastard.”
Dray might have chased my contract once. But an out-of-wedlock child is not a good thing in this world. It’s so much more than the disgrace, the reputation, the shame—
It’s a child conceived and born outside of the bounds of rituals.
So I nod, faint, because I understand.
Yet another way my family worried that I disrespected the gods.
His reflection is faint on the windowpanes. “Would you do it again?”
“Do what?”
“Run.”
No.
That’s the answer that thrums in my bones, the instinctual response that curves my shoulders, because it was hell out there.
I never want to go back to that life.
Dray must have been watching me, watching my body tense against the idea, my face turn into a grimace, because he hums, satisfied, then turns his back to the window.
He leans on the frame.
“I want to go back,” I snivel through the words, and his glare flings down at me. “I want to go back to the start and everyone makes different choices. All the way to when I was born.”
His frown comes and goes, quickly.
And, like he understands what I’m saying, which he can’t possibly, he nods, faint. “I can’t deny that this would have gone differently for you if you hadn’t been born a deadblood.”
I shake my head, face twisting, because no. That’s not it. That’s not what I mean.
Dray doesn’t know that.
He can’t.
This secret stays hidden from him.
But he misreads me.
“Our relationship would have held through the academy. Life would have been easier for you. It would have gone differently. But it did not. And all the magic in the world cannot change that. So stop wallowing, Olivia.”
I loosen a harsh breath and it puffs out my cheeks. I drop my head and consider the bruises on my thighs, curtesy of Sal’s kicking and screaming and moving boxes at work.
At work…
The shudder runs through me.
And that’s how I know for sure, I have lived as a whole other person these past few years, not as myself, and now that I am home, she is home, too.
Every time I let myself imagine what was going on back here, among the Videralli, in the world I yearned for, I brought trackers closer to me.
Every time I sat at a phone booth and let my pain break free—I was calling to them.
Breaking the shield.
And I’m not at all sorry about it.
Dray is right about me.
I wipe at my face, my breaths hitching through me, and look at him.
I see a beast so determined in its hunt that it bypasses all the other prey, just to catch the one that flees the furthest.
He asks, ”Why are you so ashamed of it, Olivia? It is only us in here. Your family do not judge you for wanting to come home. Only you are making this difficult for yourself—as always.”
I scoff, and it jolts my shoulders. But I don’t look away from him. The predator. The one who came to my room, left a celebration in the parlour, to talk to me. Just to talk.
We do not have that sort of relationship.
We are not friends.
And my heart lurches—because it clicks in my mind, and I realise what an idiot I am.
As if reading me, Dray’s stare is unflinching, a quiet challenge.
I part my lips around empty words for a beat.
Then I just do it, just ask it, the question that’s lurking around my mind, the one I don’t want to pay any attention to, because if it’s true and it’s spoken, it becomes real—
“Who did you marry, Dray?”
Dray’s smile is small, that dangerous, knowing smirk of his that darkens his whole aura.