20
Time stands still for a fleeting moment—
Then Dray is suddenly on his feet.
Wrist tight in his grip, he hoists me up with him, so hard that my shoulder screams and my wrist is aching.
A hollow sound utters out of me, but Dray couldn’t give two shits about that, and he’s yanking me with him to the paned glass doors behind my desk.
He strikes aside the curtains.
“It’s lock—”
It’s all I manage to say before he flicks his hand—and shards of glass go blasting out onto the balcony.
I throw myself back from the explosion, and smack right into Dray’s shoulder. But the glass doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t touch either one of us.
I look, wide-eyed, at what used to be my door, and just as I do, all those glittering shards hang in the air—
Then drop.
They hit the stone floor, scatter over the balcony that hugs the length of my windows.
A shout catches in my throat.
I cringe back, but Dray wrenches me alongside him, out into the chilly night air. He drags me out onto the balcony, his shoes crunching down on the glass—
I jump over the broken shards.
I land with a stagger on the stone, and still, my socks tear. The nips of pain wince through me. I feel the heat of blood. I’ve definitely been cut.
Dray jerks me around to face him.
I smack into him, my forehead colliding with his collarbone and erupting fresh pain in my head.
Undeterred, Dray’s hand twists my wrist. He turns my palm upwards and brings his finger to it.
“Ow—”
A harsh breath cuts through me.
His finger—the makut—slices along the meat of my palm and splits the flesh.
I cry out, but he ignores it, and hot, crimson blood pours out of the cut.
The blood threads through my fingers and drips onto the stone floor at my feet.
But in my palm, there is a puddle of it.
Dray lifts my wrist.
My hand.
My palm.
And the moonlight cascades over us; it cascades over the blood pooling in my hand.
Dray’s sharp, glass eyes are locked onto the blood. The tension in his jaw is so tight that a muscle is stroked across his cheek.
He watches the regular glisten of blood under the light. He watches for the glitter, the reflection of the clear night sky above.
His throat bobs, his grip on my wrist flexes, but still, he waits.
There should be stars in the blood, there should be the whitish wisp of a moon—
But another heartbeat passes.
My blood is unchanging.
Beneath his cashmere sweater, his body is tense, like his skin is pulled tight over muscles of steel.
And still, he waits.
He doesn’t move.
He doesn’t breathe.
He stares and stares and stares.
My mouth flattens against the silent tears wetting my face. My throat is slick, and I swallow back the wretched truth I saw in that same blood years ago, in the garden of Hell House, when I realised my whole life had been a lie.
I am a krum.
I don’t know why my parents adopted me and pretended I was their own.
I don’t know why they chased me to the ends of the earth, a krum child that isn’t their own, not really.
But I do know that Dray will never marry a krum.
The final card up my sleeve—played.
A breath ushers out of him and his shoulders sag.
Blood spills over my hand. Unchanged.
He flings my wrist away from him, like it’s infected with a wretched virus.
His gaze snaps to me—and the look he pins me with sends a chill down my spine.
It’s pure hatred.
His eyes flash with rage, his lip curls with disgust, and I swear, for a moment, he thinks about pushing me off the balcony.
The moonlight washes over us on the balcony, it illuminates the cracks in his mask, his shuttering face.
He looks at me, the deadblood he loved, then loathed, then pursued, then chased across the world, and he sees me for what I truly am.
Nothing.
Not a Craven.
Not a witch.
Not a deadblood.
Just… nothing.
But I see it.
That shuttering of his face, the cracks in that perfected mask of his, and before he can turn his cheek to me, the image is seared into my mind.
A grimace.
A pained one.
Hurt.
Dray reels back from me—from the nothingness that I am—and stalks for the blasted doors.
He storms off the balcony, his shoes crunching down on the glass, and disappears into my bedchamber.
I am rooted to the balcony.
Socks torn and bloody, crimson threading through my fingers and dripping down me.
Then I flinch—because the door slams shut, hard enough to tremble the whole bedchamber.
Still, I don’t move.
Breaths mist at my face.
I feel the cold eating at the wet trails down my cheeks, the chill prickling at my breasts—
And I drop my head.
The tears wash over me like a violent wave strikes a cliff.
I crumble.
Falling to my knees, my hands smack down on the broken glass.
The first sound out of me is guttural. It’s somewhere between a heave and a moan. It’s years of built-up anguish releasing—and I hardly even feel the cuts all over me.
Doubled over, I wail against the quiet night, moonlight dances over the glass like it’s mocking me.
It’s when the sharp inhales spear through me, like weapons, that I hear the knocks rattling the bedroom door.
It comes rapid, urgent, and doesn’t follow with a pause. Not before the door opens and Oliver’s familiar voice calls out my name.
My face twists.
A fresh pulse of anguish jolts me.
Rapid footsteps thud through the room. He’s spotted me through the windows—and he rushes out onto the balcony.
Glass crunches beneath his shoes. “Liv?” Panic has his voice pulled taut. “Gods, are you alright?”
Before I can begin to answer that, or even look up from the blood and my tears on the balcony floor, Oliver has swept to my side.
“Are you hurt? Liv, look at me. Are you hurt?””
I’m aware of his hands feeling along my shoulders, my arms, searching for injury larger than the small cuts.
A moan tethers through me, and I lift my hand from the glass. I show him the gash on my palm.
His murmur is barely audible, “What the fuck…”
The surprise steals him. For a moment, he’s still.
Then he gingerly takes my hand.
I stare at the floor, the glass, the blood, and through the clouding of tears.
From a pocket somewhere on his person, Oliver pulls out a handkerchief and presses it onto my palm.
“Did Dray do this to you?” His question comes breathy, almost disbelieving. “Liv, look at me. Tell me what happened.”
My breaths are too hitched, too sharp, too serrated. I don’t think I could get a word out if I tried.
Oliver realises this. He must. Because his questions stop—and he wraps his arm around me, and pulls me closer.
I fall into him.
I sink into his arms.
Oliver tugs me so close that I’m slumped against his chest. And through the sobs that batter and hack at my chest, he holds me.
Chin rested on my head, he’s quiet. Patient.
He doesn’t ask me why I’m crying—but his mind must be whirring, pinning it all on Dray.
For once, he would be wrong.
This isn’t Dray.
It’s him.
It’s all of them.
Oliver. Mother. Father.
It’s my blood.
It’s all that time that I had to fight back tears and pretend to be ok around Serena and Sal.
It’s that mask crumbling completely, fading into nothingness, and I’m left with the raw pain of knowing exactly what I am…
And that my family must be in on it.
I’ve been on autopilot for so long, I can hardly breathe through the pain of switching back on.
Oliver holds me through it.
Time passes in heaves that wrack my body. The ache in my chest is too much, it’s too serrated, too constricted.
Oliver’s arms tighten around me. He hushes softly, until my breathing starts to ease.
Less shudders wrack me.
Less pain aches my chest.
Gradually, the heaves end, and I’m slumped in my brother’s arms, my temple rested against the steady beats of his heart.
Still, he just holds me, patient—a comforting side of Oliver I haven’t known in so long. More than the years I’ve been gone. More than my time on the run in the krum world. This is a side of Oliver I remember from back when we were children, before the dynamics at Bluestone tore us apart.
The night air is quiet and gentle when Oliver’s embrace loosens, and he brings his hands to my shoulders.
“Father doesn’t know yet that Dray stormed out of here,” he says, “But it’s only a matter of time before he finds out.” His hands tighten on my shoulders, squeezing them with reassurance—and draws me back a few inches. “He will come, demanding answers.”
Reluctance slows me down, but I do lift my gaze to Oliver’s soft rainforest eyes.
My pouted mouth trembles.
Blood has dried on my arms, uncomfortable and itchy against my skin. My eyes are swollen and red raw, made worse by the chilly night air.
I understand what Oliver is saying.
I understand what he’s really telling me—even if it takes me a few moments to get it.
I need to get my story right.
Oliver thinks I did something. That I fucked up in yet another classic me way.
He’s the one who doesn’t understand.
Before I can choke out a response, he loops a strong arm around my back, then hoists me up off the glass-littered floor.
My socks dangle above the shards.
He carries me to the blasted doors, and the chill of the night chases us into the bedchamber.
Oliver drops me onto the chaise facing the roaring hearth. Then he draws back for the brass bell above the mantel and gives it a single, curt tug.
Without a word, he sits on the edge of the coffee table and reaches down for my socks.
Gingerly, he peels them off, letting tiny glitterings of glass sprinkle onto the rug.
The soles of my feet are cut. Not like the gash down my palm that I hold to my chest. Just tiny little nicks along my feet, but enough that I wince as I bring them up onto the chaise.
I sit basket-legged and wait.
The hour is late, so most of the house staff will be in bed. So the bell summons Mrs Younge, who then calls for the imps, and when they come to start cleaning the glass and boarding up the broken doors, she returns with salves and bandages for my wounds.
Oliver downs a scotch, weary and mute, then another before he dismisses her.
It leaves just us and the imps.
Oliver cleans the cut on my hand first.
His silence holds for the imps.