20. Nightmarish Vision
Nightmarish Vision
Desdemona
I realise just how tipsy I am when Elias pushes back his stupid plastic mask halfway up his face to kiss me open-mouthed in the middle of Benjamin Montgomery’s gallery, and instead of pushing him away, I kiss him right back.
It’s not my kind of kissing—wet and sloppy and a little dirty—but then this isn’t my kind of party, and Elias isn’t my kind of person, and I’m kind of not myself.
And I’ve been thinking about Elias’s mouth ever since the last time I saw him, no matter how hard I’ve tried to think of just about anything else.
Maybe it’s because he didn’t kiss me back then, but surely, kissing him like this, kissing him now with my arms around his neck and my body pressed to his and his tongue gliding hotly against mine—surely this is going to scratch the itch, give my brain the closure it’s been waiting for.
After tonight, everything will go back to normal, right?
What even is normal anyway?
Is it normal to think about someone like Elias Lennox, who sells his dignity and morals for trinkets like a merchant at an all-day fair? To think about his mouth and his dark unreadable eyes, his bare chest and his scars and his rough knuckles?
Is it normal to make a deal with him that will doom him, and let him drag me down with him?
Or is that all just part of his blurred line strategy?
Elias pulls away, ending our kiss with a gentle bite to my bottom lip, tugging wet flesh. He pushes his mask back down, but not before I glimpse the curving of his satisfied smile.
Without thinking, I reach up and press a last kiss to the plastic smirk of his ghost mask. The plastic is warm beneath my wet, sensitive lips. Behind the mask, Elias’s breath hitches.
“For fuck’s sake, you two,” a rough voice barks behind me. “Save it for the bedroom.”
Dimitri, topless in a fur cloak and covered in blood I’m not sure is fake, appears with his arm slung over the shoulder of a girl in a shiny red catsuit. A girl who is definitely not his fiancée.
“Point us to a bedroom,” Elias fires back, hand still pressed to the low of my back, where my costume doesn’t cover my skin, and where I can feel the push of his fingertips against the edge of my waist. “And we will.”
“The bedrooms are off-limits,” a haughty voice intones.
We all turn to look at Benjamin Montgomery. With his pale brown hair, which sometimes bleaches almost to blond in the sun, his pale face and wire-framed glasses, Benjamin looks like academic innocence incarnate.
A deceptive illusion—Benjamin might be soft-spoken and mild-mannered, but he’s the most ruthless person I know.
Well, the second most ruthless person. The main difference between Elias and Benjamin is that Elias’s ruthlessness is warm and dangerous, like an oil fire that spreads quickly and burns hot enough to curl the edges of you.
Whereas Benjamin’s ruthlessness is cold and deadly, like the kind of frost that destroys crops and starves entire populations to death.
“Bedrooms are off-limits?” Dimitri says with a sly grin. He’s in a weird mood tonight, which tells me Natalya, his fiancée, is definitely also at this party. “Where we supposed to fuck, then?”
His big hand slides down over the curve of his companion’s ass, which he squeezes roughly, making her squeal and blush.
“You’re not,” Benjamin snaps. “If it’s just sex you’re after, Kavinski, you can go into the woods and rut yourself to contentment at a safe distance from my home and eyesight.
” He turns to me, the long black coat he’s wearing billowing around him.
Based on the long-beaked mask he’s holding in one hand, he’s dressed like a plague doctor.
Moving his eyes pointedly from me to Elias, then back, he says, “I expected better of you, Sutton-Knight.”
I shrug. “Too bad.”
Elias laughs quietly at my side. His hand moves up my back, fingertips tracing my exposed spine, and a shudder goes through me so intense my nipples tighten. Benjamin’s gaze drops down to my chest, then back to my eyes, a grimace of disgust twisting his mouth.
“Revolting,” he says.
“Let her have some fun, for Christ’s sake.” A new voice stabs into the conversation with all the softness and sweetness of a poisoned knife. “Isn’t the whole point of this party to show everyone you’re not some loser uptight virgin?”
Benjamin’s entire body goes rigid. He wheels slowly around, his eyes narrowing to pale grey slits.
Emerald, to her credit, looks breathtaking: her dress is pale and flowing, the material so thin she might as well be wrapped in mist. Her red hair is long and loose over her shoulders, not straightened pin-straight for once but falling in hectic waves from beneath a crown of ivy.
Benjamin looks her up and down slowly, eyes roving from the top of her leaf-crowned head to the tips of her bare toes, and sneers.
“And what are you supposed to be, exactly: some sort of a swamp monster?”
“A dryad, actually—which you’d know if you were as well-read as you pretend to be.”
“The sex fantasies of ancient civilisations hold no interest to me,” Benjamin intones bleakly.
“Yes, because you’re a bland, depressing bore.” Emerald gestures. “Which is exactly why you’re spending your time trying to get people to stop making out instead of making out with someone of your own.”
“Some of us have better things to do than—” Here, Benjamin pauses, gaze crawling slowly and deliberate down the length of Emerald’s body before he finishes his sentence. “Run around half-naked.”
Emerald smirks triumphantly. “You wish I was running around your house half-naked.”
“I wish you’d drop dead,” he snaps, but there’s definitely a bit of redness in his cheeks now.
“Only so you could make out with my corpse, probably.”
“Let’s get out of here,” a voice murmurs warmly against my cheek.
Elias’s fingers press into my waist, and he turns me around by pushing his thighs into my body, with effortless control.
“This how you rich people do foreplay?” he says in my ear, and I can hear the amusement in his voice.
“That wasn’t foreplay,” I try to explain as he guides me away from Emerald and Benjamin and the crowd that’s slowly formed around them like an audience around a boxing ring. “They hate each other.”
“Oh, they definitely hate each other,” Elias says. “But that was still foreplay.”
“Emerald would rather die than let Benjamin lay a finger on her.”
“So? That’s part of the fun, isn’t it?”
Elias slowly backs me into a corner—an actual corner, because now there’s a wall pressed to my back, and Elias’s arms caging me in, and the dim red lights make him look like a nightmarish vision as he gazes down at me.
“Don’t you think it would feel good, love? To be touched by someone you hate?”
My breath is trapped in my chest, and I wish I hadn’t drunk so much, and I try to remember a time when I didn’t want Elias’s touch—when it wasn’t even a shadow of a thought on the horizon of my mind.
“I don’t hate you,” I whisper up at him.
“No?” he whispers back. “You’re developing a fondness for a worthless scumbag like me?”
“You’re not worthless.”
He lets out a mocking laugh, a low, rasping sound that scrapes over my skin, sending a curl of heat deep into my belly.
“Noxie!”
An obnoxious whoop shatters the tension between us like a fist punching through ice.
Dimitri’s burly arm appears as if from nowhere to loop around Elias’s neck, dragging him away from me.
Dimitri looks drunk and wild-eyed; the girl in the red catsuit is nowhere to be seen. Just like Dimitri’s fiancée.
I glare at him.
“Why don’t you go find Natalya?”
At the sound of her name, the muscles in his jaw tighten, visible all the way into his cheeks, which are sharp and curved just like his father’s. I’ve never found Uncle Iakov scary—but Dimitri is like the dark shadow of his father.
“She’s not here,” Dimitri says, lying to my face. “Need to borrow Noxie.”
I step up to him, anger kindling in my chest. “He’s here with me.”
Elias, to my surprise, lifts his mask for a fraction of a moment, flashing me a disarming grin: amused, cocky, delighted. Then the plastic mask snaps back into place, and the moment is gone.
“I’ll only borrow him for one second,” Dimitri tells me, slightly cowed by the anger in my tone. “Everyone’s excited to meet the guy who got Desdemona to dress like that.”
I glare at him, but he’s already turning away. Elias, grabbing my hand, presses his thumb into my knuckles, yanks me closer and whispers in my ear, “Won’t be long, love.”
Then he tilts his head, and he adds, “Guess the plan’s working, huh?”
A knot forms in my throat.
“Guess so.”
With Elias carried away into the poolroom to amuse Dimitri’s stupid hangers-on and Emerald disappeared somewhere—probably in the garden to bury Benjamin’s dignity with a shovel—I wander the party looking for Mira, the only person who can be trusted to behave.
Normally, she’d be at the centre of the revelry, holding court or dancing in a circle of admirers. But there’s little cheer to be found anywhere tonight; if anything, it seems to be quickly slipping into madness and debauchery.
I don’t know if it’s the red lights or the cold wet mist slowly creeping up the hill to lick at the edges of the Montgomery estate, but a strange, feverish atmosphere seems to be spreading through the halls of the mansion like a contamination.
I pass a grand lounge where two boys are sparring with ceremonial swords, the crowd around them cheering and cackling.
Outside, the outdoor pool is stained crimson with either dye or something more sinister; steam writhes from the water as topless boys dunk one another, seemingly for as long as possible until they start thrashing.
A girl dressed as a ghostly bride, translucent white veil covering her face, sits on the edge of the pool, her skirts gathered at her hips, her long, naked legs dyed pink by the red water.
Back inside, I pass three witches doing lines off the surface of a gilded mirror while two boys wrestle on top of an antique divan.
At first, I think they’re fighting, because the one lying on his back is holding the one straddling him by the throat, but then the boy on top opens his mouth in a hoarse, rasping moan, and I back away, stumbling into the corridor, where I go crashing into another girl.
We both turn at the same time, and I see my own shock reflected back at me.
Time seems to stop.
My heart drops in my chest.
“Ophelia!”
She takes in my outfit with her mouth forming a wide, startled O. Not that she’s in any position to judge: she’s wearing a black ensemble so skimpy I resist the urge to rip one of the old and no doubt priceless tapestries from the wall to wrap around her body.
My heart sings: She’s here! She’s here! She’s here!
Even as my brain warns: She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be here. She—
“You shouldn’t be here.” My voice comes out harsh and cold. I feel suddenly, icily, mortifyingly sober. “You—”
“Don’t start,” she snaps. “I’m not doing anything wrong, you—”
“You’re fifteen!” I hiss, grabbing her by the arm, agonisingly aware of everything I just saw: the girls doing lines and the boys making out on the couch and every other debauched thing I’d just witnessed. “You should be back at school, in your dorm, where—”
“Mum and Dad aren’t dead,” Ophelia hisses, ripping her arm out of my grip. “You’re not in charge of me, Dess!”
“Mum and Dad aren’t here,” I hiss back. “Which means I’m in charge of keeping you safe!”
“I’m not some helpless little kid, so stop treating me like I am.”
But you’re fifteen, I wish I could cry out. You’re fifteen, and something bad happened to you, and now Birnam is in hospital and his phone is in Elias’s room, and you’re here.
My heart is shivering within my chest, brittle with anxiety, every heartstring stretched so thin and taut that they feel like they could snap.
“You’re leaving with me,” I tell her. “Now.”
“Over my dead fucking body,” Ophelia snarls.
“Don’t think I won’t—”
I don’t even get to finish my sentence. The music stops.
Everything goes dark.