32. Absolute Catastrophe
Absolute Catastrophe
Elias
Pride comes before the fall, and of course, there are many ways to fall.
Accepting Desdemona’s invitation was a catastrophic miscalculation on my part.
A strategic misstep, a reckless mistake.
Like playing a chess game with my heart as a pawn, against a beautiful opponent I don’t even want to defeat.
I don’t realise this when I arrive at the Blackwood estate: the great lines of cedars outside, the wrought-iron gateway proudly displaying the family crest, the acres of lush woodland and emerald lawns.
The manor itself, with its long windows and spires and chimneys, the museum-like interior, with its priceless artwork and ancient furniture.
And I don’t realise it when I meet Desdemona’s parents’ friends: Blaise’s parents, Lord Blackwood and the famous author Theodora Dorokhova—herself a descendant of Russian nobility.
Successful artist Ana?s Nishihara and her husband, the French aristocrat Séverin Montcroix, or Dimitri’s father, the hulking giant Iakov Kavinski, who is just a paler, more cheerful version of Dimitri himself.
His mother, activist and politician Zahara Blackwood.
This whole roster of rich, famous people doesn’t give me hesitation—if anything, it’s comforting, a reminder that this whole thing is just part of the deal I struck with Desdemona.
Two days into the holiday, Desdemona’s father arrives: the KGM heir, Evan Knight. Meeting him is an odd experience, because it’s impossible to look at him and not see Desdemona: in his long, athletic limb, his easy grace, his competitiveness and golden hair.
“Elias, yea?” was the first thing he said to me.
“Elias Lennox.” I’d stuck out my hand. “Nice to meet you, sir.”
He’d dropped his eyes to my hand, let out a burst of laughter, and pulled me into a bear hug so tight it had made my bones crunch into each other.
Unlike Desdemona, her father is laid back and relaxed, full of laughter and sunshine, easy-going and affectionate.
But the differences between them don’t make me feel like she’s not like him—instead, they make me realise what Desdemona could be, if she wasn’t burdened by responsibilities, if she wasn’t permanently suffocating on top of that impossible pedestal she’s on.
And that’s how I realise what a mistake I made coming here.
It’s the morning of the third day: I walk into the kitchen after being bullied into going for a run with Desdemona’s father, the twins, Dimitri and his gigantic dad.
It’s a gruelling run, because all of them are athletic freaks, but there’s something weirdly wholesome about their easy, wolfish banter.
Like a different version of the Brotherhood.
I set off on the run feeling like the odd one out—and come back feeling like everyone’s distant cousin.
In the kitchen, I stop dead in my tracks; though I was panting when I walked in, my chest stills, my throat suddenly airless.
Desdemona sits balanced on the great kitchen island, one knee raised up against her chest. She’s wearing a big baggy sweatshirt with the name Knight on the back and the words Spearcrest Swim Team on the front, pyjama shorts and fluffy socks.
Her hair is in two messy braids down her back—she still has the fuzziness of sleep in her eyes and face.
But her head is thrown back: she’s laughing open-mouthed and unguarded. Her uncle Séverin is telling her the story of how her uncle Zachary proposed to his wife, and the two of them are debating back and forth while one of them cooks pancakes and the other is pouring cups of cocoa.
All I can do is stare at Desdemona, and it feels like I’ve just seen the princess after the curse has been broken. It’s a terribly unsettling feeling, like seeing someone exposed beyond nakedness, exposed in a way that makes you feel you now have some sacred duty towards it.
Desdemona’s shoulders are rounded, her entire posture relaxed. Her laughter is bright and almost boyish—she sounds exactly like her father when she laughs. And she looks fucking happy.
I’ve never realised, until this very moment, that I’ve never actually seen Desdemona happy.
“Anyway—then Zach had the audacity of telling me my own fiancée once broke up our engagement out of pride,” Séverin Montcroix is saying, gesturing dramatically.
“This coming from the guy who was so proud he had to propose to the love of his life just to win some stupid academic prize that nobody even cares about except for like ten people in Oxford!”
“Which he didn’t win, as a matter of fact,” Theodora, Zachary’s wife in question, pipes up.
She has pale hair cut to her shoulders, and the same swan-like grace as her son Blaise. Her husband throws her a scandalised look.
“If anything, that makes my cause more noble: you’re the one who accepted my proposal to secure the victory. Therein lies the proof of which of us was most calculated.”
“This isn’t debate club, Uncle Zach,” Desdemona points out as he hands her a cup of cocoa. “I don’t think your old techniques are going to work here.”
“The thing is that those old techniques never worked,” Séverin pipes in, dumping pancakes into a platter from which everyone is helping themselves. “He spent his entire time in Spearcrest—seven years, mind you!—trying to get her to date him, all to no avail.”
Dimitri’s dad, handing me a bottle of water from the fridge, adds: “At least I never had to fish his engagement ring out of the dirt.”
Everyone laughs—there’s a story there that they all clearly know—but I can’t stop watching Desdemona.
Her flushed cheeks and bright eyes, her beaming smile, the way Dimitri’s dad drops a kiss on top of her head when he walks past, the way her crazy aunt Willow, when she finally emerges into the kitchen, makes a beeline towards her and wraps her tattooed arms around her, the way Desdemona giggles at something Willow says when she hugs her back.
There’s a sensation like an arrow piercing through my chest, and I turn suddenly, unable to watch for one moment longer. The twins immediately look disappointed and Dimitri, who’s been piling food onto a plate for me, gives me a quizzical look. I shrug and swallow, choking out a quick explanation.
“Gonna grab a shower.”
Dimitri nods. “Don’t take long. Your food will go cold.”
Luckily for me, that only makes me feel worse.
“Fuck fuck fuck.”
By the time I reach the landing, my heart is beating so fast I’m half afraid it’s about to give in.
I clutch my chest and shake my head, swallowing hard.
I feel dizzy and nauseous, like the world’s axis has irrevocably shifted, like everything is wrong and the universe is hurtling into annihilation at terminal velocity.
“Fuck.”
I shouldn’t have come here, it was a terrible idea.
This whole fucking plan, this doomed bargain—it was all a fucking terrible idea.
All these people in that kitchen downstairs, they’re not faceless, sneering caricatures—names to add to my Rolodex, as Desdemona put it.
They’re real people, and worse than that, they’re Desdemona’s family, who fucking adore her, because—why wouldn’t they? How could anyone not love this girl?
The girl I took advantage of. The girl I forced to kneel on my bedroom floor to make her pick up her own money, satisfying my own pride by making her crawl in the pit of her own shame and despair. The girl who was ready to open her legs for me just to protect her siblings.
“Fuuuck.”
I slump forward into a wall, knocking my head into the wooden panel of a door.
This place is so huge, I have no idea how to get back to my room, but I’m alone anyway, alone in this corridor that smells like perfume and old wood, with the painted faces of Blaise’s ancestors gazing down at me from their family portrait.
Desdemona looked so happy—so happy. I didn’t know she was even capable of looking like that.
All of a sudden, I’m reminded, with a painful, acute awareness, that she’s so young, too young to bear the burdens she’s been carrying on her shoulders.
Too young to be forced to make deals with the likes of me.
And she’s brought me here, in the place where she feels safest, in the nest of people she loves.
I feel like a traitor, an impostor.
Worst, and most pathetic of all—I feel sad.
You can’t miss what you never had, and that’s how I’ve always felt about family.
But now, I see what I could have had if the great hand that decided the outcome of my life had rolled better dice before I was born.
Had my luck been better, I could’ve known mornings like this, in a bustling kitchen that smells like caramelised sugar and hot coffee, full of people that I loved and that loved me, for no reason at all other than just belonging to them.
“Fuck.”
This time, the word comes out of my lips in a whisper, a hoarse sigh. What the fuck am I doing here? I’m supposed to be on my way up, climbing as high as I can while I can, climbing so far up that I could never again be knocked down. So what am I doing, setting myself up for the fall?
The irony doesn’t escape me that I was the one to force rule number five onto Desdemona. In my arrogance and pride, I created the rule out of amusement, daring her to break it. Instead, I jinxed myself, daring fate itself not to punish my hubris.
Because love is a punishment, the kind of risk I could never afford, the one error I never thought I would make. And now—
“Hey, are you alright?”
I turn, startled, caught off-guard. A girl frowns up at me. She’s wearing black tights and a short denim skirt and a black jumper with frayed sleeves and hems. Her brown eyes are rimmed thickly with kohl, and they’re a little red and a little puffy, as if she’s been crying.
I recognise her instantly, of course. Though her hair is a dark, deep brown, her eyes are the exact same shape and colour as her sister’s.
“Hey, Ophelia.” I quickly take in her fingernails, which are bitten to the quick, her puffy eyes, the downturned corners of her mouth. “You alright?”
“Are you?” she says with a defiant thrust of her chin. “You kinda sounded like you were having a breakdown or something.”
And just like that, I feel myself shoved back through time: I’m standing in the busy rec room of a care home, facing off some defiant younger kid. One of those kids that wanted comfort so much that all they could ever do was push away anyone that might give it to them.
Help me, those kids seemed to say with their eyes, fuck off far away from me and help me.
“And you look like you’ve been crying all night,” I answer Ophelia, raising an eyebrow. “So what gives?”
She drops her gaze. I can’t help but notice the stiffness of her shoulders, her straight posture.
That streak of pride all those Sutton-Knights seem to have inherited from their mother—the only family member who’s not here for Christmas because she’s taking on some enormous case in New York, sacrificing her time with her family to save someone else’s.
Ophelia looks back up, pulling nervously at a fraying bit of her sleeve as she gathers her courage.
“You do favours for people at school, right?” She swallows, and her waterline gleams as it fills with dewdrops of tears. “I—I don’t know who else to ask. I need your help.”
Fuck.
And once again—see how quickly one mistake can snowball into absolute catastrophe?