Chapter 14 #2
“How far away is the debut?” Ashley asked her father, attempting not to show any signs of weakness by keeping her face blank. Ned seemed pleased for the most part. He looked away, as if unable to look at her when he answered. Does he hate this place as much as she does? “One week.”
She had one week until her debut. Ashley’s eyes returned to the window frame.
Once again, she considered using the extravagant ball as an excuse to sneak out of the castle.
This might be her last chance to escape, so she needed to make the most of it.
Some sort of distraction was likely to take place at the ball.
Maybe if everyone focused on her brother, she could use that opportunity to escape.
That idea was the only thing that motivated Ashley to turn back to her father, nodding and offering her arm again as she moved from her bedroom into the dining room.
The moment she entered the dining room, she realized something fundamental: she didn’t fit in there and didn’t really want to.
It took Ashley only a few minutes to conclude she disliked her brother more after seeing his disgusting friends. She didn’t want to let other people taint her view of him, but there was no denying there was something wrong with him, especially if he could hang out with guys like those.
She recognized that these families had already been rewarded with nobility status in the Opal Kingdom decades before she was born.
She wished that she had some chance to wrest back control from them, especially if those down the line proved to be complete asswipes.
The men currently sitting in front of her were some of the worst.
She’d made up her mind about all of them the moment one of them patted Emma’s ass while making little to no secret about it and grinning a gloating smirk.
Ashley’s blood boiled when she remembered how she had lived the life of a server before and had had quite a few handsy men’s fingers touch her ass cheeks.
The fact that she wasn’t able to do anything to help Emma, at least nothing that she knew of, made her mad.
But not as mad as when she realized her brother had seen this motion, and he was very obviously more than well aware of how these men’s eyes kept going up and down from female servant to noble woman, making no secret of their desires.
But far more insulting was they could just fucking paw them when they wanted, even though female servants weren’t exactly their business.
Ashley wasn’t their business either, but they decided to make passes at her as well.
And not good passes. These were the kind of passes that were heavily veiled compliments and obviously contained something more. Something unsaid. Something that made very fucking uncomfortable.
“You’re far prettier than I had ever thought you would be,” the tallest one of them said, and Ashley learned then that his name was Landon.
And that she hated assholes who were named Landon, who had far too much money to their names, and obviously didn’t think of women as people.
But, since her brother was watching her, she bit back that comment.
As Landon’s eyes were currently on her breasts instead of her face, he obviously thought her ample chest was the most attractive part of her.
She would probably kill to meet someone as kind and considerate as Alexander again, or at least half as entertaining as Jack Tracey, whose passes at her could be brushed off, considering he was a nice person, to begin with, and never leered at her body.
But instead, she was at the table with Tweedle-dee, Tweedledum, and the two Tweedle-dumbasses.
She learned their names quickly, not because they were talking to her but rather because they were talking around her.
The tall one named Landon had a lot of land and holdings, and he was very proud of that.
Almost as proud as he was of keeping a few hundred servants in his abode, though, the fat one named Dudley insisted that he didn’t actually need that many servants.
Dudley’s castle was apparently bigger than Landon’s, so people should treat Dudley with a little more respect, he thought.
Or at least, that was the way that Dudley made it sound when he was explaining his land and holdings, very obviously looking at Ashley as he did so, making little to no secret of the fact that he was trying to explain to her that he would be a far better match for her than whoever the fuck the Diamond Dragon was.
Well, if the Diamond Dragon didn’t happen to look at women like they were fucking sausages with legs, then Ashley felt like she was far more welcome in his home than she likely would have been in Dudley’s.
But, you know, Dudley never asked her whether or not she would have wanted to live with him.
Instead, he commented repeatedly about her being single and about that mate mark being something they could transfer.
Ashley murmured a few choice swear words under her breath as she turned her attention to her food, sawing into a large, far too rare piece of steak with a knife.
As she noted to herself, obviously, mate marks, while a rarity, weren’t transferable, and therefore, she shouldn’t be too worried about it.
Unless, you know, she ended up being forced into an engagement with someone who she didn’t exactly like, in which case it seemed like her brother wouldn’t let her change her mate mark.
Then again, Ashley felt like she couldn’t complain too much as long as the man she ended up with was not like the few dipshits sitting near her because it could be far worse.
She could have unappealing, pig-nosed children like the ones that would likely come from the twins who were about a foot shorter than her.
The same men both had cleft chins that were so deeply defined that they looked like butt cheeks.
In the end, they were the stupidest. They were short and had decided to just chew their steak apart with their teeth, as opposed to dining like civilized people using knives.
Ashley was pretty certain that if she had to compare those men to a small-town archetype, she would say that the twins were like football players, but in the off-season, when they were wrestling, they carried around a giant jug of milk to make a weigh-in.
Yeah, when they were in the dumbass part of their life.
The tall one she would likely compare to a creepy teacher, and Dudley?
Dudley was obviously that rich kid who always thought they were better than they were.
The same kind of guy who made passes at Ashley growing up.
But again, no one asked Ashley’s opinion. Instead, what was asked of Ashley was that she sit quietly and eat her food, chopping it up into small pieces and acting like it was the greatest meal that she had ever been given, even if the steak was far too bloody.
Val must have noticed that Ashley was picking at her food, attempting to calm down the nervousness she was experiencing as she tried to make a good impression on the few men present, because he leaned over to her.
“It’s a delicacy like this. Just about every shifter of note prefers their meat bloody. ”
“Do they eat it like this in every kingdom?” Ashley asked, much to her brother’s surprise, and while he had no idea what she was currently thinking to herself, Val had the good common sense to look just slightly suspicious.
“If you’re asking if your potential mate will serve you food in such a way, I think that will really depend on the class of the kingdom and how much money they have.
As I’ve said before, not many kingdoms are as wealthy as we are,” Val said, though Ashley hadn’t intended to ask that question.
And she didn’t care how wealthy this kingdom was.
She just wanted a steak that wasn’t bleeding out all over her plate.
o It didn’t matter how much wealth someone had.
All that mattered was that they treated her kindly and with the same respect she’d give them.
Which mainly meant they didn’t act like they were better than her and didn’t keep nasty secrets from her.
But Ashley had a feeling that if she brought up such an idea to her brother, he would scoff at her, dismissing her concerns.
She’d had enough.
She didn’t really know why that was the last straw, but as she pushed away from the table, standing up in a single swift motion while holding her breath, she decided it was.
At first the men narrowed their eyes at her, but then they stared up at her in shock.
As if they hadn’t just shown her a horrifying amount of disrespect while acting like the world’s biggest jackasses.
As if her brother wasn’t treating her like a mushroom and keeping her in the dark about things she desperately needed to know.
Of course, that was when Val finally gave her his full attention, not surprised at all, or pretending not to be.
“And what, pray tell, is the problem, sister dearest?” Val asked, his voice flat and uninterested. How could he call her his dearest sister if he barely knew her at all?
On the verge of blowing a gasket and losing control of her anger, Ashley opened her mouth to say something but suddenly shut it, realizing that her brother didn’t care about what she said.
She would rather be anywhere other than in this room and with these oafs he called friends.
Ashley glared at him but didn’t give him an answer.
Instead, she moved towards the doors, not caring or paying attention to what her brother said as she hurried from the dining room to the hallway.
Walking into an unfamiliar part of the castle, Ashley found herself confronted with long, narrow hallways.
Even so, she was hardly bothered by the fact that everything was unfamiliar as she heard her brother huffing behind her, his voice carrying from the dining room as Ashley ran down the hallway.
It didn’t matter where she was going, all that mattered was getting away from the nightmare he’d forced her to live out.
The castle was starting to feel more like a cage of secrets than anything else at that point.
Ashley wanted to escape from it as she charged towards the door at the end of the hallway, trying her best not to freak out.
She pulled it open only to find another large room staring at her—another one that she hadn’t been in before.
The castle tours were mostly inadequate, and Ashley bristled at that realization, wishing more than anything that she would’ve been allowed to explore it more. Unfortunately, there she was, wandering around blind and wishing she had some clue where she was going.
She approached a massive door at the end of the hall, with two torches burning beside it.
She didn’t care that there was a freaky stone dragon skull on the door, or that the doorknob seemed to gleam with magical power.
She wanted away from all of this, and this was the only door that opened when she turned the knob.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
What she saw stole her breath away.