Chapter 28 #2
“We should go. We can’t risk being seen by them,” Niklaus tells me in a low, haunted voice. Something about watching his father mingle with the men and women that make up different factions and boards of Demechnef releases a quiet, simmering frustration inside him.
“Yes,” I agree, nodding while I search for a waiter. “But only after we chug champagne and dance.”
Niklaus gives me a reluctant sidelong glance, though his shoulders lose their stiffness.
“I’m not dancing with you,” he says coldly, but still plucks to champagne flute glasses from a tray and clinks his with mine.
We down a few of them until the glow of the lights are soft and fuzzy around the edges, and my mood is significantly lighter and happier. I lift the heavy skirt of my raven-black ball gown and do a little twirl. Dancing sounds good. I want to dance.
But Niklaus continues to brood and watch my mother speak to Aunt Ruth in the corner.
I gasp. “Aunt Ruth!”
Niklaus puts his big hands on my shoulder to keep me from racing over to her.
“Goddamn, drinking was a bad idea,” he growls.
“You think I’m an imbecile? I wasn’t going to say anything to her. Just going to watch them interact!”
Niklaus chuckles. “You were just going to stand in front of them and stare like a stalker.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
The musicians introduce a new dance. The room shuffles into brief, graceful chaos. Women clacking across the glittering golden tiles to find their partners. Two ovals and men and women, side by side in the center of the ballroom.
I raise my eyebrows at Niklaus expectantly.
“No,” he says.
“We’ve known this dance since we were kids!” I squeal, stomping my heel.
“Hmm. True. I don’t care.”
“Well, if he won’t, I will…”
Niklaus looks over my shoulder, glaring at the man’s voice behind me. I drunkenly spin around, coming face-to-face with a six-foot, blond-haired, brown-eyed looker.
“Ooof.” I grin up at him.
“Oh god,” Niklaus grunts.
The man has a tousled halo of sun-bleached curls, with a flicker of mischief in his caramel eyes. The misleading look of a cathedral angel. He smiles back at me confidently.
“When a man won’t dance with you, it’s because he can’t dance, sweetie. I don’t have any problems in that department,” the blond man says.
I laugh. Unfortunately, not being able to dance isn’t Niklaus’s problem. He’s just a dud.
“Terrible dancer!” I agree, taking the stranger’s hand to dance. “I’d rather have a man to lead me.”
Niklaus scoffs, but humor doesn’t come anywhere near to lightening his gaze.
“I’m Hawthorne.”
“Audrina,” I reply, deciding to stick with my fake name.
As Hawthorne guides me to the beginning of the star-crossed couples dance, I give Niklaus a cute little wave and wink.
The clap of heels and shoes stomping to the floor with the first step has me scrambling to get into position, taking the tips of Hawthorne’s fingers and letting him guide me into the synchronized movements of the other dancers.
“If you don’t know the steps, just follow me,” he whispers in my ear.
I smile. “I know them.”
And I get lost in the sweet swaying and stepping and turning to one of my favorite string quartet pieces. Hawthorne pouts as he twirls me to my next partner, giving my fingers a tight squeeze between twirling me away from his hold.
My next partner is an older gentleman, then another, and then the next lets me take a quick swig from his flask.
I inhale the sweet scent of roses and baby powder, catching a soft breeze from the swishing and wafting of ruffled gowns sweeping the floors.
“Come find me later, pretty girl.” The man with the flask twirls me away, and he returns to his wife like the shithead he is.
And as I spin on my tiptoes, careful not to bump into the other women around me, my movements are a little too quick.
I land in the arms of my next partner, grunting into his hard chest and subtle aromatic cloud of aquatic wood.
The muscles in his arms turn to stone as I’m pulled in close, my stomach pressing against his.
Those downturned, lethal blue eyes are weaponized as they glare down at me.
His jaw ticks once, the kind of detailed gesture I wouldn’t have noticed without being this close.
And I can’t help but breathe him in again as I inhale sharply.
Niklaus Demechnef smells like a distant memory.
Cold metal, winter air, and those nervous feelings you get at a great height.
“You—you said no to dancing,” I say exasperatedly.
“You said I was a terrible dancer.” That stare narrows just enough to feel angry and cold, yet it falters—briefly lowering to my lips. The sudden minute detail makes my stomach dip.
“That’s right,” I respond, flickering my eyes down to his lips out of pure curiosity. I’ve never taken much time to notice them. At his five o’ clock shadow. And the tightly coiled masseter muscles in his jaw.
“Hmm.” He nods.
I’d be blind not to notice the way he effortlessly weaves through the many different clusters of dance partners, some easily coordinated, and others fighting their two left feet.
Niklaus has been a natural since we were children.
Not just with dancing, but everything we do.
Much like Krimson, he either adapts quickly to perfection or obsesses over what he’s not good at until he excels past his peers.
I, on the other hand, had to spend years fumbling and conditioning myself to move around my two left feet. Twenty-one years old, and I’m a champion at these balls.
Unfortunately, Niklaus is a fucking prodigy. The man glides on clouds, walks on water, and moves with an unnatural grace to his steps.
Rigid arms tighten around my waist, and his hand drops to my lower back. My skin prickles under his hold, and for some reason, as his long fingers knead against the base of my spine—I feel it in my toes.
“And what about now?”
“Not the worst,” I choke out.
“But still pretty terrible.”
I nod. His eyelashes are so long. What a ridiculous detail to notice. I shift my gaze away from the way his throat shifts as he swallows.
“And now?” Niklaus dips me backward, lowering my weight with effortless ease.
And I let my head fall back with the blood rushing to my face. It feels way too good to let his hand arch my lower back like this. Why the hell does it feel that good?
I’m brought back slowly, meeting his eyes as he holds me a breath away.
“Good,” I say, and I swear, if I breathe a little heavier, my lips will touch his. That small movement would bring me into this grasp.
“Better.”
I’m twirled around once, but instead of sending me to the next partner, Niklaus tugs me into his chest again, skipping the swap with a possessiveness I haven’t seen in him before.
“Why did you do it?” I blurt out. Maybe it’s the alcohol. Maybe it’s the familiarity of this setting that’s giving me flashbacks.
“Do what?”
“Kiss me.”
“Hmm?”
“You took my first kiss.” I hold my breath. “I didn’t give it to you. You took it from me.”
“I remember,” he says.
“Well, why did you do it?! I wanted Dorn to be my first kiss! I spent hours getting ready for that ball. HOURS!” I look around in embarrassment after raising my voice. “How could you do that to me?”
Not that he hasn’t done worse. But that one stung. That one left me sobbing all night, still in my ballgown.
Niklaus darts his eyes away, unable to look at me. He raises his eyebrows and nods for me to look over at the couple next to us.
“Answer m—”
The voice to my right cuts me off. Cuts off my thoughts. Cuts off my oxygen.
“I guess it’s finally time for Aurick and me to get acquainted, hmm?” my father says in a low voice, hovering his mouth close to my mother’s cheek.
He attended this ball? How? He was a patient…
“Nooooo, absolutely not,” my mother responds, trying to block his view of Niklaus’s father.
Patient Thirteen twirls her around his finger. “You think I’m going to cause a scene?”
My father is dressed in an expensive, charcoal tuxedo that looks too tight around the arms and shoulders.
And I have to pause, hold my breath, blink away the drunkenness clouding my eyes.
Because the way he looks at my mother is a confused mix of a ferocious restraint not to fall for her and a devastating hopelessness because he knows it’s too late.
He’s fallen.
Though he’s trying hard to hide it, it’s blatantly obvious.
My father’s eyes are so dark, so cruel, they’re almost evil. Murder, torture, an eagerness to inflict pain in creative ways…yet there is a tenderness as they rest on her face, studying her concerned expression. A silent yearning to touch her. A hesitation to show her how black his soul really is.
Something about it all makes me want to cry.
“Let’s go.” Niklaus leads us away from my parents.
“No, please…” I’m at a loss for words. I need to see him just a moment longer. I need see how he treats her. If he is everything they said he was. I need to know…
“Now, Spitfire!”
The room blurs and sways as I stumble on my heels further and further away.
My father steps toward Aurick in a dominant confrontational stance.
And I want to scream for him. Tell him who I am.
Ask him if he ever wanted children. If he would have wanted a daughter.
If he truly loved our mother. I want to beg him not to fall into the coma.
I just want him to know me!
“Bad man back!” Dellilian’s urgency floods my veins with a spark of soberness.
Even with a queasy stomach, drooping eyes, and unstable balance—I spot him in the back of the ballroom.
Among the curtained shadows, hidden from the golden honey lights.
But he can’t hide that hideous face, even if this castle is full of women wearing enough paint on their lips and cheeks to paint a masterpiece in the grand hall.
“Shit!” I sputter, turning to sprint behind Niklaus.
“Yeah, shit,” he agrees.
As we bump into drunk couples, bursting through the backdoors of the castle, I throw off my shoes and run as fast as I can. We don’t have weapons on us. No knives, swords, or ways of getting rid of this psychopath.
But do we really need them? Niklaus and I have been training damn near our entire lives for this kind of crisis, right? Why can’t we fight him off ourselves?
“No fight! Must run!” Dellilian shouts in her fairy-light voice.
Evergreen branches whips across my skin. The night sky beams with sparkling stars and a waxing crescent moon. A charge of chilly gusts of wind whirl around us.
“Shit!” My feet crunch over twigs and roots, collecting splinters by the dozens.
“Don’t slow down!” Niklaus whispers-shouts over his shoulder.
“We can fight him though!”
Niklaus slows down to get a better look at me. He considers this.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about that too…”
“There’s two of us and one of him.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Are we really going to let him hunt us like this?”
“She’s right, Niklaus Demechnef. Are you really that frightened of me?” A storm of goose bumps, nausea, and disgust roll under my skin like a flesh-eating disease.
How Vrath managed to catch up to us, I don’t know. But there is a layer of betrayal in his eyes that we had the audacity to run at all.
“No, not frightened.” Niklaus takes a bold step toward him. “Your face does turn my stomach though.”
Vrath reaches for his face before freezing in place. Those giant eyes slipping to the shadows behind us, jumping back and forth in soundless astonishment.
“You are cheating!” he hisses in disgust, a rare sight of explosive emotion. Two steps back. Vrath sticks out his plump bottom lip, appearing so much younger all at once. His inner child clawing its way to the surface.
“What?” I ask, whirling around to search for whatever he just saw in the shadows.
“I know what that is!” Is he hyperventilating? “You think I don’t know what you’ve brought to this world?”
Niklaus’s only reaction is a slow, bored blink. There’s an understanding in his posture that neither of us know what Vrath’s talking about, so there is no point in getting worked up with him.
“Stay back!” Vrath yanks out a black, gooey tree branch strapped to his back. “How could you…”
Not a tree branch. An antler. A sharp, spiked antler glazed and crusted in blood. He points it at the shadows behind us with a shaky hand, huffing and panting in great distress.
At this, Niklaus and I look back to the shadows under a dying tree. Nothing, I see noth—
“Back!” Vrath howls.
Dellilian emerges, crouched low with speckled paws lifted and stepping slowly, preying on the man in front of us as if he is some insignificant rodent she’s hunting for game.
A fine mist of coal and glimmers of amethyst light orbit the small, black wolf.
A charred cloud of night and an eerie quiet that eats away at the natural sound of the forest.
He’s scared of Dellilian?
Abruptly, Vrath reaches into his coat pocket in a burst of energy—fumbling with something wet and the color of a pale peach. It’s spread like a starfish, dripping, shining with a single piece of jewelry.
Oh my god, it’s a severed hand!
A woman’s hand!
I shriek as he squeezes what’s left of the chopped wrist until a small drizzle of dark cherry blood drenches his antler.
Vrath quickly marks the dirt with his deranged weapon coated in a woman’s blood.
And in a contained explosion of winter air, umbral clouds, and ink that breathes over us before we have a chance to run—he travels.
It isn’t like the few times I’ve triggered the ability. My moments seem to suck me in like a tornado. This way of traveling doesn’t feel right in any sense. It feels like the cold side of eternity has a gaping wound that Vrath invades like a virus. A place where light goes to rot.
And before I know it, that infectious ink blasts over us, dragging me into that festering wound without any opportunity to resist. My hands find Niklaus’s elbow, and I latch on until my knuckles turn white.
I can’t risk the possibility of me leaving him behind since I’m not the one calling the shots.
“Think of where you want to go, Spitfire! Think of somewhere you’ll feel safe!”