Chapter 21 Hopped Up #2
My gaze travels to her bed, heaped with stuffed raccoons, and the buzz of my phone breaks me out of a dangerous daydream. A text from Noah. “Basketball at the palace. ASAP?”
Ella rests her chin on me and reads over my shoulder. “Do you have to?” she sighs.
I grunt. “I should.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“He probably thinks I’m at the office.”
She looks up with an expression I’ve been calling her “math face” since I tutored her for the college entrance exams. “Five minutes to the car. Thirteen minutes to drive—”
“It’s Friday night. The traffic is awful,” I say, removing her glasses and setting them aside so I don’t smudge the lenses. “It’s at least twenty minutes to cross town.”
“Another three minutes from the car park,” I drag her around to the front of me.
She adds an extra five minutes to the timer on her phone. “You stopped to talk to one of the footmen on the way in.”
She tosses the phone, and when I kiss her she laughs. She always laughs.
We’re not laughing when we hear a tap on the door. I lift my head and scowl at the nearest clock. We have ten more minutes.
“Ella?” Freja’s voice calls through the door and Ella pushes me off the couch. I land with a thud.
“It’s fine,” I whisper, “we’re just gaming.” We prearranged a cover story for just this eventuality.
“Have you seen yourself?” she hisses. Grabbing my face, she points it at a mirror, her voice low and urgent. “You look like you’ve been attacked by the dragon of Sondmark. Moreover, you’re supposed to be fighting traffic.”
“Ella.” Freja’s voice, slightly impatient, carries through the door and Ella drags me to my feet and stuffs me into her closet, really putting her back into it when I won’t move as fast as she likes.
“Hey—” I catch her hand as she turns, tugging her in for a deep kiss, picking out her shape with my fingertips in the velvety darkness.
I get her to lose herself for a moment before she breaks free. Taking a huge breath, she kicks me in the shins. The low sound of my laugh dissolves in the shadows.
“Coming,” Ella calls. I watch the sisters through a crack in the door. “Sorry,” she says, her acting pretty plausible. “The mechanism must be glitching.”
Freja is quiet and her eyes narrow on Ella’s face. “Did you have shellfish?”
“What?”
“Your face is red and your lips are swollen. You know you’re not supposed to eat shrimp when you’re alone. Let me call Doctor Frum—”
“I’m fine,” Ella replies. “I took a pill. I’m already past the worst of it.” I sometimes forget how well she lies when I’m not looking for it. “What brings you to my lair?”
“Oskar and I had dinner with Mama and Père,” Freja says, looking over Ella’s shoulder. I shrink into the shadows, my heart beating loudly in my ears.
“Both of them at the same time?” Ella asks, resting her hand on the doorframe, blocking it.
“They’re putting on a good show for Oskar,” Freja answers.
“Of course. Putting on shows is what we do.”
I frown at the bitterness in her voice. Ella is not like her sisters.
If her nanny wrestled her into those little-girl dresses with the white collars, she’d march herself through the nearest puddle.
She would make faces at the paparazzi and melt down on the tarmac whenever her mother’s plane lifted off while everyone else was standing sedately.
She used to tear through the administration wing, upsetting the royal order with a laugh no one but her mother could resist.
She’s not laughing now.
Freja dips her head. “Can I come in? We could talk about it.”
“I’m just headed out,” Ella says. She reaches for a hoodie, shoves her phone into her pocket, and bundles Freja into the hall, staring pointedly at the crack in the closet before she goes.
I check my phone, the screen illuminating the closet. 20:49. I’m still supposed to be on the road.
I settle into a low chair and begin responding to work emails. This used to exhaust me but it’s become more like a simple game of Drop Bloks. Every line I strike off my to-do list means more time to be with Ella. This part of the arrangement is working out, more or less as I hoped.
Eventually she returns and worms her way into my lap. “I had to walk her to her car, say hi to Oskar…”
I tug the ears of her hoodie until it falls away, nuzzling her cold skin. “You’re keeping her at arm’s distance.”
Ella tenses. “Would you rather have me invite her in?”
I breathe against her neck. “Your family isn’t doing well.”
She releases a sharp-edged laugh. “Ten points for Team van Heyden.”
“Reporters haven’t worked out that your parents aren’t the happy couple they present themselves as?”
She dips her head, planting a soft kiss on my earlobe, following it with the brush of her thumb. “Not yet. There isn’t a whisper of it in the press. My sisters have them distracted with their ever-growing baggage train of calamities. Thank heaven for small miracles.”
I catch her hand, holding on to my sanity. “What are you going to do about it?”
She lifts her head. “These aren’t my problems. Mama and Père have been keeping separate quarters for more than a year. Every one of my sisters is going her own way. I haven’t done anything but show up and do as I’m told.”
My arms crisscross her back. “Family is everything. You can’t abandon them when they need you.”
“Marc.” My name on her lips is threaded through with hurt. Vede, I didn’t mean it as an accusation. “They don’t want to be rescued.”
I gather her closer, burying myself in the crook of her neck. “You’re such a middle child, though. You’re not happy unless everyone is happy.”
“False. I want them to suffer.”
“No you don’t.” I think of the Bible verses, committed to memory. Love is patient, love is kind. It is not proud… This is Ella.
“It’s not my job to solve my family.”
“We don’t always get to choose the things destiny lays at our door.” The words sound pompous but I kiss her neck to soften them.
“Destiny? I thought you were a thoroughgoing Lutheran,” Ella says, taking this chance to turn to some less demanding topic.
I was raised Lutheran, my mother a great believer in equipping me with the tools to live in the world I would one day inherit, but I have just enough of a connection to my Seongan heritage to perform the ancestral rites and mean them.
“I can’t dismiss destiny,” I answer. I can’t shrug away the idea of the heavens bending to some foregone destination. Leading me here.
The alarm chimes. Our time is up.
“My family is going to make their own choices,” she says, tapping her phone.
I should be leaving the car park by now, coming up the rain-soaked walk on the north side of the palace, but I don’t want to leave Ella, especially now.
“My hands are clean when it comes to my family. Their issues have nothing to do with me.”
“I think you’re better than that,” I counter.
She looks deeply into my face. “Do you think I’m being selfish?”
I take a breath. “Your family needs you. With a little mercy, a little grace—”
“The Lutheran has returned.” She shrugs off my arms and scrambles to her feet. “I could be one of those internet weirdos who goes no contact with their parents because they don’t recycle used batteries or Pankedruss lids. But no, my great crime is leaving people alone.”
“Ella—”
“We can’t all be Saint Marcus, loyal liegemen to the crown, Martyr of Lindenholm,” she mutters. The air crackles with hurt and frustration, but she’s also really cute when she goes on a tear.
“Ells.”
She points to the door. “Don’t leave my brother waiting.”
Vede. Noah. I give her a quick kiss and shrug on my jacket. “I’ll text you when I get home,” I say, helpfully unlatching her door mechanism when I pass through. The sound of the slam follows me down the hall and I grin.