Chapter 30
C HAPTER 30
RUBY
None of us has any idea what will happen when light comes on this final day—the relic is found, or it isn’t, and night comes with a new set of terrors.
We agree to rest, but I don’t know how any of us can sleep with these thoughts, scenarios, threats, probabilities piling up in a levee around us, and we’re already neck-deep in water.
I’m not a witch, but I’m not safe. Not even remotely close.
If these people who can do magic aren’t sure how to get out now, I’m not sure how Wren or I have a shot of survival either.
I’ve sunk into the corner of the sofa in Ursula’s front room, my sister and everyone else all gone to rest until daylight, when all I seem to be able to do is stare at the ceiling until the tiles blur. Maybe if I do finally shut my eyes, I’ll wake, all of it a bad dream, staining my thoughts and soaking my sheets with sweat.
I force my eyes closed—and that’s exactly when the scent of mint and lavender invades my presence along with a steady voice. “Take a walk with me?”
Skin, warm and clean, cradles my elbow—not a dream, then.
There’s Auden, apparently fresh from the shower with wet hair and scrubbed skin and eyes too bright for the hour. My heart catches in my chest, my cheeks go hot, and I swear he must be watching them pink in real time because his lips kick up.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
We haven’t talked about how I claimed his hand on our way to the killing grounds. And yet now, his fingers slip into mine. Perhaps there’s something in the past I’m not reading in their shared, prickly history. Still, this is my present. My stomach flips, unsure of what happened between my choice to reach out and now. Unsure of the distance between where we were upon the old ghosts of our “reintroduction” and now.
He’s healed me.
Lied for me.
Weathered a knife attack with me.
Found relics with me.
And now, we’ve built to this. Whomever we were before is not who we are now, navigating this space and time, the cold, dark hour before the dawn of the day when we must complete Ursula’s tasks or accept that forever for us is within these grounds, within these crumbling walls.
Auden winds us down the hall and to the right, down another hall. And maybe it’s the movement, but my brain finally unsticks and jogs up to meet us, words forming on my tongue as I realize he’s taking me deeper into Ursula’s maze of rooms.
“Are you planning to show me a way out of this mess? A secret portal, perhaps? Because, if so, that probably would best be shared with the group.”
He arches a brow toward his soft brown hair, shiny and curling at the ends. “And shared much earlier. But no. What I’m about to share is just for you, Lavinia Blackgate.”
I force myself to smile at the name. “What—”
His hand on the small of my back ends my question. Auden maneuvers us left, and through a door that had been previously closed.
The walls in here are the same muted burgundy of a dried rose petal, cracks running like marble veins beneath the plaster as gas sconces reflect moodily off its dark complexion. Chaise lounges in various gilded configurations run a rough rectangle around the room, a large, handwoven rug at the center, atop the plush carpeting. It smells of ink, flame, and steeped Earl Grey.
And there, in stacks and baskets along the floor, are dozens—hundreds—of paperback mysteries, overflowing like bushels of apples in autumn. I recognize at least a dozen titles from my bookseller life in the stacks at Agatha’s.
“You… were going to share this room with me?” I ask, a little sheepish and very confused.
My thoughts don’t clear as Auden leaves my side to retrieve something from a small table by the door. A jar… of peanut butter? Two silver spoons peek out over the top like bunny ears.
“The peanut butter. I find it to be restorative late at night.” He smirks, but gestures to our surroundings and meets me in the middle of the rug. “Though you’re welcome to share the room too. It’s technically the sewing room, but I’m fairly certain Ursula never actually sewed a day in her life. My best educated guess is she hid away in here with her tea and read paperbacks when no one was looking.”
This woman, who orchestrated the death of Marcos Blackgate out of grief for her children’s choices, who put us in the impossible position we’re in now, who was so very powerful… and yet still human. With stories, a warm mug, and a need to get away from it all.
A knot of anguish balls in my throat.
I accept a spoon, sit on the floor, back to a chaise, and inspect one of the paperbacks on top of the nearest pile—Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None .
I hope that’s not the way our story ends tomorrow—all dead, save the killer.
Auden joins me on the floor, unscrews the cap, rips off the safety seal, and offers me the first glorious spoonful of creamy, perfectly smooth peanut butter.
I blink at him. Falling back into my role of Lavinia, spelled to forget. “Did we—is this something we’ve done before?”
A smile plays at his mouth. It’s a good mouth. Hard to deny no matter who you are. “No, I didn’t learn the beauty of eating peanut butter straight from the jar until boarding school.”
With that, Auden serves himself his own heaping spoonful. We’re quiet for a few minutes. His shoulder nudges mine, the skin warm and more inviting than I’d like to admit for how stressful this night has been. How can this feel so comfortable when the walls are literally crumbling around us?
It occurs to me that the lavender and mint I’m smelling must be the shampoo his grandmother used, yet Auden wears it like his own skin, his fine features, his strong body, and poetic mind.
Mostly to stop thinking about his nearness, I muse, “I don’t know how we’re supposed to sleep. I don’t think I can.”
Auden presses a thumb to his full bottom lip, and I find a frayed thread in the chaise across from us to accept all of my scattered attention so I don’t stare at his mouth. “What is the thing you’re worried most about?”
The uncertainty. What Hector will do. What Marsyas has planned.
Being found out as imposters.
Losing my sister.
Losing you.
Throat bobbing, I ask him a question instead. “How do you feel about what Evander had to say?”
“The lies?”
“Yes.”
Everything that’s come to light lines up in my mind, in neat little rows among the disaster of this weekend.
His parents’ deaths. Marcos Blackgate’s role. Hector’s deception, his counterparts’ silence. Ursula’s punishment. Evander’s blackmail. Infinity’s meeting. Ada’s title. Hex holding a candle for Winter. Winter’s feelings for someone else—who is looking more and more like Infinity. Infinity, who smelled of Winter’s perfume first thing this morning.
The remaining hidden secrets belong to Auden, my sister, and me.
I wonder if this is apparent to him too. That we’re the only ones left on the table with our cards unturned.
Auden brushes the curling ends of his wet hair off his face. His elbows land on his knees, bare in yet another pair of athletic shorts, the points of them slotting perfectly into the little dips where his quads attach to the tops of his knees. It’s so distracting that if anything is going to calm my mind enough to induce sleep, it might be the surprises he’s been hiding in plain sight.
“Everyone lies, Lavinia, even if they call them secrets instead.”
His eyelashes brush his cheeks as he responds. So many of the mystery books I’ve read, so many of the ones in this room, posit that a person is lying if they look away.
Feeling brave, and perhaps a bit intoxicated about the nearness of Auden in a private room with our terrible reality pressing in and coming closer by the minute, I reach out and crook a finger beneath his chin.
I tilt his face up. And hope that by asking him, he won’t ask me. Honestly, as our secrets scratch the surface, I don’t know if I can hold mine back anymore.
My secret is a lie, and the lie is a secret.
It may not have started as mine, but it is now, and it might be mine to my grave.
“Is yours a secret or a lie, Auden?”
He watches me, his blue-brown eyes sparkling even in the dim, pupils blown wide. This time, he doesn’t look away.
“Depends on your point of view.”
Suddenly, he’s so close that I feel his breath on my cheek, warm and sweet. Now I’m the one compelled to look away, overwhelmed by his nearness.
I dip my spoon into the peanut butter again. This bite sticks to the roof of my mouth as much as my bones, but Auden doesn’t hurry me into more tit for tat. He just sits there, calmly watching the fire crackle in yet another white-marble hearth, his skin still touching mine at the shoulder and now at the place where my cross-legged stance meets the swell of his calf.
After a moment, I make up my mind, gut clenching. My gaze firmly set on the flames, I say, “You aren’t going to ask me if I have a secret? A lie?”
“No.”
My heart stutters. “Why?”
To my surprise, Auden laughs. Low and soft. “Lies and secrets, that’s how the Four Lines have survived. It’s how we’ll keep surviving if we get past this. As much as they hurt and destroy, at their heart many lies, and certainly secrets, are held close to keep a person and those they love safe.”
Auden screws the lid back on the peanut butter, and when he balances his spoon atop it, I add mine to form a little X . When I’ve got it set and pull back, I’m surprised when he softly snatches my hand for himself.
Again. Purposefully.
He turns toward me, though his attention is on our fingers, laced. Unquestionably, two made one. He’s become very good at avoiding my bunny bracelets.
Somehow, what he says next feels even more intimate.
“I’ll keep you safe, Lavinia.”
Auden looks to me then, with those beautiful eyes, the refined features, the curling wet hair, and my throat catches. I swear he’s closer than before. His breath warming my cheeks.
When I’d first met Auden, I thought his smile was dangerous—that he was the kind of boy who’d wreck you.
But I was wrong.
He’s the one who is already crashed and smoldering.
Scar tissue and burn marks from losing his parents, his innocence. Now, his grandmother is gone, his sense of community, family, order.
I’m not the one who can give any of it back.
But I’m the one who’s here.
Auden’s hands are in my hair, as warm and wonderful as the rest of him. Up close, those eyes are a starburst, dark lashes crowding round, his lips pink on that very nice mouth. One thumb grazes the apple of my cheek.
His lashes flutter, my eyes fall closed, and Auden Hegemony kisses me.
It’s tentative and sweet. He tastes of mint and, yes, peanut butter, but it’s the lavender in his hair and on his skin that seeps into me as I touch his neck, the fine ridge of a clavicle, biceps and forearms and a back made from hard work and time on the lacrosse pitch.
With each new breath, the hesitation evaporates.
For Auden. For me.
His mouth presses hard, more insistent. One of his hands cups the back of my head, the other bracing beside me, on the expensive weave of his grandmother’s rug. The peanut butter jar tips and rolls, the spoons skidding away under one of the chaises, and I laugh a little against his lips, but he doesn’t stop kissing me.
He doesn’t stop until much later, until we peel apart, gasping for air in a room now overly warm. Heat in our blood, flames in the hearth. Still, even now, Auden holds me as if I might disappear, though I’m flush to his side, temples to ankles.
I’m not my sister—I love to write, but I don’t have words for what it’s like kissing a boy who thinks I’m so much more than I am. And so, instead of words, I press my lips to his cheek.
In answer, when I pull away, Auden’s thumb traces my swollen bottom lip, the divot of the dimple I have on one side. “Despite the way the rest of this turned out, I’m glad you came back, Lavinia.”
For a moment—until he says the name that doesn’t belong to me—I think I could be Lavinia.
I could be her and we could share memories, and he could truly love me.
He’s glad for the presence of the girl he thinks I am.
And I don’t know what it says about me, but that feeling that hasn’t been earned by the person I am still wraps me up, tight and warm. Safe.
I tuck my head against the side of his chest and whisper, “Me too.”
Auden’s fingers in the ends of my hair, his strong arm curled around my shoulders, the soft rhythm of his heart give me refuge and I fall into a deep, beautiful sleep.