33
Alarie
Luke and I walked into one of the larger studies in the manor. Jay wore a three-piece deep blue suit with an even darker blue tie, so deeply blue it almost appeared black. Even though the bespoke suit fit him perfectly, it still seemed like his muscles were bulging under the fabric, like he could flex and the threads would tear down the seams.
I hadn’t seen Jay at breakfast that morning. He’d been in meetings all day, probably since before I was even out of bed. Today was the one day out of the month when most of his emissaries would come to the manor for a full debrief. Luke and I usually gave our reports to the high lord together since we worked over the same High Court events together.
“So, I’ll see you tonight?” I asked Luke, finishing up our conversation as we all made our way toward the large desk in the center of the room.
“Of course, Al. Who the fuck else am I going to dance with? Rhett?” he quipped, gifting me one of his glorious, toothy smiles.
I laughed.
Closing the door behind us, Jay quipped, “Luke, perhaps you could refrain from flirting with Alarie long enough to give me your report?”
“Sorry, Jay,” Luke replied, his tone making it plain that he was not sorry at all.
“Is this one of the times that you don’t want me to pretend to be Alarie’s boyfriend?” Luke asked, the smile disappearing completely from my friend’s face.
“Luke, what are you talking about?” I demanded.
Luke looked pointedly at Jay.
“What is he talking about, Jay?” When Jay did not immediately answer my question, I followed up with, “Did you ask him to pretend to be my boyfriend as some sort of cover for us?”
“Well, Alarie, you wanted things to remain a secret throughout your first year as liaison,” Jay replied.
“We agreed to keep it a secret,” I corrected him. “But, Jay, I never asked that Luke help us hide it.”
“You didn’t have to, love. I’m the Lord of Whispers. I’m the one who handles what’s said behind closed doors here at Court.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you ask?” he retorted.
“I didn’t know I needed to.”
“Exactly, Alarie. Like everything else, you left it to me, and I took care of it,” he said.
And his point sunk into me like a blade, buried to its hilt in my side. He was right. I didn’t question the way everything in my life just went perfectly since I’d gotten involved with him. I didn’t ask questions about how things got paid for or what needed to be taken care of.
When I’d arrived on Jay’s doorstep, I’d been so independent to the point of self-isolation. But with Jay, I’d submitted to him not only in our intimate moments together but completely. I’d let him make every decision to do with me, and I didn’t even question it. It had been such a relief, for once in my life, to have someone take care of me. But at that moment, I didn’t even know the wage I was being paid as liaison or even where my money was being kept. My insides churned at this realization, at the dichotomy to what I used to be.
“Jay—”
“Alarie, we’ll talk about this later,” he interjected, cutting me off.
“Report,” he barked, looking back at Luke.
Luke looked at me. I nodded, letting him know I wanted to move on. Pushing past the awkwardness of the moment, Luke and I began our report to the high lord.
“Cole’s been conspicuously missing from Court lately,” Luke began. “As you can imagine, no one particularly misses Cole’s charm, but him missing his own House soiree a couple of weeks ago started some chatter. House Tragon has remained silent on the reason for his sparsity.”
“Pretty much, Cole has missed every court function the last couple of weeks. No one has seen him for more than a minute or two,” I added in.
“Cole and House Tragon are hiding something,” Luke concluded.
“The other day, Cole referred to Cass by his first name. That’s weird, right? How could he possibly know Cass?” I asked, bewildered.
Jay nodded in agreement, forgetting our prior rift.
“I have no doubt that they’re up to something,” he growled. “I just can’t figure out what. Before, there was a silence around them that I thought may have been because of my fading powers. But even with my powers returning, it’s like there is a shield around their whispers, keeping them from me. But I know every person who is capable of that kind of shield and none of them would work for House Tragon,” Jay said, letting his aggravation show.
When we were finished with our report, Luke moved toward the door of the study, holding it open for me. I looked back at Jay.
“I’m going to hang back for a minute, Luke,” I said, failing to hide my irritation.
Throughout the entirety of our report to the high lord, I had sat there fuming at the way Jay had pulled his high-lord card, ending our conversation prematurely.
“Ok, Al. I’ll see you tonight,” Luke said, squeezing my arm with his large hand and then closing the door behind him.
I turned on Jay.
“What the fuck, Jay?”
I was angry with him, but I was angrier at myself that I’d let myself get into such a vulnerable position without even realizing it.
Jay rose in his chair. “Alarie, don’t—” he started, adopting his high-lord veneer.
“No. You don’t, Jay,” I interrupted.
I’d never spoken to him that way before. Not even when I’d found him with Lady Vitruvian. But I felt violated, like my best friend had been turned against me as a spy.
“Alarie, you will lower your voice,” the high lord ordered.
He had never taken that tone with me before. Although he did not raise his voice, the power in his words, his power, seemed to fill the crevice of every corner in the room, compelling me to obey. Even in the beginning, when he had been my forbidding tutor, I’d felt an innate kindness within him. But as he stood addressing me in his study, that underlying warmth was gone. I stood there, stunned.
And then another thought came to me, about his powers, about him controlling the whispers at the High Court and “keeping me safe,” while he was away so many nights.
“Jay, do you… Do you listen to the things I say, to what people say to me?” I asked.
I now looked at him, wondering where the man I loved ended and the Lord of Whispers started or if there could, in fact, be any daylight found between the two.
“Alarie, how else do you expect me to keep you safe when I can’t be around you? When I have to be away from the High Court so often?” he said, the muscles in his jaw clenched.
I felt a chill shoot down my arms and then my spine. He had been spying on me.
“Alarie, you know about Ala—You know what I lost when I wasn’t able to be there before. I won’t, I can’t, ever let that happen again.”
I softened, just a bit, at the long lifetime of pain and guilt he had put himself through for things that were not his fault. But the sympathy in my eyes seemed to strike a nerve with the high lord.
“I have other emissaries outside the door waiting to make their reports. We’ll talk about this later,” he said coldly, dismissing me.
He had always encouraged me to speak my mind and challenge him as long as I didn’t do it in front of others. That was part of our deal—I gave him “Yes, Jays” in the bedroom but maintained control of my life outside of the bedroom. Or, at least, that was what I’d thought was our deal.
He had never tried to overtly tell me what to do outside of the bedroom. He was ruining the delicate balance of our relationship by pulling the high-lord card on me like this. I raised my eyebrows in disbelief before turning to the door, calming my face so that the other emissaries waiting in the hall would not notice anything unusual, and left without another word.
I caught up to Luke walking toward House Bellamy.
“Luke,” I called out to him. “Luke.”
Luke stopped, waiting for me to catch up. He hadn’t gone very far. He’d probably been waiting on me, knowing Jay well enough to know that my conversation with the high lord was not going to go over well or take very long.
“Al,” he said, his lips pressed into a sideways smirk.
“Luke…” And before I could stop myself, I blurted, “Have you just been pretending to be my friend?” I was questioning something I’d never thought to question before. “Am I just one more piece on the game board that is the High Court for you and Jay to play with and I didn’t realize it?”
I looked down, unable to meet his eyes, scared of what his answer would be.
Luke grabbed my chin, gently tilting my face up to him.
“Al, how can you even ask me that?” he replied fiercely. “I did what Jay asked because I thought that was what you wanted—I thought you wanted to be with him. I thought you wanted to keep things quiet between you two.”
“I did. I mean, I do. But I guess I just didn’t realize you and I were just pretending,” I said.
“I wasn’t pretending, Al. Not in the way you are thinking. When I’m with you—” He stopped himself. “Well, Al, what did you think we were doing?” he asked me.
I looked down at my hands hidden between his big hands.
“I—”
The truth was that I’d never thought to question the nature of my relationship with Luke. It had always just felt so natural. And I’d never thought about how Jay, who had used every man I’d ever touched as the basis for some kind of lesson, had never said anything to me—at least not since the Summer Ball—regarding how Luke and I were so close.
“I don’t know, Luke. You’re you. You’re—” I struggled to find the right words. “You’re my best friend,” I said, lamely, feeling that “best friend” did not really capture what I had been going for either. I held onto his hand, squeezed it once, then dropped it to my side in hopes of conveying in that one silent gesture what I could not put to words.
Luke looked like he was going to say something, then changed his mind.
“Don’t tell Rhett that,” Luke joked. “He’ll get jealous for sure.”
And even then, when I felt like my carefully curated life at the High Court was falling apart, he made me laugh.
For the first time that I could remember, Jay was in town but was not waiting for me at the manor that evening when I got home. And I did not seek him out. Instead, I went to bed dressed in something other than a Vitruvian-blue nightgown, wondering what other strings Jay was controlling in my life that I’d not even thought to question.
Jay’s power play that afternoon had definitely proven one thing to me—the game he and I played all of these months was no longer fun. Before, we both knew that there was nothing behind my flirtations with other lords. It was just a part of my High Court facade. Instead, we’d used my teasing the other lords and Jay’s feigned jealousies as harmless fuel for our passion.
But since the incidents with Lady Vitruvian and Stefan, I guess his jealousies were no longer pretend, and our game was no longer fun. I knew the high lord’s tiff with Luke had less to do with Luke in the moment and everything to do with the fact that the game we played was irretrievably broken.