Chapter Twenty-Four
An hour later, I stood alone in an unlit room, my back pressed against the door.
I had come to get away from—not Eliot, I insisted to myself— everything .
The constant buzz of the orchestra, like an insectile hum drowning out all attempts at conversation; the dusted golden light of the chandeliers that stuck like pollen in my nose; Noé, at the center of the party even when he was hovering at its edge, his indecipherable gaze flickering occasionally my way.
Why are you blushing?
I started as the wood I was leaned against shuddered—once, twice. Someone was knocking at my door.
“Lovett.” I knew his voice from its first syllable, as surely as if it were my own. “I know you’re in there.”
I fisted my hands at my sides. I’d taken refuge in a vacant drawing room, one of many empty spaces that pocked the Alaires’ estate like sores. Theoretically, nothing was stopping me from feigning absence, staying quiet until my visitor wentaway.
And yet, just as surely as I’d recognized him by the sound of his call, I understood I would not do that.
Exhaling, I forced myself to call out, “What do you want?”
“To talk, Lovett.” Eliot spoke wearily, his words one long, resigned sigh. “Let me in.”
I considered refusing him only for a second before I twisted around to grasp the doorknob. Eliot blinked when I yanked the door open, his left arm still raised to knock.
“Excuse me,” I deadpanned. “Am I blushing again?”
My jab seemed to bring him back to himself. Averting his eyes, he slipped by me, across the threshold and into the darkened room. “Noé will notice that you left early.”
I closed the door behind him, peering out to ensure we had not been seen. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have followed me,then.”
Eliot huffed through his nose. Despite his level tone, I noticed that he, too, appeared more frayed than he’d been in the ballroom, with a harried, restless energy like a quivering thread. “As I seem to be constantly reiterating to you, I am trying to help—”
I put a hand to my chest in false shock. “Is that what you are trying to do? I wouldn’t know. You seem to muddle every situation you interfere in.”
His eyes rolled. “Please. You make your own messes; it is only that you do not notice until I appear to clean them up.” His gaze tracked me as I stepped nearer to him, ready to counter my rebuttal—but before I could speak, a change seemed to pass over him.
He swallowed, his chest dipping with an exhale.
“Forget that,” he said, a second later. “I don’t know why I…
” briefly, he drifted off, then started again.
“I came here only to assure you that the irritation Noé showed tonight will fade,” he continued, in a firmer tone.
“It should be a simple task for you to win him over again. There is a book he read recently which he loves—I’ll find out the title.
The next time you speak, you could bring it up. ”
“A book,” I repeated, doubtfully.
Then, shaking my head, “This is ridiculous. A book cannot save us. This partnership has been doomed from the start.”
Eliot froze a few feet from me, his eyes owllike in the dimness. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why did you pick me, Eliot?” I asked.
His first name was familiar on my lips, though I’d never spoken it aloud before.
“I was no one—a penniless thief you met in a hotel lobby, with a halfway useful Wit and no good breeding to speak of. Any other silkwitch would have been a more appropriate choice for your bargain than me. So why not choose one of them?”
Eliot looked blankly at me. He hadn’t expected my question, I knew—would have preferred, likely, to keep fighting. But all the anger had gone out of me, and I could not battle him any longer. “I thought you wanted this,” he said finally. “Our bargain.”
“I do want it,” I replied, the words ripping from me as if torn.
“I want a life free of the cloisters, and I want comfort and wealth, and I want to win . And you— you— are ruining all of it.” I pressed a palm to my chest, where my heart beat fiery and sore—his work.
Before him, I had only ever run cold. “You are ruining me.”
“And you think you’re not doing the same to me?
” Eliot did not move toward me, but it was as if we were locked together; his stare was unwavering and furious, holding me fast. “Do you really believe I want to think of you as often as I do?” he asked.
“Do you think I enjoy it, watching Noé put his hands on you and then bowing to him afterward, calling him my brother ? Lying awake at night, haunted by the image of you in his arms, over the memory of my own sister?” He swiped a hand over his brow, his outrage draining away, breaking like a storm.
“You are ruining me , Lovett,” he asserted softly. “You have destroyed me.”
My breaths were shallow. With his speech, the air in the room seemed to have gone, replaced by something that fizzed drunkenly in my mind like champagne. “Sometimes,” I said, “I think I detest you.”
He chuckled at that. “Well,” he said dully. “I wish you would. Sisters know, your hatred would be far easier to bear than this.”
But I hadn’t finished, and we’d come much too far to turn back now.
“How dare you act as if I’m some—some devil come to curse you?
” I said, advancing another pace toward him.
“As if you did not bring this on yourself—on both of us. This”—I pointed wildly between us—“has been with us since the beginning, Eliot. From the day we crossed paths at the Diplomat, it has been growing, and you were the only one of us with the power to uproot it.” I paused, my lungs full of searing oil.
“You knew my circumstances. You knew I was too desperate to refuse a chance at a better future, if one was extended to me—but you…You chose me, Eliot. You chose this. And I completely and utterly detest you for it—”
It happened so quickly, slid like a stray page between the seconds—there was stillness, and then Eliot was moving, crossing to me and cupping my chin, tilting my mouth up to meet his.
His lips were dry and firm, and they felt like relief, like an answer I’d waited too long to hear.
I kissed him back without hesitation, my arms twining naturally around his neck.
I followed his movements, only partially aware as we stumbled backward, as my shoulders came to rest once more against the door.
He drew away a half inch when I gasped, as if checking to see whether I was all right, but when I pulled him toward me again, he did not protest. I think we both understood that if we disrupted the moment even for a second, if we paused to examine it, we would see ourselves clearly, and it would all break.
Instead, I let him keep me close, his chest flush with mine, my caul cast to the floor and his fingers tangling in my loose hair as his mouth met mine again and again.
I felt euphoria and desire and yearning; above all of them, though, I felt in my bones a powerful and abiding anger, the depth of which I’d never experienced before.
I wanted to inhale him, consume him; I wanted to devour him and then finally, finally be rid of him, and I knew by the hungry way he touched me that he felt it, too.
We were each of us desperate to be sated, and maddeningly unable to get our fill.
We separated only at the sound of voices in the corridor outside.
Eliot’s hands were braced on either side of my shoulders, his fingers splayed and his exhales coming hard.
I didn’t look at him, only waited with his breaths gusting over me as the speakers drew nearer, then passed us by.
Their chatter was urgent, lowered with worry.
Once they were gone, Eliot’s shoulders relaxed, his forehead pressing faintly against mine. “Lovett,” he whispered. His voice was delicate, earnest, and it undid something within me—the grudge I’d kept like a knot around my center.“I—”
“Lear!” Another shout, louder and more distant, as if the caller were crying from several corridors away. Cursing, Eliot raised his head and stepped back, finger-combing his mussed curls. Once he’d composed himself, he nodded to me, then motioned at the closed door.
“We should be going.”
Obligingly, I moved out of his way but made no attempt to follow him out. When he paused, looking questioningly back at me, I said, “Noé can’t see you leave with me.”
The words struck him—I saw how he tensed, though he tried to disguise the reaction, as if I’d tossed a pail of water in his face.
Even so, my resolve did not falter. “I would be sent home tonight, Eliot,” I said.
“No respectable Weaver would wed me after such a scandal. Unless you’ve changed your mind about marrying a silkwitch. ”
He was quiet then, his hand still grasping the doorknob. Though it was hard to tell in the dimness, I thought I detected a shift in his expression—a wavering of his disposition—and against my better judgment, I felt hope bud behind my sternum.
It only made the sting worse when he looked away.
“Wait five minutes, then follow,” he said flatly.
He pushed the door open, glancing back when he was halfway over the threshold.
“I—I did not intend to ruin you, Lovett,” he added.
His tone was restrained, as if he were clutching the admission tightly, frightened of it breaking free.
“If it gives you any comfort, the destruction has been mutual.”
Then he was gone, vanishing into the hallway.
I tried not to listen to the sound of his receding footsteps, the thump of each one driving the nail of his rejection farther into my spine.
I had not expected him to give a different answer; I knew him well enough by now, knew that someone so convicted to his morals , as Noé had once told me, would not shatter under the weight of a single kiss. And yet…
His denial had hurt me, and I was ashamed of the pain, because it meant I had let another emotion in.
After roughly five minutes had passed, I re-pinned my caul as best I could and exited the room.
I did not bother returning to the party—even if I were not too disheveled to consider making an appearance, I knew my mental state was fragile enough that I could not bear facing Noé, or the other maidens, before tomorrow—but I was surprised to find the halls were quiet as I made my way back to my quarters, devoid of the guests who’d spilled out from the ballroom when I’d fled it earlier.
The entirety of Fortblanche, in fact, seemed subdued, like a lamp turned down low, the raucous energy that the ball had sparked now extinguished. Had everyone gone home already?
I frowned. Perhaps my conversation with Eliot had gone on longer than I’d realized.
The maidens’ corridor was similarly abandoned, a night breeze snaking through the open arches and whipping against my neck.
As I crossed to my door, I noticed that Sybil’s was lolling open—not by much, just an inch or so, as if she’d forgotten to pull it closed when she’d left.
A day ago, I would’ve taken her negligence as a cue to enter, but exhaustion had settled too heavy in my bones; I simply shook my head and turned to my chamber.
The weariness fled from me as soon as I entered. From the back corner of my room, a solitary white light wavered, as spectral as a ghostly face in a window. Ophelia’s candle—which I’d left dark prior to departing for the party—was burning, seemingly of its own accord.
I nearly tripped over my feet, hurrying to my desk without bothering to shut the door behind me. My correspondent had written back.
Clustered around the base of the candle like fresh snowfall, four new slips of paper sweat trails of smoke. I sucked in a hiss as my fingers made contact with the first one—scorching—gritting my teeth until all of them lay unfurled in front of me.
As I read them, one by one, my heart dropped.
Did you take it?
Answer me.
You have no idea what you’ve done.
They will kill you for this.
My gaze was lingering on the last one, a bitter cold splitting my chest, when the knock came: an urgent one-two against mydoor.
Hurriedly blowing out the candle, I whirled around.
My pulse sped when I saw Clio Lavoie standing in the threshold of my room, her green dress belling around her.
The other maiden looked untidy—her long, dark hair had come partially loose from her caul and hung limply around her face.
Her arms were covered by a pair of white gloves, sagging below her elbows.
For a moment, we only stared at one another, her in the doorway and me positioned in front of the still-smoking candle, my chest tight with panic. Then Clio spoke.
“There you are,” she said. “They sent me to find you. They want all of us in the ballroom.”
Her tone was hollow and emotionless, her meaning hitting me a second later.
Her Wit—over the course of our limited interactions, I hadn’t given it much thought, but I recalled Eliot saying in the Diplomat that the other maiden had been blessed with perfect tracking.
Evidently, she’d turned her gift on me,but…
“Why?” I heard myself ask. My voice was high and breathy—guilty, I thought—but Clio didn’t seem to notice. “Has something happened?”
The other maiden bit her bottom lip. Her eyes, I realized suddenly, were glassy with tears, and I found myself caught up in the display of emotion, compelled by it.
Most of all, though, I was frightened by it.
“It’s Sybil,” Clio said. “She’s dead.”