Chapter Seventeen
Lucy’s mind felt uncomfortably full by the time she returned to Quincey Hall that night.
With sunset quickly approaching, she knew that she needed to use the brief pocket of calm to sort through her thoughts.
She certainly had enough of them to put in order.
And probably not a lot of time left to do so.
But her head was aching. Her brain itself felt sore, too stretched to be of much good. Thankfully, there were few things as strangely clarifying as an argument with Mila Rostova.
“I’m not saying you can’t do it,” Mila was saying as Lucy swung open the bathroom door. “I’m just saying that you’re cutting it close.”
“I’m not cutting it that close,” Lucy said. “It’s not even sunset. It’s barely pre-sunset.”
“Maybe,” Mila said. “But we can’t be completely sure what Vanya’s timing is. Like, does he need to wait until the last rays of light have left the sky, or can he start to move when it gets even a little bit dark?”
Lucy was going to take Mila by her beautiful shoulders and shake her. “I will be done well before it starts to get dark at all,” she said. “It’s a shower. I’ll be quick.”
“I don’t understand why it’s desperately urgent for you to wash your hair,” Mila said.
“Because I need to wash my hair,” Lucy said. “After the day I’ve had, I deserve to wash my hair. Would you like me to tell you about the day I’ve had again?”
Mila looked appallingly unmoved. Maybe it was because Lucy could only tell Mila about roughly half of the day she’d had.
She had to excise any parts about Laurentius’s offer.
But even leaving all that out, she’d been through more than enough to warrant the hottest shower known to man.
She had fully sweated through her pajamas tossing and turning the night before.
She had barely managed to take three bites of even the rarest meat they were able to find in the dining hall.
And she still hadn’t heard from Natalie.
Mila raked her hands through her hair. “Okay, okay, fine. Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “But I have a safeguard in mind. It’s just not going to be very comfortable.”
“I’m okay with that,” Lucy said. What had been comfortable about the past week? “I feel like dirty laundry. I probably look like dirty laundry. I’ll do anything.”
“You do not look like dirty laundry,” Mila said.
“Next to you I do,” Lucy said. “Everyone’s probably looking at us like, what is that beautiful Amazonian goddess doing with that sentient dumpster?”
Mila didn’t laugh. Which seemed fair enough to Lucy, at first—her sense of humor was among the many things that had suffered over the past week. But just as she was going to ask about this uncomfortable safeguard, Mila said, “Beautiful Amazonian goddess?”
“Well…yeah?” Lucy said. “Sorry. I could probably come up with a better descriptor if my hair was clean. About that safeguard—”
“Why would you say that?” Mila blurted out.
Lucy reeled back. She read Mila’s tone as anger, at first. But as they locked eyes, she recognized the look on Mila’s face. Total bafflement.
“No,” Mila added quickly. “Sorry. You need to shower.”
“Well, no. Now I have follow-up questions,” Lucy said, against her better judgment. “Are you actually embarrassed that I’m calling you beautiful?”
“I’m not embarrassed,” Mila said, which was a bold thing to say when she’d gone so uncharacteristically pink. “I’m just—surprised.”
“Surprised?” Lucy felt like she was having a stroke. “I thought I was being obvious.”
“Obvious when?” Mila said helplessly. “We’ve known each other for a week. You’ve been mad at me for half of it.”
“When we first met,” Lucy said, as if she could somehow jog Mila’s memory. “I blatantly hit on you.”
Mila looked at her like she was speaking French. “You were traumatized.”
“I was traumatized,” Lucy agreed. She could hear a warmth in her own voice that she would have thought she was too tired for. “And I was also hitting on you.”
Mila looked so utterly lost that it was Lucy’s turn to go pink.
She’d been so humiliated that night, when Mila had stepped out from behind the chapel.
So sure that she’d made a complete fool of herself, making eyes at someone who was eventually going to have to kill her.
And now it seemed as if Mila just…hadn’t noticed?
She needed to mercy-kill this conversation. Before they both dug themselves into respectively deeper holes. “I should, um, shower. What’s this safeguard?”
“Right. Fuck. We’re wasting time.” Mila whipped out a pair of handcuffs from behind her back.
“Mila!” Lucy said.
“I told you it would be uncomfortable!” Mila said. “But if I’m going to leave you alone next to a window, we should restrain you with something stronger than cloth.”
“Okay, sure! Understandable!” Lucy said. “But you couldn’t whip out the handcuffs before I started calling you beautiful?”
“Well, sorry! I’m clearly not familiar with handcuff etiquette!” Mila looked as if she wanted to melt into the bathroom tile. “And if you’re going to beat the sunset, you’re going to need to hurry.”
Lucy groaned. “Okay, yes,” she said. “Give them to me.”
Mila hesitated in the midst of passing them to her. “Do you want help putting them on? You’ll probably have to get undressed first, though.”
Lucy wasn’t usually one to kick someone when they were down. But in this scenario, she didn’t think a light prod would go amiss. “I’ve just told you that I think you’re beautiful,” she said, “and now you’d like me to strip naked so you can handcuff me?”
The handcuffs were deposited in Lucy’s hands faster than she could blink. “I’ll leave so you can put them on.”
“That’s probably wise,” Lucy said, not unkindly. “We’ll figure out the most dignified way for you to let me out once I’m done. Now—if you wouldn’t mind leaving, that would be great.”
“Right. Yes. I’m gone.” Mila made for the door like the hounds of hell were after her.
Though, halfway out the door, she paused.
“You—don’t have to worry about looking good, by the way,” she said stiffly. “You always look good.”
And then she shut the door behind her, long before Lucy could decide how to react.
“Well,” Lucy said, to no one at all. Maybe an argument with Mila wasn’t so clarifying after all.
She’d already guessed that Mila had never dated anyone besides Jon, but she had no idea the situation was this dire.
Her poor head had progressed from full to bursting.
As much as she wanted to analyze Mila’s parting words within an inch of their life, it was, unfortunately, the least urgent thing she needed to think through.
She turned on the shower—the pipes in Quincey always took their sweet time to warm up—and allowed herself a minute to splash some water on her face. A brief glimpse in the mirror showed absolutely nothing that “looked good.”
She straightened. Before she found a place to cuff herself, she should probably close the blinds. Didn’t need anyone asking about that.
She looked up, her hand already halfway to the window. And through the glass, she met a pair of eyes, half hidden by a dark hood.
Lucy may have been exhausted, but days of hypervigilance had quickened her reflexes.
She seized the cuffs from the bathroom counter and locked one around her wrist, then turned sharply to find someplace to anchor them.
The shower rod was too high, the towel rack was too fragile.
But the radiator was sturdy, and the right height.
She clicked the other cuff into place around one of its accordion-shaped pipes, and when she tugged, it held.
“Are you handcuffing yourself?” said the voice at the window.
Lucy froze, her heart hammering. It was not a voice that could have belonged to Vanya. It was crisp, judgmental—and entirely familiar.
Slowly, she looked up. And this time, she got a good look at the face on the other side of the glass, nearly concealed by the raincoat draped over her head.
“Please don’t scream for your bodyguard, either.” Whitney’s voice sounded strained. And Lucy could guess why. The light of the sunset was barely low enough to skim the trees. “I’m here to talk.”
Lucy faltered. Yelling for Mila would have been the smart thing to do.
But like Athena with Dr. Horne, Lucy recognized an opportunity to gather information when she saw it.
She reached over to the shower and gave the dial another nudge, turning up the water pressure.
Hopefully it would be enough to drown their voices out.
“Okay,” she said. “But the handcuffs stay on. I don’t want your sire commanding me outside. Unless whatever’s left of Sadie Grainger is taking point on that these days?”
Whitney’s eyes had a yellow sheen to them, like a nocturnal animal. Lucy supposed that was what she was now. “It wasn’t my idea to attack your friend.”
“I didn’t think it was,” Lucy said. Whatever else was true, none of this was Whitney’s fault. “But I assume that’s not what you’re here to talk about. How are you here, anyway? It’s not dark yet.”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” Whitney bit out. “You can’t imagine how much it hurts just to be standing here. It feels like the worst flu of my life. But the only time he’s not watching is when he’s sleeping.”
Completely unwillingly, Lucy wavered. This was not the time for softness. But there was a desperation in Whitney’s eyes that stuck in her heart.
The night of Natalie’s party, Whitney had told her not to get lost in the dark. She hadn’t exactly been a pleasant person when she was alive. She was rude. Judgmental. Possibly a little classist. Even still, she cared whether or not Lucy made it home safe.
Maybe Athena was right. Maybe it changed a person irrevocably when every living thing around them became their natural prey. Maybe all Whitney could see, looking through this window, was something to eat or not eat. Maybe the Whitney Fielding who had been her roommate no longer existed.
All those things could easily be true. But please, Lucy thought. Just this once, let Athena be wrong.