QUEEN

OF NOTHING

HEARTS OF BLUESTONE

BOOK FOUR

QUINN BLACKBIRD

Queen of Nothing

Hearts of Bluestone series

Book 4

Copyright © 2026 by Quinn Blackbird

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission—this includes scanning and/or unauthorized distribution—except in case of brief quotations used in reviews and/or academic articles, in which case quotations are permitted. 

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether alive or dead, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, incidents, and places are all products of the author’s imagination.

Imprint: Independently published.

CONTENT WARNINGS

If you are familiar with Blackbird’s worlds and stories, then you are aware that she writes all ugly, dark and grotesque things. Be aware that this means trigger warnings for those venturing onwards: assault, bullying, SA.

If any of these are not your cup of tea, or will upset you in anyway, please protect your mental health, and do not read onwards.

CLASS SYSTEMS

Aristos

Gentry

Citizens/Commoners

BLOOD RANK

Fullblood: Elite

Diluted: Half-breed

Born of Krum: Made one

Non-magical: Krum

Queen

of

NOTHING

QUINN BLACKBIRD

the Videralli

Behind the shadows of the world, lurks another.

Beneath the foundations of society, thrives another.

Above the reigns of kings and queens, rise more.

We are the hidden.

We are the unseen.

We are the world you live in.

The Witches of the World.

The Kings of Kings.

We are the Videralli.

a little life

I remember the holiday on the French Riviera for a few reasons.

It was the last coven trip of the summer before I was to start at The Academy of Bluestone for the Education of Exceptional and Elite Society.

Mr Ström arrived with his daughters, but not his wife, who went off to visit her family in Aspen instead.

And Mr Barlow was in a sour mood the whole time because we—the Cravens, as well as the Sinclairs—chose not to stay at the Barlow’s estate of sprawling vineyards, but rather at a five-star hotel in the heart of Nice.

It was only a three-night trip, but I remember the day at the private beach best.

The memory is as clear as freshly cleaned glass, even after all this time.

The beach was a glaze of cream-hued parasols and loungers and deckchairs, all the way along the shore of pebbles and sand, up to the exclusive Mediterranean restaurant.

Mr Barlow spent the day by the bar, and that was great news for me, because he was out of the way. Landon was always more fun with his father out of the way.

And he sure was a lot of fun that day.

Together, we ran in and out of the waters, chasing the waves, running from them, kicking the sea at each other, and stacking pebbles into pyramids and walls.

But Mother called me back to her on the daybed so many times, over and over, that by the time I returned to play, he had already moved on with the others.

Every two hours, Mother applied sunscreen to me. She never let anyone else do it, not even the female servants, not even her dresser.

Under the shade of the canopy, Mother dragged the sunscreen over my arms and shoulders and down my back, so distractedly and harshly that I swayed with her movements.

Her attention was on Amelia, sprawled out on the daybed with her.

Amelia gestured to the private beach, where only the coven’s children ran. “Who in their right mind would choose poverty over wealth, confinement over experience, a small, little life over this?”

Mother’s handling of me was harsh. But unintentionally so. Amelia’s curt words held her attention, and so as she turned me around to face the sea, and started running sunscreen down my back, I bobbed with each forceful swipe.

I watched Oliver tackle Dray into a sandpit they’d spent all morning digging.

Amelia tutted, and the sharp sound wasn’t unlike her glacier eyes that she lifted to Mother over her sunglasses. “She brings the Ströms too close to disgrace with these antics of hers.”

“Well, Lana does come from gentry,” Mother whispered, and it furrowed my face under my sunhat because Mother came from gentry, too. But then she added, “She must be under some delusion that separate living is an option in aristos society.”

The discussion of Mrs Ström’s absence was juicy enough that I didn’t whine for Mother to hurry up.

Amelia scoffed a single, curt sound, a bitter almost-laugh, and it was lovely, it was silk, like the pearly coverup she wore. “She forgets herself and her place. To reject our traditions and our time together in favour of her family on another continent? So much ignorance in one act of disrespect.”

“It is her own fault. She chose terribly.” Mother tapped me on the head, like she wanted me to hear this next part, really hear it. “A woman should only ever marry a man who loves her more than she loves him.”

It invited me into the conversation. The gossip.

I turned to face them and, slowly, cautiously, climbed onto the edge of the daybed.

I wasn’t kicked off.

Amelia’s smile was slick around her words, “Lana heard ‘the founding family of Monaco’ and tripped over her rags to get there.”

Mother’s laugh was a bell caught in her throat. She tightened her mouth shut on it and slapped some sunscreen onto my face.

I squinted against the cold smears.

Amelia added, just as a waiter appeared and lowered fresh cocktails onto the side table, “No one told her the Ströms are broke.”

Broke for aristos. I wasn’t confused about that. But it was new information.

Amelia added, “If she had done her research, she would have learned the cost of going against the coven.”

I was grimaced against Mother’s uncaring application of the lotion to my face, dragging it all over, even around my ears, but her gaze was on the reddish cocktail that Amelia plucked from the table.

My question was muffled by her hands pulling against my mouth, “Are the Ströms poor?”

Mother’s smile came with a curt, choked laugh.

Amelia nudged me with her foot. “Do not eavesdrop, Olivia.” Then she hid her smile behind her glass. “But, yes, almost.”

Mother said, “The coven is only strong when we stand together, isn’t that right?”

I nodded. But I was sure some sunscreen was leaking into my eyes, because they were starting to sting.

“Without the coven,” Amelia warned, “then we would all be sentenced to a little life.”

She shook her head with the disgust of it, then sipped from her blood-red cocktail.  

“Go play.” Mother booped me on the nose “And don’t you dare go in the water for the next thirty minutes. Let it dry first.”

Again, I nodded, then practically flung myself off the daybed. My bare feet came smacking down on hard, smooth pebbles that sent winces shooting up me—but I remember how excited I was to rejoin the others.

With fresh gossip.

I avoided Landon, who still played in the water. He would not have appreciated it. Besides, Asta and Serena had joined him.

So I ran straight for the pit dug into the sand.

The pebbles slowed me down, but when I reached the transition of pebbles to sand, my legs moved faster.

I scrambled to the pit, falling to my knees, and looked down at them.

Oliver and Dray sat in there, not wrestling or fighting like I expected, but rather, they picked through the menu book from the restaurant and bickered over lunch orders.

They both looked up at me, squinting against the midday sun.

“Mr Ström is angry because Mrs Ström is sad that they are poor, and now she’s choosing the little life.”

For a moment they just blinked at me.

Then Oliver dropped his frown to Dray. “What about the paella?”

Dray flicked the page of the menu. “I hate Mediterranean cuisine.”

He wasn’t allowed to say that. He would never say it now, not as adults. But when we were children, and it was just the three of us, filters faded.

Oliver smacked my hand, curled on the edge of the sandpit. “Get in here before someone sees you.”

I climbed into the pit.

As I dropped onto my bottom, Oliver hit the edge of my ugly sunhat that Mother made me wear.

“It’s an exclusive pit,” my brother added with a pointed look.

That meant I couldn’t invite anyone in. It was just us three.

I didn’t mind.

“I think a little life is when people die from heartbreak,” I decided and basketed my legs, “from being poor.”

Dray frowned at the pages. “The Ströms aren’t poor.”

I made a face at him. “Your mother said they are.”

“Oh.” Dray couldn’t have cared less. He pushed the menu onto my lap. “Split a gelato?”

I sifted over the dessert page. “There’s no cannoli?”

Impatient, Oliver snatched the menu from me. “No one else likes cannoli. You have to pick food we all like.”

My mouth puckered, moody. “Do we have to share?”

“Mother said we only get one dessert between us.” Oliver flicked the page, too rough, and it tore at the edge. “And one meal to share.”

Dray nudged me with his shoulder. “It’s your fault. You ate so much you were sick last night. If you weren’t sick, we wouldn’t have been caught.”

Oliver’s face twisted. “It stunk of liquorice.”

True.

It did stink.

I stole too much from Grandmother Ethel’s stash of chocolate-coated liquorice. I ate too much of it.

Got the cane for it, too.

Oliver smacked the book shut. “We will order cannoli—” Dray made a face. “—if you ask Mother what a little life is.”

I stuck out my hand.

He stuck out his.

And we shook on it.

The three of us clambered out of the pit. And shadows had stretched over us.

I looked up and saw two lovely faces angled down at us.

Serena and Asta had found us.

Serena started, “What are you do—"

“Go away,” Oliver snapped as he scrambled to his feet. “You are not invited!”

I snickered and chased at his heels, Dray at mine, and we ran back to the daybeds.

Oliver flattened the menu on the mattress, beside Mother’s stretched out legs.

She looked over her sunglasses at us. “Is it lunch already?”

Oliver then threw an expectant look at me, just as Dray dropped onto the daybed, exhausted from digging sand pits in the sun.

I nudged myself between Amelia and Mother. “What’s a little life?”

Mother’s smile was tired and smelled of those nice cocktails she and Amelia had been drinking all morning.

Amelia sang her question, “Have you all been repeating things the adults said?”

I nodded, firm.

Dray yawned, “And we picked our lunch order.”

Amelia reached out and gave him a half-hearted smack. “Manners, Dray. Cover your mouth when you yawn.”

Unbothered, he rolled onto his side, like he was ready for a nap. Serena called them siestas, and I was fond of them, especially in the summer heat of the French Riviera.

“A little life,” Mother started, and looked over her shoulder at the shadow drawing closer—Father, carrying nothing but a glass of water, “is a life without travelling, without power, without sufficient education. It is insignificant and dull. It is simply small.” She turned her smile on me.

Oliver stretched over the edge of the daybed and mused, “The lives of krums are little.”

I frowned at him for a beat, my mind snagged on the education. Krums didn’t go to Bluestone.

So I asked, “I don’t want to go to the academy. Can I have a little life?”

Dray snorted behind me, and Oliver buried his smile in the crook of his elbow.

Father’s face was stone. He dropped onto the deckchair and raised his chin, as if to look down his nose at me.

Mother forced one of those tight smiles of hers, the kind that meant I said something wrong and she was about to give me the chance to correct it.

But I just really didn’t want to go to Bluestone.

I dreaded the day of leaving Mother and Father and Elcott Abbey.

I wanted to stay with my governess, not go to a boarding school in another country. And it was only weeks until Oliver and I were to be sent off with our luggage to stay at some strange, new place without our parents.

I heard the magic there was so strong, the mountain so high, the snow so thick, the winds so powerful, that the phonelines sometimes cut out. So what if I needed my parents, but I couldn’t call them?  

I didn’t like that at all.

Mother leaned closer, slow, like a snake about to strike, and it clenched my insides.

“Then you will have to give back everything you have.” Her voice lowered into a dangerous whisper, forged in steel, and my fingers started to wring together on my lap. “You will have to give back all your toys. All your books. Everything pretty in your bedroom. Your animals. Your shoes and dresses. Your lovely home. And all the other homes. All the trips, the jet, the friends… the family.”

The blood left my head and a wave of dizziness pulsated in my brain.

I didn’t want to give up any of those things.

Out the corner of my eye, Oliver’s sneer was as obvious as paint dripping down him. He wore it proudly for me to see.

Father’s order was firm. “Don’t fidget, Olivia.”

My fingers froze on my lap.

Mother arched her preened, dark eyebrows. “Do you want to go home now and pack up everything?”

I shook my head.

It wasn’t enough.

“Don’t you want to leave all the beauty, all the luxury, all the gifts, all the friends, the love and support, the privilege you deserve… and go live in some little swallow of misery?”

Again, I shook my head.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

Mother’s hair glistened darker than ink—and her tone was a threat wrapped in faux-concern. “You changed your mind? You don’t want to be out there with them?”

I was recoiling now. Folding into myself.

And I threw a moody look from beneath my lashes at Oliver as he pushed the menu closer to Mother.

“The lamb and hummus for lunch.” He slid a smirk to me. “And gelato for dessert.”

Then he took off. Launched himself from the daybed and ran back to the waters.

“You stay here,” Mother said softly—but there was nothing soft about the way she lingered a look over me.

Dray slipped off the daybed then, with a glance at me, his mouth flattened into a slanted line, left without a word.

I stayed on the daybed for lunch.

Mother ordered me a Greek salad. No dessert.

And she didn’t excuse me until the last hour of the outing, when all the children were tired, and slow-moving, and Serena and Asta were asleep on loungers.

Landon and Oliver filled up the sandpit with water.

Dray ditched them and chased me into the water. I only knew he followed me when he splashed water up my back, and he teased, “Do you still want a little life?”

I shook my head, face scrunched between the tears I silently wept on the daybed and the moodiness settled deep in me.

But Dray just advanced on me.

His steps were slow and playful, his smirk ghosting over his lips.

Instinct jolted through me and I made to run deeper into the waters—but Dray caught me, fast.

His arms, his weight, spun around my midsection before I was tackled off my feet.

And I came down in the water with a giggle.

1

Folded over, I turban the stiff towel around my head. It’s abrasive against my hands, like an exfoliation mitt, and I have the fleeting fear that it will damage my hair.

But I have bigger problems than that, so I dismiss the thought as quickly as it came.

Droplets of water roll over my face before I flip upright—and a wince shoots through me.

An ache in my back thrums, ice-cold.

I grip onto the edge of the stained basin.

Days of sleeping on floors, on the hard chairs at airports, sitting for too long in narrow seats on cheap flights, and the lumpy mattresses in these depressing motels—and my back is paying the price.

All these aches started with seventeen hours on a rocky boat… or maybe, it all started with an ass-whooping from Asta.

The remnants of her attack are all over me. The discoloured patches around my ribs and my belly, the scratches on my clavicle, the black and blue and purple stains on my face.

My scalp hurts, my face hurts, my wrist and my knee, my mouth, my belly, my back.

Everything hurts.

And there’s no witchdoctor to run to.

Just a soothing balm that has the texture of milk and that smells like eucalyptus. All it does is soothe. Not take the pain away. Not heal.

So I decide it’s absolutely useless and leave it on the edge of the bathtub.

My fatigue is turning to laziness.

But really, it’s all catching up to me.

The bad food, the anxiety, the battering from Asta, the backhand from Dray, and the ache in my chest.

I don’t feel so good.

The constant krum travel doesn’t help. It might weather me more than veils ever did.

And there’s a tickle at the back of my dry throat, so I might be getting sick, too.

I clear my throat, as though that’ll vanquish the tickle.

It doesn’t.

So I tackle the next pain.

I roll my shoulders once, twice, as though it will help ease the growing ache spreading over my back.

Another failure.

I need a massage. I need a physical therapist. I need a witchdoctor, lotions and balms only available to the witches of the world.

But all I have is peasantry.

The lingering steam fills the mouldy bathroom, despite that I turned off the shower a few minutes ago and that roaring ceiling fan is fighting for its life.

No ventilation, I guess.

My mouth twists with disgust. Mould is all around me, burrowed into the lines between the tiles and along the base of the toilet.

I need to get out of this steam den immediately.

But I’m not done.

The mirror is fogged over.

I wipe my hand down my reflection.

For a moment, I stare at myself. At the cuts on my lips, the discolouration around my eyes.

I force myself to look away.

The steam climbs back up the mirror above the sink.

Loosening a sigh, I grab the toothbrush perched delicately on the edge of the basin.

Without a reflection, I get started.

Might be better that I don’t see myself in the mirror. At least not until I’ve healed better.

My gaze drifts over the claustrophobic, tiled bathroom, from the black mould that’s dotted along the shower seals to the rotting windowsill.

I spit out the last of the toothpaste, then dab the soothing lotion all over my body. Changed my mind again. Guess it’s better to have eucalyptus lotion than to have nothing at all.

I rush it, and I’m left feeling as unclean as I did when I came into the bathroom.

I pack up my toiletries and escape the steam.

The motel room is a gust of cold, damp air.

I glance across the room. Red and brown, with just two narrow beds and a dated, bulky television on an old dresser.

Beyond the white lace drapes, the window is cracked open.

The lace dances in the breeze.

I hug the towel closer to my body.

Anyone passing by the motel room could look at the window and, if the breeze hits just right, catch a glimpse inside.

“Close the window,” I mutter, and maybe I should startle at the ragged sound of my voice, which is not unlike my vocal cords have been dragged over a grater.

I toss the toiletry bag onto my bed.

Serena was quick to claim the bed nearest the door when we staggered and lugged our way in here just a couple of hours ago. Said the draught from the window helps soothe her nausea.

Apparently she needs a lot more than a faint draught. She needs the window open, letting in all the cold air, and exposing me in my towel to the whole carpark out front.

I roll my tongue around the inside of my cheek, fighting back the quarrel brewing in me.

It’s been a long day.

A long few days.

Airplanes, boats, trains, buses, dirty motels.

That is all our escape has been so far.

The exhaustion wears on us both.

So worn-out that even the sight of this brown and rusty-red room didn’t deter us from the promise of food, beds, and a shower.

That’s what we stopped for.

That, and the next phase of Serena’s plan.

She’s still working on the details.

Ignoring my window request, she pores over a local map that’s spread out over the foot of her bed. Tucked under the map is an atlas that she’s been flicking through since we got here.

She is so focused, so determined, that I wonder if she even heard me complain about the window.

I think I could say anything at all right now, like ‘Changed my mind, I secretly love Dray Sinclair and need to run back into his arms now—’

And she wouldn’t even blink.

I change into a black loungewear set from my bag, then tug on a pair of bed socks.

The soft material gliding over my body is a relief, especially after the exfoliation of the rough towel that I let crumple to the carpet.

I drop onto the edge of the bed, then fold over myself. Another towel is wrapped around my head. I scrunch it against my scalp, soaking up as much of the wetness as I can—and it all feels so robotic.

My hair is damp when Serena moans, “I’m so bloated.”

My neck cranes as I glance at her.

Leaning back on her elbow, she’s forgotten about the map, and now rubs her hand around her stomach.

“I can’t eat anymore of this stuff,” she sighs.

My gaze cuts to the paper bags strewn about the dresser. Grease stains the white paper.

We ate all the fast food when we first got in, but the stale stench is pungent in the room.

The coffee cups still have some dregs left in them. They will start to smell soon if we don’t throw them out.

I straighten up and toss the towel onto the floor.

Serena shifts her weight off her elbow and drops onto the mattress.

Still cupping her suspiciously flat stomach, she thinks aloud, “We’ll get some sleep, then take the last train into the city just before midnight.”

“Then what?”

“We sell what we can. And maybe we can make the first flight out.”

The first flight out could go anywhere.

We have no direction just yet. More of a ‘first out’ situation while we’re still in Europe.

The plan was to get out of the UK, then Europe. Then make our way to Serena’s secret contact, the shield witch she’s told me nothing about.

Not like a lot of conversation has happened on the flights or the trains or the taxis, not with so many people around us.

And in the motels, we sleep mostly.

I give a nod, unenthused.

Unloading the bulk of our jewellery in one city is the better idea. It makes it harder for our families to track us once we’re off the continent.

If we hold onto the jewels and pawn them as we go, then we just leave a trail for them to follow.

I drape myself over the bed, cheek pressing into the lumpy pillow.

A frown starts to burrow into my face.

I focus my sight on the single black hair that tickles my nose—sprouting from the pillow.

I make an ick sound at the back of my throat, then pluck the hair off the pillow.

I hope it’s cat hair.

I let it drift down to the carpet.

For a long while, Serena stares up at the ceiling. She hasn’t said a whole lot since we left on the boat, and I’ve said even less.

I don’t want to talk.

There’s too much hurt in me.

She’s responsible for some of it.

The betrayal of luring me into a runaway scheme just to tell me after the fact that she’s pregnant, when I’m literally stuck on a boat with her?

It’s as serpentine as one can get.

I let the exhaustion pull down my eyelids.

I don’t just fall asleep, I’m plunged into it.

When I wake, the flashing red numbers on the alarm clock have only changed a little.

I slept for an hour.

My body needs more, but my mind is still too alert. Frazzled. Anxious.

A yawn splits me.

It lures in Serena’s gaze.

Now, she’s sat up against the headboard, her face buried in her drawn-up knees. She turns her cheek to her knees and watches me.

My tired murmur is hoarse, and my throat drier than Dubai air, “Aren’t you going to get some rest?”

We only have another three hours before we need to pack up and leave.

“I can’t sleep.”

My mouth flattens into a line.

I don’t pry. I don’t invite her conversation.

I shut my eyes, hoping to find my way back to sleep, but then Serena’s softly spoken words reach me, “I know why you left.”

A tired frown crumples my face.

I open my eyes. “What?”

“You left to get away from Dray—and your family.”

The frown loses strength.

Energy is withering in me.

I just blink at her.

She unfurls and shifts to face me. “I knew that if anyone was going to come with me, it would be you.”

My answer is a curt hum.

“I didn’t tell you the full truth, because I had to be sure you would run with me first. I had to be certain you wouldn’t change your mind and go back—with my secret.”

I bite back another yawn.

Lying on my side, the shrug I give is awkward and uncomfortable, and it sends pains shooting up my spine. I keep forgetting Asta left some marks on me. But they do make sure to remind me anytime I move the wrong way.

Serena stares at me for a long, hard moment. Then, her brows lift. “You don’t have anything to say?”

I scoff, bitter. “What do you expect me to say? You sold me on freedom, just to take it away. You’re no different to them, Serena. I can’t trust you.”

Slowly, her mouth purses—and then it holds, as though she bites down on the insides of her cheeks.

“I had no other choice.” A curt breath jolts her shoulders. “Oliver is the sort of man to put family and reputation first. He’s loyal to the gods, the covens, the Videralli, the Cravens—and if we married, he would be loyal to the reputation of the Vasiles.”

I turn my cheek to her and roll onto my aching back. I stare up at the ceiling that looks as though popcorn was tacked to it, then painted over.

I make a face. Odd design choice.

“I loved him,” she says, soft, and I wish she wouldn’t speak at all. “Even when he wanted to explore others. I learned that if I fought with him, I would have his attention. He couldn’t stand when I refused to acknowledge him. But when we were good, he wandered. Every time.”

Still, I stare at the popcorn ceiling, speckled with chipped, peeling paint.

“Year after year, he changed more and more,” she says, then pauses to sigh, and I don’t know why she’s still talking to me. “I fought to just hold onto the part of him I once knew. Then this past year, I realised, I never knew him. I was only just starting to see him for who he really is. He’s just like Dray, isn’t he? He only smiles more.”

The huff deflates me, annoyed.

I shift to sit upright and slump my tired weight against the headboard.

“And what does any of that have to do with me?”

Serena turns a molten silver glare my way. “Oliver would take anything from me, including my child. I can’t let that happen, Olivia. You have to see that. If I told you the truth before we left, and you decided not to come with me, I couldn’t be certain that you would keep my secret.”

A strand of tawny hair falls over my face. I tuck it behind my ear, a little too harshly.

I get it. I get her reasoning.

It makes sense from her perspective.

An out of wedlock child is no safe thing in our world. I know that, but what I don’t know is why she thought she had the right to drag me into it with the promise of freedom, when now, I’ll be something of a nanny.

I never even wanted my own children. It was merely an obligation to be fulfilled.

Now, the hopes and thrills of a life away from the Videralli are spoiled.

And Serena is overlooking something.

She did to me what everyone else does.

She made my decisions for me.

Serena’s smile is tight, a grimace that she lifts to me, the corners of her mouth pinned to her cheeks. “If anyone in our society understands what it is to have everything taken from you, to have no autonomy, it is you.”

I shake my head with the disbelief of it all.

The audacity of it.

Serena roped me into helping her with her unsanctioned offspring.

Not conceived on the night of the wedding ritual, with the blessings of the gods, with magic at its strongest, and not within the magical sanctity of the marriage.

Children, like the one inside of her, are thought to be weaker, unhealthier, or even a spit in the face of the gods.

Those children are tucked away.

Somewhere like the Home for the Misplaced, or to be raised in a gentry home, I don’t know exactly. But yes, Serena is right—Oliver would remove any bastard child of theirs, no hesitation.

And it wouldn’t be my place to say anything about it.

“I did not mean for this to happen,” she says, soft, and it sours my insides.

The tone of my voice is as cold as my thoughts, “You weren’t taking the brew?”

Her voice comes thick with unshed tears, “I reached my lassitude limit. I didn’t connect the dots.”

I turn a blank stare on her.

It takes a moment for it to click in my mind—

The question spills out of me with a breathy tone of disbelief, “You sicked it up?”

Her face starts to wobble. “I didn’t realise… I took the brew that morning, and later that day, I was sick in the infirmary.”

I swing my legs over the edge of the bed to face her. “But the baby is Oliver’s?”

She touches her fingertips to the wet streak on her face. The dim light dances on the gloss of her manicured nails. “Oliver and I aren’t as intimate as we might seem. It could be Avi’s.”

The question arches my brow.

She clarifies, her tone subdued with the same heating her sunkissed cheeks, “Avi Kohen.”

“Zara’s brother?”

She nods.

And my eyes are wide.

Slack, I stare at her. Everything stills in the motel room, musty air stagnating around me.

“The…” My words, my accusation, fails.

I try again, clearing my throat first.

“The made one?”

Serena turns her cheek to me, flaming hot. Her lashes shut on the defeat sagging her shoulders.

“The made one?” I echo, like if I say it enough, it will make it better, or she can tell me I’m wrong, and there’s another Avi Kohen at Bluestone.

Serena sighs something curt, then runs her hands down her face. Streaks of pressure turn her complexion white, but only for a heartbeat.

“It’s either his,” she says, and her voice is almost swallowed up by the fluttering of the curtains as a breeze passes by and rustles her dark, glossy hair. “Or it’s Theodore’s.”

“Teddy?” I almost shout. “You and Teddy—”

“Once.” She holds up her hand. “Just that once. I… It was the night at that halfbreed party by the ruins.”

Dread floods my stomach as my mind is invaded with the memories of Dray finding me in the maze, looking after me in the cigar room.

I shake my head, as though I can shake the memories right out of my skull.

“Oliver was with you,” I say, and it sounds very much like an accusation. “That night, at the party, he was there.”

“And then he wasn’t.” Her smile is tight and watery. “He made some excuse, like he always does, and left me at the party alone. So while Oliver went off to find someone new and interesting to spend the night with, I found Teddy.”

Oliver didn’t leave her to fuck a random in some broom closet.

He left her to find me and Dray.

When I woke up the next morning, my brother was asleep on the armchair next to the couch.

He found us in the cigar room, and he stayed.

I don’t know why.

But I don’t bother telling her any of that.

I’m still too hung up on the Teddy part of it all.

“He and Oliver hate each other.” The look I give her is unkind. “Was that intentional?”

Her moon eyes glimmer.

She wipes delicately at her tears again, but they just keep on coming. “Of course it was. Oliver wouldn’t look at me unless there was a fight in it. Because—” she sighs, her face twisting with a mixture of pain and disgust “—his heart was in someone else’s hands.”

I stare at her, outraged. “If my brother loved someone else, he would have her for a bride.”

The shake of her head is slight. It loosens strands of inky hair from over her shoulder, letting some slip over the warmth of her cheek.

“Not her,” she says. “He can’t have her. So he played the part with me. It took me too long to realise that it was all masks.”

I look at Serena and her vulnerability—and I ache to strike her across the face.

I see tears, and I don’t feel any sadness for her.

I see pleading in her eyes, and I’m unmoved.

Not only did she mess up her brew, she chose not to have the situation dealt with, which would just be another brew, and the worst part is that she lured me into a runaway plot, which really, is another life of confinement.

She baby trapped me.

I fold over, burying my face in my hands.

But my mind starts churning through the months at Bluestone.

My voice is muffled, “So you slept with Teddy in October…”

My brain struggles to work through the maths.

That would mean she is five months pregnant, and she would be showing a lot more than the bloated appearance of her belly that she has been illusioning through the days at Bluestone.

A belly that—unillusioned—surprised me the first time I saw it.

But it is hard to calculate.

Witch pregnancies are not as straight forward as krum ones. The lifeforce growing within us draws too much from our powers, weakens us, as the babe and its power grows.

A witch pregnancy is often seven months long. But there have been weaker babies born after just six.

“I was with Avi at the halfbreed end-of-term party,” she tells me, and my mind plants that timing as back in November, making her just four months pregnant.

But she says, “I don’t know how far along I am.”

My tongue rolls around the insides of my cheeks. Because no matter what, “You chose me to be the father, then?”

“Olivia, please,” Serena’s voice comes soft. “If I told you, you wouldn’t have come—”

“You think?” My voice hitches. “I didn’t sign up for this. On the run—with a baby? You…” I point my finger at her. “You tricked me. This is entrapment.”

Serena hardens right in front of me.

A darkness settles over her, the vulnerability slamming shut like a vault door.

For a moment, I think she’s going to scream back at the very least, or even lunge at me—but then, slowly, she rises from the edge of the bed and announces, stiffly, “I’m going to be sick.”

In a blink, she’s shuffling past my bed for the bathroom. A clammer of the door follows thudded footsteps—but the door doesn’t close all the way.

So I hear it. Loud and clear.

The kind of heave that reaches all the way down to her gut.

The splash of sick hits the toilet water, and a grimace turns down my mouth.

I slap my hands to my ears and rush for the front door.

The rules are not to go out if we don’t need to and never leave the room without telling the other. But I grab a jacket, pull it on, and tug the hood as far over my face as it’ll go.

I step outside, out into the fresh air and the quiet of the sullen carpark, peppered with old, beaten cars.

Sinking back against the doorframe, I fold my arms over my chest and stare at the sedan parked opposite me.

Mud cakes the grooves of the tyres. Streaks are dragged all over the windshield. Rust flaking along the edges—and I hate it.

I hate everything about it.

I’ve seen cars like this, but only ever in passing, from the window of the Royce, the Range Rover, the Bentley—and if I’ve been travelling with the Sinclairs in their cars, the Maybach, the Aston.

I have passed these deteriorating cars on foot as I wandered cities. I never paid them more attention than a glance.

But now I stare, because that is my future.

Rusted cars, and fast food so greasy that it stains the paper bags it comes in, and coffee so stale neither one of us could finish it, and dusty motel rooms that haven’t been properly cleaned in decades.

Serena played me.

Asta’s words ring in my mind.

‘Serena is out for herself. If she’s cosying up to you, there is a reason for it.’

And it goes beyond my engagement to Dray.

Serena wanted more than to position herself as the bestie of Dray’s wife.

And Asta made sure to let me know that, just as she made sure to let me know how little Serena likes me, and how poorly she stands alone.

I was lured into a trap—and it’s bitterly ironic that Asta was the one who tried to warn me.

I run my hands down my face, feeling my cheeks tug under the pressure.

The evidence of Asta’s attack on me lingers. It hurts to apply too much pressure to my face.

I drop my hands to my sides with a sigh.

Because if I like it or not, I’m in this now.

Serena pounced on me with her proposition when I was at my weakest, my most vulnerable, my most hurt.

I wonder if she waited for that exact moment, the moment I unravelled completely before she came to me with her plan—a way out.

It takes me back to just months ago, back to the start of the first semester, when she began her lame attempts to befriend me.

Those might have been strategy to ally herself with Dray’s future wife, acting on a suspicion that wasn’t yet a reality.

But it grew from there.

It evolved when she found out she’s pregnant.

Her efforts to get closer to me really ramped up over the Solstice Season.

That’s it.

She went home over the break, suspected she was with child, and tested herself.

I wonder if she used krum tests or had to approach a witchdoctor with a penchant for accepting bribes.

She knew that baby would either be forcibly terminated or disappear into the lower ranks of the Videralli. Probably terminated, so she could finish out her time at the academy, and graduate.

And I became a pawn.

Now, I’m trapped on her chessboard.

I can’t go back, not even if I wanted to.

The consequences for running—even if I returned of my own volition—will be too dire.

I don’t know what the punishment would be. But I do know I can’t risk finding out.

I live in a new prison now.

Serena’s prison.

And it’s full of damp, mouldy motel rooms, fast food that she sicks up in the bathroom, chipped and rusty cars, and a baby on the way.

My face twists with the horror of it all.

I turn for the door—and as I edge it open, the sound of Serena’s heaving reaches me.

I leave her to it and climb onto my bed.

I tug a pillow over my head. It’s no enchanted bed curtain, and it only slightly muffles the sound of her in the bathroom, but I hold it there.

If I’m going to be running around for pawn shops in the city in just a matter of hours, catching trains and early flights, then I need as many minutes of sleep as I can get.

I need to be sharp.

Because I have no doubt that my family are already close behind us.

2

The train rocks beneath me as we leave the outskirts behind and rattle towards the city.

Rigid on the musty seat, I clutch the bag to my middle, like it’s a safety blanket—and also to keep it close to me, in case any of these krums try to snatch it.

Mother told me about that.

The thieving, the robberies, the violence of this krum world.

And it’s all I can think about as the last train of the night stops at station after station, and krums squeeze along the aisle, disembark and board the train, some passing me with bad body odour, others with too much perfume, and I’m starting to get nauseas.

I’ve taken trains before, but only short trips around London.

This is too much.

I stay bolted to the seat.

Serena is wedged between me and the scratched, grimy window.

Tired, her lashes are low, dark circles stain around her eyes. But she doesn’t lean on the window and get some sleep.

I wouldn’t either.

There are some suspicious stains and streaks on it.

It’s disgusting.

Mother didn’t tell me that.

How gross this world can be.

The London Underground can be dirty, too, sometimes. But when I’m only standing with the sway of the train for a short moment, I suppose it doesn’t seem as bad as it does now.

I got to ride an old steam train once, a dinner thing for Landon’s birthday, back when we were kids, and he was really into trains and boats.

Dray and I spent most of that dinner running up and down the train, finding a spot to hide in. Then Oliver threw a tantrum, tried to drag me out of the cabin Dray and I were hiding in, and take me back to the dinner.

Those two almost pulled me apart.

Dray tugging my arm, Oliver yanking my ankle, and it only stopped when Mother found us.

I got extra dessert that night.

Oliver got none.

I hate to think back to those days.

Days when they actually liked me.

Even Oliver.

We were best friends at home. Dray was my best friend out of home. And Serena was also my best friend. I suppose, looking back, I picked my favourite of the hour based on my mood. I had that power.

How things change.

Now, I’m on a krum train that smells faintly of urine, and I’m holding onto my ivory backpack.

My jewels are inside.

Most of them, anyway.

Not all.

A bunch fell out back in the alleyway, when I tackled that security guard through the veil. Serena grabbed as much as she could before we ran.

But I did lose some.

The white-gold chain that Dray bought for me in Venice, when the families were on vacation there, and we all had our roles, our parts to play. He also bought Asta a pink diamond bracelet. And that sent the message to me, you are not special, you are still beneath us.

The chain was nothing compared to that lovely bracelet.

I lost the bracelet Oliver gifted me some Solstice Seasons ago. Gold and threaded with pearls. That bracelet scattered down the length of the alley, maybe went through the veil or down a grate, I don’t know.

But it’s the ring that bothers me.

Mother gave it to me when I turned eighteen. Father gave it to her on their one-year anniversary. He got it from Grandmother Ethel, who was gifted it by Grandfather Elijah.

The ring was becoming a family heirloom, if it wasn’t already. And it’s gone. Skittered away into the shadows of an alley. 18kt gold, platinum, a princess cut emerald stone.

A gorgeous piece.

Not something I ever wore around Bluestone. I only really wore small, subtle pieces at Bluestone. But some sentimental pieces, I brought with me and kept in the jewellery box. Maybe so I could look at them sometimes and remember moments when I mattered. Even if they were all pretend.

The train rattles to another stop and jolts me out of my spiralling reminiscence.

I glance at Serena.

She shakes her head.

Not our stop.

The impatience huffs out of me, and I hug my bag closer, tighter.

People get on, people get off.

The closer we get to the city, the more it fills up in the carriage. The two seats opposite us are taken by two men in cheap suits, tapping away on their phones.

A woman squeezes by me, her thigh brushing against my shoulder, and I hiss in response, jerking back into Serena.

But the woman doesn’t notice.

Goes on like she didn’t touch me.

I feel the need to shower again.

Mother told me that krums have more diseases than we do. But we can catch them.

I make a note to burn my jacket.

I lean closer to Serena and stare out the window.

The city rises in the distance first, then as the minutes pass, it grows around us, dense and tall.

The noise of the platform has a strange echo to it, but it also roars, and the chaos of the people moving in every direction cringes my bones.

Hand in hand, Serena leads the way through the crowd, through the station that’s almost as large and convoluted as the airports we’ve bounced around.

But finally, when we find our way out into the cold, crisp breeze of the city streets, my shoulders relax and I breathe a little easier.

Cities, I’m used to.

Not without a chaperone, usually, but London I’m familiar with, and I can navigate that one just fine.

I’ve been to this particular city before.

But not with Serena.

I came here, every time, with the Sinclairs.

Some of our annual trips.

Mother loves Zürich. Loves the quiet luxury and subtle wealth of the city.

But being here, with just Serena, everything feels enormous. Loud.

Dangerous.

The unease is a fist tightening around my gut, and—as though in sync—my grip firms around Serena’s.

She leads me through the city, up and down streets, around sharp corners, pausing for double-takes, and she stops twice to check the map.

The second time, I slump against a shop window. The lights are off inside, as it’s so late, most of the city is asleep.

I wonder, “Where exactly are we going?”

“A jewellery boutique.” Serena spreads the map out over the clean window. “Oliver brought me here for a weekend years ago.”

“A romantic trip?” My voice sounds as dead as my expression looks. “How nice for the couple who don’t love each other.”

Serena just sighs, curt. “It was after I slept with Dray.”

I practically throw myself off the window. “What?”

The grim look she turns to me isn’t brimmed with guilt, but rather, shame. “It was a drunken mistake. I wanted Oliver’s attention—and to hurt him, after I found him with Asta.”

My insides constrict.

My brow furrows and I just stare stupidly at her.

Serena folds the map. “And she only slept with Oliver, because Eric was cheating with Melody—and it was a whole drama. A domino effect. Anyway, Oliver lost his mind, of course. He’s never more competitive than he is with Dray.”

The look I rinse over her is unkind. Judgmental.

But refreshing, too.

Dray and Serena?

Asta and my brother?

I find a bit of satisfaction in their entanglements and scandals and, even, their pain.

There was a time I envied Serena.

I always looked at her in the dorm, pulling on her gloves that glided over her fingers like silk, and dabbing her lipstick on in the mirror, flipping her hair over her shoulder, and I was resentful.

I wanted to be a part of that.

Serena lived a life that was taken from me—but I didn’t know I was watching a lie.

I thought she dabbed her lips and flicked on her mascara before dates with my brother, that she was about to enjoy another night of courtship or a lovely party with all her friends, the other snakes.

I had no idea then that my brother was making his way through half the student body, including Serena’s best friend. I had no clue that he loved someone else, that Serena fought for his attention, that there were cracks in their relationships—all of their relationships.

Serena was sleeping with Teddy to piss off Oliver, then Dray and Avi, all to get my brother’s attention.

I just thought they looked out for each other in a way they would never look out for me.

I thought Serena took my spot at the top.

But I look at her now, the slanted line of her mouth, the weariness in her eyes, the faint streetlight casting an unkind glare over the shadows of her illusioned, ashy complexion, and I see a defeat that I never noticed behind her mask.

I should have realised when Asta came to me and exposed Serena as more venomous than I gave her credit for.

That day in the bathroom at Bluestone, Asta outed her friend, her best friend.

And I was so absorbed in my own self and reality that I didn’t think twice about it.

I dismissed it as Asta trying to hurt me and get information about Eric at the same time.

Now, it has a whole other layer to it.

Asta was trying to hurt Serena. To derail whatever scheme she had in play.

Pieces of a puzzle are all coming together in my head, and I see the truth for what it is.

None of them look out for each other, not the way I thought they did. And Asta and Serena might not be as close as I thought they were, as they should have been.

Even Dray and my brother…

They have always had a competitive, fucked up friendship. A poisoned brotherhood.

I just didn’t know it went that far.

Serena tucks the map into her coat pocket. And like my whole sense of reality isn’t falling to pieces, she goes on, “So Oliver brought me here, and I was the only person in the world again. For one weekend. He took me to this jewellers, a private one, bookings only, custom pieces, collectables, antiques…”

Her words trail off into a heavy breath.

She lifts her chin and squints through the faint light to the street sign at the corner, a frown knitting her shaped, dark eyebrows together.

Her mind works, plotting our location, but mine is stuck on the drama of the snakes.

How putrid they all are.

I don’t know why it consumes me to know all of this.

Maybe I thought my life would’ve been easier with them. But maybe, as it turns out, it would have been heartbreaking.

Serena starts down the street. “I figure we’ll get the best price there. The clientele is suited to what we have.”

I stagger to catch up with her brisk steps.

The weight of my ponytail sways behind me. 

Her sense of direction is right this time, and after another thirty minutes of walking, we arrive at a door adorned with a brass handle and golden paint along the lining.

No windows or signs.

It looks entirely private.

But that’s not unusual for these sorts of jewellers. Collectors, to some, like Grandmother Ethel who has a fixation with collecting the crowns of dead monarchs.

Serena knocks, and her illusioned hand is liver-spotted and bruised in the faint streetlight.

Our illusions are of older women.

I lean against the brick wall, waiting, and it reminds me of ringing the servant bell in my bedchamber at Elcott, those annoying few minutes of waiting for Abigail to respond.

But there is no bell, no servants, and no Abigail.

It’s only me and Serena on a cold, dark street, and her knuckles rapping over and over on the old door.

It’s incessant.

She does not let up.

Her knuckles must be as sore as my face, my ribs, my back, by the time a tired voice croaks from the other side of the door—

“Who is it?”

Serena fishes her hand into her pocket, then tugs out a ruby-encrusted necklace. “A friend who comes bearing gifts.”

The necklace is one of our more extravagant pieces. She holds it up—and it takes me a moment to realise there’s a peephole hidden in the brass adornment on the door.

“It’s an emergency,” she adds. “And that makes this worth your while.”

Silence is the answer—but only for a few seconds before the rattle and clang of locks.

The door creaks open just a couple of inches.

I look at the dark gap and only see shadows.

Another pause, then the door opens all the way and Serena wastes no time at all before she brushes by me.

I scuttle in after her, into dense shadows.

The door shuts behind me.

The thud of the lock jolts me, and I whip around in the dark. But still, I’m blinded.

Hope this isn’t a serial killer by night, jeweller by day.

Something brushes by me, and my skin prickles.

I cringe back into what feels like a wall and listen to the footsteps that lead the way through the shadows.

Then a switch is flicked, loud in the silence, and a faint orange glow presses against the dark.

I squint against the new birth of light.

But I see that I’m in a narrow corridor—one that ends with another door that looks more vault-like than anything.

I chase Serena’s heels to the metal, barred door, closer to the man who hasn’t tended to his stubble in a few days, and whose eyes are puffy and bloodshot—so I know we pulled him out of his sleep. 

He must live here.

But that should mean there’s another door somewhere in this corridor. It must be hidden, because, as I look over my shoulder, I only see the walls and the entrance.

The groan of metal strikes down the hallway, and it wrenches my gaze back.

The man pushes against a solid bar stroked across the door—and then reaches into the room on the other side and flicks a light switch.

He leads the way inside, and the moment my sight adjusts, I smile at the luxury of it all.

Glass casings encircle elegant chaises and armchairs that I’m sure have been snatched right out of a French palace; the walls are decorated with prized display pieces, from the Monet in a golden frame and the three Stradivarius violins, over to the wall lined with actual pieces from the Amber Room.

But I falter.

Hesitation strikes me, and my eyes widen at the beauty, the rarity, of the Rembrandt painting that takes up a whole wall of its own.

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

Painted in 1633, lost in 1990. Never seen again—or so I thought.

A faint scoff catches in my throat.

Then I look up at the glittering lights above me.

The glass chandelier is obviously Italian in style, with glass flowers of blue and red weaved throughout it, and it won’t surprise me if this is a genuine piece and not replica.

The golden chandeliers on either side of the grander piece are more Amelia’s style—something she would have picked out for the renovation she put Thornbury Park through.

My bubble of admiration is burst when Serena huffs beside me, like she’s spoken and I haven’t heard her.

I only get the chance to look at her before she’s tugging the bag strap off my shoulder.

Neither one of us has thawed apparently. But I’m stubbornly holding onto the take that only I have the right to be so pissed.

The glare I rinse over her isn’t kind as she turns her back on me and stalks over to the sleek mahogany desk—a desk that looks as though it was snatched right out of the seventeenth century.

There, the man is shuffling papers and putting them away in a drawer, his puffy eyes even more bloodshot in the light.

The desk doesn’t have a plate on it to say what it is, where it’s from, what makes it special—but this whole boutique is like that.

It’s a matter of ‘if you know, you know, and if you don’t, the purchase is not for you.’

Grandmother Ethel would know.

One of her beloved pieces is Bram Stoker’s writing desk.

The man jimmies the stubborn drawer shut. The whitish blonde of his hair glistens under the light as he lifts his tired stare to Serena.

He offers, “Coffee?”

“Yes, please,” I answer before Serena can answer for us.

I’ve been surviving off poverty coffee, and I need something luxurious.

“We are in a hurry,” Serena says, sharp, and throws a look over her shoulder at me.

I force a tight smile back at her. “Then I’ll drink it in a hurry.”

The man hesitates for only a heartbeat before he makes his way to the coffee machine in the corner—a real coffee machine with a milk steamer and everything.

Something warm spreads through my chest, like the luxury and peace all around me is luring me back in.

I wish I was stronger than what I am, stronger than cracking after a few days of travel and stale motels and bad coffee. But all of this just makes me miss home.

Serena starts organising the pieces on a linen cloth draped over the desk.

I leave that business to her.

Not like I would know what to do. How to barter. What I should accept for an offer.

I don’t know how much any piece of mine is supposed to fetch. If jewellers pay eighty percent, seventy, fifty, twenty—how would I know?

How would Serena know?

I just take my coffee when it’s handed to me, and the man smiles, which weathers his face another decade.

He downs his own coffee in one fluid gulp, then joins Serena at the desk.

I sit on the chaise in the middle of the room.

A catalogue rests on the gorgeous gold-legged coffee table, very Louis XI—and it might be. Maybe stolen right out of history, like I suspect most of these pieces have been.

I pick through the catalogue, page after page of antiques up for auction next month.

Again, I think of Grandmother Ethel, and how much she would love this. Maybe she already has it in her calendar to attend the auction.

The rumble of conversation, of negotiation, is my background music.

I drape myself over the chaise, flicking through the pages, and sipping my coffee until the glass is empty.

An hour later, I’m halfway asleep when Serena says my name.

I blink, startled, and look over at the desk.

She’s standing now, the man is gone, and she tosses my backpack at me.

It strikes my middle—and a lot lighter than when it was pulling down on my shoulder.

I loop a strap around my shoulder, then kick my legs off the chaise. “Where is he?”

“Gone to his safe, I imagine.”

“It’s done?”

Tired, she nods, and those circles around her eyes that aren’t really hers look a shade darker. “One hundred and sixty-five thousand, cash.”

I sit up a bit stiffer. “Is that a good deal?” My illusioned face creases. “For everything we gave him?”

It doesn’t feel like it.

That’s less than two months of my allowance. And I overspend even that.

Serena’s face is that of an older woman. A woman we saw at an airport a few days ago, with blotchy red cheeks and permed grey hair. An ordinary krum who blends into the background.

That unfamiliar face turns to me, pinched. “It will have to be enough. We need to dump everything in one place in one deal.”

A sigh slumps me. “One hundred and sixty-five,” I echo the words back to her, as though I can make better sense of such a small amount.

I sneeze that kind of money.

“It’s done.” Serena’s firmness bristles me.

I lift a dark look to her as she turns her back on me and runs her hands down her face.

I make to check my watch. But it isn’t on my wrist because I added it in with the jewels.

I drop my hand to my lap. “What time is it?”

Serena fishes out her burner phone from the back pocket of her jeans. The phone is a little black brick with a small green screen.

It might be older than I am.

She tossed her personal phone into the sea when the boat rocked beneath us.

“It’s almost three AM.”

I let a stretch rise through me, lifting my arms above my head. “We should get something to eat after this. Is there anywhere open at this time?”

“Doubtful. It’s not a nocturnal city.” Still staring at the time on her phone, her mind works. It works slow and sluggish, but enough that she decides, “There will be a filling station nearby.”

“A what?”

“A filling station. For cars.” She looks back at me, and the expression on her unfamiliar face is blatantly judgemental. “They have petrol to put in the cars…”

Before I can ask what that has to do with my hunger, because I don’t drink petrol, the door at the back of the showroom opens, and the man carries in three large, beige envelopes.

Together, they count the cash.

And then they count again.

And the whole time he just thinks he’s doing business with two wealthy, older women who turned up at his door in the middle of the night.

Strange, sure.

Suspicious, not enough for him to turn us away.

But soon, our trail will be followed to this showroom.

I don’t know what that means for him or our jewels that we sell him, if our families will buy them all back, or simply take them.

Suppose it depends on how valued this man is to the Videralli—and, considering the stolen pieces around us, I’m assuming he is very valued.

I leave it behind, because it’s not my concern.

I follow Serena out into the night.

3

The filling station is a little on the overwhelming side.

It’s small, but striped with glaring lights on the ceiling, the kind that ache my eyes and brew a headache behind them, the radio speaker crackles almost as loudly as the high volume itself, and the aisles are stocked full of too many choices.

I focus, not on the hum of the half-dozen refrigerators lining the wall, but on the shelves.

I take my time to pick through everything while Serena disappears into the bathroom, and I fill a basket with crisps, chocolates, juices, energy drinks, packets of cheese and crackers and breakfast bars and then, I find an entire section of coffee machines and hot food in glass casings. But then, my mouth puckers at the sight of the remaining selection of hot food.

Fried chicken strips that look sort of grey under the glaring fluorescent light, two whitish pieces of pizza that I’m sure aren’t meant to be white at all, a few small buckets of limp soggy fries, and a pretzel that’s dented and torn along the side, like it’s been banged around and dropped a few times, so there is no way in any world, Videralli or krum, that I’m touching that.

There might not be anything open at the airport.

Usually when it’s so early, the restaurants and cafés are shuttered.

So I snub the hot food but start sifting through the equally as disappointing sandwiches in the open fridge.

After too many suspicious looking chicken and cheese options, I decide we are too late in the filling station for any decent food, and, from the basket on top of the coffee machine, I grab a couple of packaged pastries that are probably stale, and a banana—the only one that, after picking through the lot, isn’t bruised.

I stop at the magazines and get one of each kind.

Flights are super boring in the krum world. And claustrophobic. The more I have to distract me, the better.

I dump the whole basket worth of items onto the counter. The banana jumps on impact, and bounces over the edge, and down onto the floor at the server’s feet. A chocolate bar is quick to topple after it.

The server behind the counter spares me a withering look before he picks up the fallen item. As he starts scanning them, Serena returns.

She asks, “Did you get that juice I like?” The one she decided is her new favourite at the second airport in our travels. Gatorade.

I tried it. It’s disgusting.

“I got the blue one.”

Her gratitude is a mere nod, then we wait in silence as the server takes his time scanning and bagging.

It’s a minute that stretches on for ages, each tick of the clock behind the counter louder than the last, until finally, Serena pays.

I start packing everything into my empty backpack.

Serena asks, “Can you call us a taxi, please?”

He does, and we go to wait for it outside.

Serena leads me around the building to the bins out back.

Here, hidden by smelly plastic, she changes our illusions. And we change our clothes.

The taxi pulls up out front, and we race for it before the server can notice that we’re suddenly two different people now.

And in the backseat, the ride to the airport is filled with packing and repacking our bags, sorting through the junk, and mainly, Serena illusioning the cash. By the time she’s done with the money, the paper notes are just a stack of books.

Easier to get through airport security with books than it is to get through with cash—or jewels.

Serena’s print has saved our asses so many times now. Without it, we wouldn’t have made it very far at all, not even past the first airport.

I’m sick of them.

Airports.

I can’t wait for this part to be over, and we’re settled on a beach somewhere, sand between our toes and cocktails in our hands.

But I can’t fast forward through the monotony of airports so early in the morning. At least the main café is open, really more of a cafeteria vibe that reminds me of the mess hall at Bluestone, and I’m glad for it, because I fill up on breakfast as we wait for the next flight out—

To Pristina. Serbia.

I’ve never been. Not like this is really a visit.

We’re only there for two hours before we jump onto another crammed flight and go to Istanbul, where Serena alters our illusions to fit in, then to Baghdad, then Doha, then all the way to Dallas, Texas.

Finally, we stop flying around the world.

I’m nauseas with travel by the time we’re leaving the airport and stepping out into hot, thick air.

It’s horrible.

Serena pauses at a bin and sicks up everything she ate on the last flight.

Once she’s gotten it all up, we wait in the long taxi queue, then we’re off. The idea was to get far away—out of the city, and beyond that.

The idea wasn’t to find a motel on the outskirts to take a breather in.

But that is what we do.

Sick, nauseas, exhausted—we sleep.

And sleep.

Serena wakes up only to be sick, then she’s straight back to bed, and for the next twenty-four hours at least, we are dead to the world.  

When we wake, we shower, change clothes, tend to new illusions, then when we leave, this time we aren’t going to the airport.

We walk to the car lot just up the road.

Dressed in matching tracksuits—Serena’s a royal blue, mine just black—we wander the car lot wearing the illusions of men. Appearances that Serena stole from a couple of guys on the last flight.

But her lassitude limit is really hitting her now.

Too much nausea, too much effort, and her nose trickles with a slight trail of blood that she wipes away.

We’re running out of time.

A few times now, we have stopped to give her a break—like just outside of Geneva, and here, in Texas. But it’s not enough.

Serena needs real rest, which she can only have once we reach the shield witch.

All I know is that the shield witch is in Mexico.

Serena didn’t share more than that. And I’m certain she only told me that we need to go to Mexico in case the lassitude limit wipes her out completely, unconscious, and I’m forced to take charge—that way, at least I know the direction I have to take.

Problem with that backup plan of hers, is that I can’t drive. So it will be taxis all the way to Mexico, and a lot of aimless wandering.

I keep things as easy for her as I can—because neither one of us can risk her exhausting.

I don’t even argue against the car she picks out.

Not the worst one on the lot, but not the best, either.

I say nothing about the stench of stale cigarettes inside. Nothing as I consider the scratches along the silver paint, the dent on the boot, and the other on the hood.

I skim the tag.

It says ‘hatchback’.

I don’t know what that is, I just know that the car I’m looking at is very small. Cramped. The seats inside aren’t leather, aren’t clean, and the steering wheel material is peeling.

Serena waves over an attendant. 

“How do you know how to drive?” I ask.

Serena’s lashes are almost halfway down her eyes, like she’s drunk out of her mind and about to pass out right here on the hot concrete ground. Only, it’s a man in a royal blue tracksuit who wipes his sweaty brow opposite me.

“Abuelo Salvador,” she tells me, and spares me an exhausted, sickly look. “He was a collector. I practiced on vintage cars around the estate when I was a child.”

“I didn’t know that about you.”

There’s an edge of accusation in my tone—but maybe that’s the fatigue and the heat, and how slowly that car salesman is moving towards us across the lot.

“He never let me take them off the grounds,” she adds, wiping the back of her hand over her brow. “But he did let me drive the Alfa Romeo around town.”

I scoff. “He let you drive the Alfa Romeo?” 

“The SUV,” she tells me with a pointed look. “Not one of his prized cars.”

I run a look over the silver ‘hatchback’, whatever that means. “This might be a little different.”

Serena agrees with a faint, unenthused hum.

And still, we buy the car. For just a few hundred US dollars, too.

That’s how much my manicures cost. No pedicures, just the hands. And I don’t get French tips, like some of the older Videralli women do. I only ever choose a satiny pink, or a light gloss, or a faint blush, and that one time, coral—but that didn’t look too nice with my complexion, so I never got it again.

But it is strange to look at this dented car and see the price of a manicure, like I thought I understood money—but I don’t, not at all.

I’ve pranced through the shops of London, waved and tapped my black card, like it was nothing. Like it meant nothing.

The bill went to Father.

Even if I went over my allowance, he never told me to stop spending.

Looking back on it, I guess I got in fake trouble. Father telling me off for frivolous spending was just an act, part of his role, and mine was to keep waving around the black card.

Because I know what it’s like now to be in real trouble with Father.

It’s terrifying enough that I’m choosing to get into this stale-smelling car and sit on the stained passenger seat, with Serena Vasile of all people settling into the driver’s seat.

All for what?

Just so I didn’t face Father’s wrath.

No, I had other reasons.

Good reasons to run.

I’m just having trouble remembering them in the harder moments of this journey.

It’ll get better. Easier. At least when we reach the shield witch.

That’s what I tell myself as I flip the grated apertures at the front of the car.

“What are these?” I ask, whacking it up and down, up and down. “Are they supposed to do something?”

“Vents,” Serena says, breathy, like she’s fighting of another bout of nausea. “For cool or hot air.”

“Oh, turn it on.” I tap the sliding buttons around it.

Serena reaches out and, without taking her eyes off the road, turns it on—and air whooshes out of the vent.

But the air isn’t cool.

“I don’t think it works,” she says, and the patience in her voice is sounding a lot like over-stretched violin strings ready to snap. “Leave it. Get the phone out of my bag. Text the number that we’re on our way. Just say that, ‘on our way’, nothing more.”

I reach over to the backseat. “What number?”

“It’s the only number in the contact list.”

I bring the whole bag onto my lap.

That new leather smell that once wisped through the dorm room from this very bag is gone now.

Now, the bags—and even we—smell like airports, travel, clammy sweat threaded through overworn clothes, cheap motel rooms, stale coffee, and fast food.

It permeates the old car, layered with a stale cigarette smell, as I fiddle with the phone.

And fiddle.

And fiddle.

I hit buttons and the pixelated green screen flickers onto something new. Emails, a blank screen, a screen with a scoreboard and a moving tail of pixels that I think is a game.

The truth is, I just don’t know how to use these things.

But I keep trying, hitting the up and down buttons with arrows printed onto them, the crooked arrow button that’s bigger than the rest, and the middle one, over and over, until—

I wince. “I think I called the number.”

Or deleted it.

Maybe both.

It’s hard to tell with the midday sun glaring into the car, glaring over the phone screen.

“What?” Serena’s shout is so pitched that I cringe. “Just text it—you know what? Stop. I’ll do it.”

She pulls over to the side of the road, then turns off the engine. She swipes the phone from me, her nails scraping my hand as she does.

I bite down on the insides of my cheeks, biting down on the sharp words rising up in me.

My dark gaze slides to her, and I watch as her thumbs clack the buttons.

Words come up on the screen.

Then, “Done.”

That’s all she says before she starts to pull the phone apart.  

My eyebrows lift.

She takes out a black brickish thing from the back of the phone, then slides out a tiny chip—which she bends until it snaps.

“Roll down your window.”

I do.

It’s hard work. The little roller that turns and turns and turns, until the window is down and letting in all the heat.

Serena chucks the pieces of the phone out of the window—and I sink back into the seat so the shards of it don’t strike me on the way out.

“There’s a notebook in the bag, it’s black with golden trim.” She pulls back onto the road, blending into traffic that spreads across three lanes in either direction. “There’s a page marked armour. There’s an address on that page.”

I roll up the window first.

The hot wind hits me on the face, and I feel the dehydration of the past week parching my skin. Only when the window is shut all the way do I start to dig through the bag.

The notebook is tucked away in the pages of the atlas. But there’s no local map to go with it.

And we don’t need it yet, apparently.

What we do need is petrol.

So we stop at a filling station off the road, the kind with a café attached to it and a lot more food on offer than there was at the filling stations in Zurich.

But that’s nothing either one of us is excited about. Pizza, chicken strips, burgers. Just more crap to stuff into our bodies.

I need a detox.

Mother would probably find some way to clean out my arteries if she was here, watching me stuff the tasteless, soggy pizza into my mouth.

The thought of my mother is a punch to the gut—and I lose whatever scraps of appetite I had.

The pizza goes abandoned on the table in the café, and we get back to the drive.

The road is busier now.

But my mind isn’t on the traffic or Serena’s slow and steady driving style, like she’s more nervous on the road than she lets on.

My mind is on my mother.

For the first time since we ran, and I saw Mother in passing on our way to the gondolas, the reality of leaving her actually strikes me. Like a hook catching on my heart.

This whole running away thing has been so intense and chaotic that I actually haven’t had the chance to feel the loss—until now.

It’s a long drive.

It’s a quiet drive.

And that cold ache spreading through my chest is undeniably grief.

I face the window to hide the silent tears falling down my cheeks.

Everything in me wants to run back to Mother and throw myself into her arms and cry on her shoulder.

I have to force my mind to hold onto the reasons I ran in the first place, that Mother is supposed to protect me but dismisses me instead, that she was so cold about Dray and all the pain he’s put me through, and that our meeting at Bluestone if I didn’t run wouldn’t have gone in my favour at all.

Maybe once we reach the shield witch and get settled, and it all slows down, I’ll feel better.

No more motels, bad food, airports and flights. No more chasing our shadows.

The shield witch is our reprieve.

“I can have the baby there,” Serena told me back at the last motel. “It’s safe and remote. I can trust her.”

It’s a relief that we won’t be on the run while she’s pregnant. But once she has the baby, we go back on the road.

That’s a whole other problem for another day.

Right now, I just need to stop and stand still for a while.

I distract myself in the car.

Once I fight back the tears, and wipe the evidence away from my cheeks, I switch back and forth between two radio stations.

One plays a pop song that Serena likes, humming along with it like she knows the tune, but I think it’s sort of hollow and the singer sounds lazy, the melody is lazy, and it’s all very bland.

The other is weird yell-singing.

And honestly, I don’t know which is worse.

Serena hits my hand away, annoyed by my constant back and forth of the stations. She makes the decision for me, and that traps me in the car with hollow pop music.

And it’s a long ride to Mexico.

It’s hours until we cross the border.

Serena turns onto the highway and she drives slowly. She turns the music down, and a fresh wave of quiet washes over us.

I throw the bags onto the backseat. Much lighter now that they are free of jewels.

The book illusions of the cash will have faded now.

It’s not a lot of money. Less now that we have paid our way across the world.

I don’t know how much the shield witch will cost us.

Assuming she doesn’t take too much, I doubt even then the money will last us a long time.

I’m not familiar with how much is needed to live, for food, for a home, for… other things that come with life out in the krum world.

But between us, maybe there’s only a year or two in that money—unless we chose to live somewhere like here.

No, I can’t do that.

I can’t live in these clustered, rusty metal shacks against a barren horizon.

There is more of them after the highway splinters off onto a few, narrower roads, and Serena takes the narrower one, the lonelier road.

The map we picked up from the filling station comes out. I spread it over my side of the dash, but that’s all I do, because already Serena has marked the route with a red pen.

It leads us through a sun-bleached town.

We pass a woman sitting on a plastic chair outside of a shop, rolling tobacco, a few food stands, a bunch of kids that run onto the road, chasing a scuffed football.

Then the town thins out, the road stretches on. Barren fields and harsh terrain replace houses, and the brightness of the sun is starting to fade.

Serena drives through the night for as long as she can before she has to pull over.

On the side of the never-ending road that unfurls into the horizon, with no other cars around, she’s sick.

Hunched over a shrub, she throws up everything in her stomach.

I hide from the smell of it.

I stay in the car.

Still, I hear it.

Can’t escape the noise.

I throw the spine of the seat down into the backseat. As close to a bed as I can get.

Serena—once she’s done out there—does the same with hers. And in the cold of the night, we get some hours of sleep. Just a handful.

Not nearly enough.

It’s around noon when we are driving through a town with buildings shaped like white sandy cubes, and windows without glass cut into them.

Serena tells me, “She lives not far from here.”

“Who is she?” I ask, and now that we’re apparently so close, she might actually answer. “How did you meet her?”

This place is so remote that I doubt they just bumped into each other on a stroll, or at a Michelin restaurant.

“Her name is Sofía.” Serena’s hands grip tighter on the steering wheel, as though nerves are starting to get to her. “She is Isabella’s cousin.”

My mind takes too long to understand.

But when it does connect, I throw her a startled look. “Isabella Paredes?” I echo, disbelief hitching my voice. “Desmond’s wife?”

Again, she nods. Faint, curt, her expression focused as she turns off a road, and we are leaving the town behind.  

“Don’t let the familial bond fool you,” Serena warns me. “Sofía and I obviously have something in common—the need to be free of the Videralli—but she is a witch for sale.”

Meaning she only cares about money.

She isn’t helping Serena out of the goodness of her heart. Cash talks, and that is Sofía’s language.

Disbelief relaxes me on the seat. “How did you meet her?”

It’s not like rogues are invited to family dinners and Rugby Sundays and coven vacations.

To be a rogue means to be cut out.

Serena takes another turn off-road.

Dust flies up behind the car, and the new road is more of a track than anything.

She says, “Our family spent a weekend with Isabella’s over the summer.”

My eyebrows lift, the corners of my mouth pull down, and there’s nothing nonjudgemental about that fleeting expression.

I school my face before she can catch the look.

I’m betting my family knows nothing about that little weekend. The Sinclairs, too.

I’ll bet all the cash in our bags that Serena’s father did everything in his power to keep that meeting with a rogue quiet.

“Sofía gave me her number and told me to call her if I ever needed help,” Serena goes on as though the dread isn’t settling like lead in my stomach. “Then Solstice Season came—and I found out I was pregnant.”

She shakes her head, as though in disbelief of her bad luck. Her black, inky hair catches on her shoulder, tangled, the illusion faded away.  

I check my own illusion in the small mirror of the visor. And my own face reflects back at me, pale and dry skin in dire need of a facial.

I flip the visor shut. “Why did she give you her number?”

Silent, she just shrugs.

But the sorrow on her face is slack and telling.

Sofía must have sensed Serena’s misery, saw her own reflected in it, just like Serena once saw mine and wondered if our sorrow was the same kind.

It wasn’t.

It still isn’t.

We both run, but with differences.

I’m chasing a reprieve.

Serena is chasing freedom.

It’s a fundamental difference between us.

The realisation is heavy. I’m on the run with someone I have nothing in common with.

4

The barren landscape is never-ending, and there’s something uneasy about it, like it’s an abandoned place, not peaceful or remote. Abandoned.

The horizon is warping in the heat, not a home in sight, and I wonder if I should expect a mirage to come along and break up the monotony of this eternal drive.

But all I see are the occasional tumbleweeds rolling over dust.

The town and road are long behind us now, and the small hatchback rattles over the uneven terrain—not a drive this car was built for. For this type of drive, we should’ve bought a Range Rover or something like it.

Serena sits up, her spine suddenly straight. “Here.”

Her quartz eyes reflect with the sunrays cascading through the window.

And her gaze is pinned ahead, to the side.

I trace her stare all the way to—a log.

No, not a log. The tyres roll over dirt, and we get closer to the random, out-of-place sprouting of a tree trunk.

Just one.

And, even more strange, the stump is rich with healthy, green moss growing over it.

A derisive, tired smile snakes over my lips. “She lives in the stump?”

Serena rolls her eyes back for a moment. “We drive around it once—and when we do, we say ‘refuge’, ok?”

Apparently a little humour isn’t welcome.

My tongue lolls around the insides of my cheeks. I don’t answer, but when we do drive around the stump, I say it with her.

We come back to the tyre tracks and look ahead as a mirage starts to glimmer on the horizon.

But this mirage turns out to be very real when it takes the shape of a wooden house—and Serena starts driving towards it.

The house is poorly made. The wood is pale, it’s three stories tall, and I worry about it collapsing just by looking at it.

More love went into the creation of the fenced-off gardens circling the house than the actual house.

I keep that thought to myself. Serena’s been a right pain so far, and I don’t think criticising the property is going to thaw her.

I bite down on my tongue—even as I spot her, the witch standing at the front of the house.

Isabella’s cousin?

She could pass as her sister.

That long dark hair sits over her shoulder in a frazzled plait that should be messy but is actually charming, especially with the smile that beams at us from her pretty, angular face.

And like Isabella, she has those curves. The kind of silhouette that snatched Desmond, an aristos bachelor from the Coven of Europe, with one hell of a print, when he should have married better.

But the difference between Sofía and Isabella is more than a husband. It’s vibes, too.

Sofía’s smile is warmer. Truer. Even if it makes me think of a Cheshire cat.

In slacks and a top, a linen set, and barefoot, Sofía stands a mirror of Isabella if Isabella was more in touch with the earth and less in touch with Dior.

That smile alone should welcome me—or at least make me feel more comfortable.

But there’s a weight spreading in my gut, like liquid metal, and I feel pinned to the seat as the car stops at the front porch.

Serena rams the stick into park, then gets out of the car.

With the metallic dread ribboning through me, I move slower, but I force myself to follow her lead.

The air has that dry heat I suffer whenever we visit Dubai, that stagnant heat with no relief, and it’s hard to breathe.

It’s a desert here, too.

My sneakers flatten on the earth, and it’s so dehydrated that cracks are splintering off in every direction.

Sofía flattens her hand above her eyes like a visor. “Come on in, before we cook out here.”

On the other side of the car, Serena moves for the door to the backseats, then tugs out the bags.

I don’t take a step, not until Serena does, then I’m quick to follow at her heels—maybe too close. So close she can probably feel my breaths rustling her hair.

She might think I’m nervous, and that’s why she doesn’t push me out of her personal space, and she would be sort of right—but also, I’m not going to lead the way into the shield witch’s home. If anything happens, at least it’ll happen to Serena and not me.

We approach Sofía, the visor of her hand casting shadows down her face, and I find that her eyes are on me.

That look glints with recognition.

Her grin is faded, and in its wake is a small smirk.  

I force a smile back, but mine most certainly looks more like a grimace of nerves and uneasiness.

I could break the ice, ask her, ‘So what made you abandon the Videralli and want to spend the rest of your life in hiding?’

But then she could throw that question right back at me.

And, as I walk over the creaking porch for the open front door, I have trouble remembering my answer.

Still, she is staring at me—waiting for my greeting, for any acknowledgement to come from me.

So I settle for awe. “You can conceal an entire house? That’s impressive.”

“I can hide just about anything.” There’s a bragging silk to her voice. “This way,” she adds, gesturing Serena to lead the way down to the corner of the house—not up the porch steps.

That liquid dread returns to sway and sway in my gut as I follow them to the small, fenced garden stuck to the side of the building, then in through a door that’s almost hidden by overgrowth and vines, so concealed that it feels like a forgotten or secret door.

It takes us into darkness. No windows or lights to illuminate the way.

Serena takes my hand, and hers might just be as clammy as mine. Could be the heat outside that’s done it, or the nerves as we follow Sofía through the darkness—

Until I hear the clatter of a doorhandle and light floods into the thin corridor.

Fingers unclasping, Serena and I chase the light into the new room, and immediately I’m suffocated by perfume and chaos.

I don’t know what sort of room this is supposed to be, whether a kitchen, a lounge, a parlour, or even a bathroom, because it’s impossible to tell through the sheer clutter.

Clutter might be too gentle a word.

Shelves take up the bulk of the room, standing at odd angles, and are stacked with figurines and tiny phials and long-neck bottles.

Strings of dried herbs and flowers hang from the ceiling—like a dense garden is just dangling above my head and flooding my nose with too much perfume.

Crystals glimmer from the shelves, bones too, and photographs, and letters, and books and candles and feathers.

It’s so overwhelming that my legs move of their own accord, taking me into the corner of the room, as if to hide from it all.

Serena tosses the bags to the floor.

They land at the toes of my sneakers. I just glance down at the bags when Serena mutters, “Wait here.”

Then she and Sofía squeeze through the mess, duck under hanging chimes and leaves, then weave around a massive scratched table that’s littered with loose papers.

They make their way through the tangled maze of mess, to a door with glass panes that glimmer with sunlight.

They go through the door, maybe to a sunroom, and leave me in here.

Trapped in a hoarding hell, while they have their privacy.

What they can’t say in front of me, I don’t know. I’m as much a part of this as Serena.

But then, I haven’t exactly been enthused about the whole thing. So maybe Serena decides to leave me out of the greater plans.

Guess she doesn’t trust me with all the information at once. It’s what she’s been doing since the start of all this. Breadcrumbing me.

The annoyance of it sags me against the wall.

I cross my arms over my chest. My sweatshirt pulls with the gesture, stretching and tugging, and I can’t wait to get it off of my body.

After being in the car for so long, sleeping in it, sweating in it, I feel unclean.

I stare at the glass paned door, as though if I look hard enough at the shadows flickering beyond it, I can will them back—and Sofía will become a semi-decent host and lead me to the bathroom, where I can at least shower.

But she is gentry, after all, like her cousin.

I’ve heard nothing about a rogue in Isabella’s family through the gossip vine. So it must have been buried deep to preserve the reputation of Desmond’s wife, and thus, the Vasiles.

All pointless, now that Serena is a rogue herself now… and me.  

My heart sinks to the dread in my gut.

A rogue in the Craven family.

Shame heats my cheeks, and I drop my head, as though Mother and Father are standing opposite me now, their disapproving, devastated stares fixed on me.

But all that stands opposite me is a sort of bookcase. Only, it houses jars of pickled and preserved things. Tiny animals, like foetuses, maps unfurling over shelves, dreamcatchers and charms and animal skulls.

For a shield witch, Sofía collects a lot of ritualistic items. She might be part of a coven of rogues, or one of those witches that risks the dangers of stepping outside of her print, trying to expand her power.

But that would be crazy—and just as I think it, the door opens.

Steps thud on the creaky floorboards. But only Sofía comes inside a few steps.

“This way,” she says, and gestures me over with a wave. “I’ll show you to your room.”

My Spanish is rusty—and her dialect is off. But I understand and scoop the bags up from the floor.

Over Sofía’s shoulder, Serena gives me a tight smile, one that doesn’t make me feel wholly welcome, but not entirely unwelcome either. Like it’s a chore to tend to me now.

I bite down on the edge of my tongue, and start making my way through the clutter.

The escape can’t come soon enough.

It stinks in here, reeks of smoke and dust and incense and lavender and tea, and something spicy, and something sweet, and something menthol.

This room would trigger one of Oliver’s migraines, no question.  

I reach the door, but Sofía doesn’t step aside.

“Let’s settle my fee first,” Sofía smiles around her words, and it’s slimy. “Get it out of the way.”

She turns that smile over her shoulder to Serena in the doorway, whose face is harder than stone.

Sofía says, “Fifty thousand euros, thank you.”

That’s too much, way too much compared to the cash we have.

“Fifty thousand?” I echo, and my voice hitches.

Sofía blinks softly at me. “Family rates.”

I throw her a slack look.

“And of course, the monthly stipend,” she adds, all warmth to mask her rotten greed, “but that is to be agreed upon later—once your time here is over.”

Rogues, I decide, are just another gang of snakes.

5

The house is cluttered, from room to room, and that’s not even taking into account the other refugees that are staying here.

People come and go, some stay for days, some for weeks, some have been here longer than us.

Sometimes the only way I can get a moment to myself, to breathe, is to sneak out into the vegetable garden at the back of the house, past the animal pen, where the chicken coop and barn are nestled, and down the hill.

Sofía’s private garden is off-limits to guests, but that doesn’t stop me from stealing a reprieve in it every other day.

The vegetables in this imported, enchanted soil are delicate. So I never step off the narrow trails as I hide from the madness of Hell House.

Today—with the arrival of three made witches—I sit between the rhubarb and lettuce patches.

The apple trees loom above me, shading me from the harsh, endless sun.

I tug my mint-green baseball cap down, then hug my knees to my chest.

I won’t be found out in the garden for hours. Not between the made ones pulling up in an old, dusty car, and Mirriam—a long-time rogue and friend of Sofía’s—cooking up a storm in the kitchen for the dozens of guests.

Those other witches are constantly in my way. Whether it’s hogging the bathrooms, clogging the corridors and staircases, or in the main gardens working off their debts with labour.

But Serena and I paid off our debt with a chunk of cash. So we don’t have to do the hard labour.

Really, we do nothing at all.

I spend my days wandering, or sleeping in bed, rolling around under the blankets—and without wealth and luxury, it got boring, fast.

I pick at the stem of the apple I plucked from the tree. We’re not allowed to take any, but I think the fifty thousand euros we handed over to Sofía say otherwise.

I scrape my fingernails along the stem until it’s fleshy—then the shade darkens.

It stretches, growing over the path.

I touch my chin to my shoulder and look back at the silhouette advancing on me, a stick with a bulbous belly.

Serena waddles down the trail.

As slender as she was back at the academy, her belly is a round mass just stuck to her body.

Heavy and awkward, she somehow maintains an elegance about her, like she’s a model that has a fake belly strapped to her.

It reminds me of Dinara’s older sister.

Dinara Korolyov is one of those aristos women I see at the major collective events, where most of the covens come together, like the debutante ball.

Russia is linked with Iceland, Greenland, and all those icy little islands—making the Coven of the North—but it used to be a part of the Coven of Europe centuries ago.

The families grew too much, and covens should not be made up of more than five families, one for each point of the pentacle, one for each of the gods.

Serena is a mirror of Dinara’s sister, the pained smile on her sweaty, exhausted face, the thinness of her shape with a giant swell in her belly—and Elvira was carrying twins.

Dinara was only sixteen. I remember because we’re the same age. and I remember Elvira crying out in the ballroom of the Winter Palace, right in the middle of the debutante ball.

She went into labour right there.

It was horrifying.

Her family rushed her out of the crowd, and I just remember how she walked.

How she waddled.

Serena makes an awful grunting noise before she slowly, clumsily, drops to the earth at my side.

Her legs stretch out before she leans her weight back onto one straight arm, hand pressing into the soil. Her other hand rests on the underside of her belly.

She faces the opposite direction, watching Hell House stand against the horizon, and I stare out at the barren landscape.

“Back to sulking?” Her voice is too breathy. “You know Sofía doesn’t want you out here. She will start giving us fines if you’re not careful.”

I don’t respond.

There’s no point.

We’ve had this conversation too many times.

Sofía hasn’t given out any fines yet.

And I still haven’t stopped sneaking off into the only glimpse of privacy on the property.

Sweat dampens the back of my baseball cap. I rub at it, and the crunching sound of my hair would send Mother into a frazzled frenzy if she were here.

I sometimes wish she was—but I don’t say that.

Instead, I ask, “Is the bathroom free yet?”

I’ve been waiting all morning for a shower.

Though, of course I did give up on that and come out here after a few hours of going in and out of our bedroom, checking on the bathrooms, and failing each time.

My patience is withering.  

At home, I have my own bathroom.

A full ensuite, the shower, the tub, the toilet, the basin, the towel closet… and Abigail.

At the academy, there are plenty of showers to go around. So even if there is a queue, the wait isn’t very long at all.

My mind snags on the academy—and the truth that it all continues without us. The senior year doesn’t stop just because we vanished into the night.

My brother, Dray, Asta, Landon, even Eric, they all continue on. It’s a strange realisation.

My voice is a murmur, “Everyone will be graduating this week.”

But of course, Serena already knows. She just doesn’t care.

Not like I do.

There’s no part of her, however small, that wishes she was there with the rest of the seniors, finally graduating after all that time and turmoil and torture.

After a long moment, she asks, “Is that why you come out here? To think about home? We’re not supposed to do that.”

One of Sofía’s rules. I don’t understand the rule entirely, or why she feels the need to control our thoughts here.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

I don’t explain myself.

Silence stretches over us.

I stare at the landscape.

She stares at the house.

I dig my fingernail into the apple’s skin. “Do you think they are still looking for us?”

Her answer comes too quickly, too easily, and so I think she must’ve been ruminating about home, too.

“Definitely.”

“What if they’re not?” I ask.

She turns a blank, patient look on me.

“What if they told everyone we died or something, and they just… go on pretending we don’t exist?”

For the first time in a long time, Serena smiles. A true, genuine smile.

“Then we would be truly free,” she says, soft, and loosens a sigh. Her dark hair spills freely down her back, a river of ink. “And we wouldn’t need to stay here, and we could get in the car now and drive off into the sunset.”

I scoff. “Into the sunset, then to the hospital—because you’re about to burst.”

Her fingers drum on her belly, and she hums. “It would help if I knew how far along I am.”

She looks as pregnant as one can get. That is a big baby belly—and she looks on the verge of going into labour, like Elvira who just spilled her water all over the polished floors.

But what do I know?

Serena could be seven months, eight, nine.

She could be early or late.

I only wish the little seed would hurry up already. It’s been a lifetime here at Hell House, and I’m ready to get out of here.

“What about after the hospital and the sunset?”

Serena hums, “Hmm?”

I turn to face her. “What would you do? Where would you go? If they weren’t looking for us.”

“I would…” Drumming her fingers on that belly, over and over, she lets her mind wisp away to places of fantasy. “I would work. I would build a career in fashion.”

I make a face. “Doing what?”

“Run a magazine,” she muses with a faint shrug, “or create my own version of fashion week outside of New York, Milan, and Paris… or simply open my own shop. A boutique near the beach.”

Flames of an old love flicker in her eyes.

I consider her now, in basically a sack that was mislabelled a dress, and the awful, dated floral print.

Serena never would’ve worn anything like this before we ran away.

Now, it’s the only thing of Sofía’s that fits her, so she wears it every day. It stinks. Reeks of sweat and mildew, because she rinses it in the shower with her sometimes, then wears it outside until it dries, but it never really dries all the way, not even in this heat. It needs to be washed and hung out properly with the worker rogues.

“You?”

“What?” My mind takes a moment to return. “Oh. I would… play piano—professionally.”

It’s the first thing that comes to mind.

But truthfully, I don’t want to work any job, ever.

Finally, I bite into the abused apple.

Even with the magic, the enchantments, imported soil, the apple is still too soft. Not crisp enough, not sour enough.

It’s mediocre at best.

Still, I finish it, bite after bite.

Serena falls onto her back, crossing her arms over her face.

For a long while, we stay here. Hidden away.

In the vegetable garden, time feels private. In the house, time feels suspended.

It’s a slight difference, but one that matters.

Then, Serena goes and ruins it. “Sofía needs me to go into town for her.”

And that means she needs me to come along.

For company, for safety, and for my lessons.

Each time we illusion-up and go into the large town two hours away, Serena uses the chance to teach me about the krum world.

At first, it was a disaster.

I stared at the shelves of toothpaste—stunned by the sheer selection on offer. Dozens of them, some with fluoride, and I have no idea what that is, some for sensitive teeth, then some for cavities, some for whitening, some for babies, kids, and in all sorts of flavours.

It’s too much.

And that’s just the toothpaste.

Not the toilet cleaner, the bleach, the different kinds of cooking oil and breads.

I don’t look forward to it.

But Serena decides our time in the garden is up and, hand pressing into my shoulder, she starts to get up. Takes her a moment.

My face twists under the pressure of her weight sinking into my shoulder—and I bite down on the hiss brewing in my throat.

The moment she’s standing on her own, I roll and rub my shoulder, perhaps a little sulky.

She just glances down at me, a dullness in her consideration, an ‘I’m so over you’ look I have no trouble reading.

It’s amazing we haven’t strangled each other yet.

It’s even more impressive we haven’t exchanged cross words.

We want to.

But we have crafted new masks just for each other, and those masks are patient and unbothered most of the time.

I shift onto my knees—then still.

Because a splash of water strikes the dirt and wets my hands.

I blink at it, then my mouth turns down at the corners, because I know, I know what that is.

And it got all over me.  

Slowly, I lift my gaze to Serena.

She is a struck statue.

The pallor of her complexion, the wideness of her eyes, it’s pure fear. And so is the tremble of her voice, “Get Sofía. Now.”

I don’t waste another second.

I scramble to my feet, then barrel into a run up the garden path.

6

Newborn babes are not very cute.

It’s more than the constant bowel movements that stink enough to run me out of the room, and the milk that regurgitates with a slight burp, and the crying that claws at my ears and has me wishing for a nursemaid to just magically appear.

It’s the look of them, too.

The babe that Serena holds to her chest, that she hums a soft tune to, has a complexion that’s pale in patches, purple in others, has eyes that are wrinkled shut, and little white dots on its nose.

His nose.

Serena gets mad at me when I say ‘it’.

Bet she would lose her mind if I called him what I really thought.

Monster.

How else does one describe a creature that tears its way out of a woman like that?

That’s what I remember.

That is what is seared into the grooves of my brain and will stay there to haunt me forever.

It tore out of her.

The blood, the stretching, the pulling—

Then I passed out.

Woke up on an armchair in the corner of the room, a damp towel on my forehead, and there on the bed with dated checkered sheets, Serena was slumped on the pillows, holding that swathed baby as though it didn’t try to rip her in half.

That was weeks ago now.

And what sleepless weeks they have been.

I lean against the dusty window.

Serena still hums that soft, gentle tune. I don’t recognise a pattern in it, so I think she makes it up as she goes. Not a melody I’ve ever heard before.

I’m glad when it stops—but not so much when Serena takes to talking to me instead.

“Isn’t he the cutest?” she asks, then her voice lightens into that awful babytalk she does, “Aren’t you so handsome? I love you. I love you so much, nothing in the world will come between us.”

My mouth twists.

I turn my cheek to the glass to hide the faint repulsion on my face.

But Serena doesn’t look at me.

She has eyes only for the babe.

It’s not the baby himself that I’m uncomfortable with. It’s how blatantly and openly she adores him.

It’s that she breastfeeds him herself, right in front of me, without any care.

It’s that he has become the only thing in her life, her world, her existence.

And maybe it’s how much she loves him that makes me want to avoid our bedroom as much as I can.

Her loving tangents continue like background noise. But when she says, “You are going to be so strong, I just know it,” I bristle.

My spine stiffens, and I turn my back on the window.

I ask, blunt, “What if he isn’t?”

Serena’s smile falters. It lifts, and she looks plainly at me. “Pardon?”

“What if he isn’t strong? What if he’s like me?”

Understanding takes a moment to settle in her sluggish mind.

Something to do with pregnancy and motherhood scrambles the mind, according to Sofía.

It’s more common among mothers who care for the babes themselves, without any nannies or nursemaids.

“If he is deadblood,” she says, carefully, like there’s restrained irritation creeping up inside of her, “then I will love him as I do now.”

My face tightens. “Maybe that’s easy to say.”

But not to do.

Because I’m sure there was a time my father held me as a babe, promised to love and protect me, then somewhere along the way, that all faded.

“If he is,” Serena says, “then he will never know. Not in this world where there are no witches.”

Her smile hurts my heart. It is so true and so loving, and aimed down at her son.

I grunt an answer, then turn to look outside.

And time passes.

The evening light fades, night comes, and after a while, when I turn around again, the baby is in the cot, and Serena is sleeping alone on the bed.

With just a flimsy sheet pulled over her body, she snoozes through her exhaustion.

I won’t wake her for dinner.

I need her asleep for now. Less chance of her following me out to the garden.

So I’m quiet, careful, as I pull on a lumpy woollen sweater, then slip out of the room.

The door clicks softly behind me before I tackle the creaky steps one at a time.

Down one landing, and it’s like stepping out of a quiet bubble and into a chaotic one.

The house is claustrophobic at the best of times. But rush hours—breakfast, lunch, dinner—has the thinnest air and the slowest, most clogged traffic down the staircases.

It’s also the best time to sneak out to the garden unnoticed.

My face twists with the annoyance as I side-step along the wall, avoiding the staggering manure-smelling workers from the goat enclosure. I guess the goat enclosure because they don’t have chicken feathers clinging to their clothes as they push by in their rush to the upstairs bathroom.

Sofía is insistent on everyone being clean for dinner.

But between the runaways returning from gruelling physical labour—that I consider to be more along the lines of slave labour than paying off shield debts—and the ones now getting up to start their night shifts, it’s a good few minutes before I’m even on the ground floor.

I slip outside, and the fresh air floods my lungs.

The sky is brushstrokes of pinks and purples above me as I rush across the dirt, out of the lights that glare from the house, and down to the private garden.

The gate squeaks against its hinges—but the noise of dinner and the runaways clogging the halls and stairways masks it.

I haste downhill, following the trail until I’m out of sight, and I’m surrounded by shrub.

It’s dark this far down.

I don’t risk using a torch.

All I have right now is the fading sunset on the horizon, hardly there anymore, and the moon that’s starting to rise.

I drop onto my knees and roll up the sleeves of my sweater—the same sweater I wore in the chilly hours of Bluestone.

I force that out of my mind.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

Sofía’s warning is what I hold onto, a way to trick my mind out of memories, and I just repeat her words over and over in my head.

With my bare hands and nails that were once manicured, I reach under the roots of the apple tree, and I start to dig.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

I hum the tune of the words in my head.

A song that grounds me with each wrenching handful of dirt out from under the exposed roots.

A memory tries to intrude.

The ritual on the mornings of the New Year. Digging up the earth by hand with my family, pouring my blood into the soil, a bagged sacrifice that I convince myself is just an animal…

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

But it’s the plea I make to the gods that snakes into my mind, stubborn.

‘I offer no blood, because it is unworthy.’

But what is unworthy about deadblood, blood that should still contain the gods’ magic, blood that should reflect the night sky?

The three extra phials of blood in Witchdoctor Dolios’s briefcase burrow deep into my brain—three extra phials that did not come from me.

The whisperings between Mother and Father, of bribing witchdoctors and a dreadful truth realised with blood tests.

I thought I was beloved and cherished, and that’s why I was taken out of Bluestone every time I was injured. Even just a scrape on my knee would send Father into a panic, and I would be taken home for Witchdoctor Dolios to tend to.

But the fear in me doesn’t dissipate.

The dread doesn’t ease.

The doubt doesn’t leave.

So I dig up what I buried under the roots of this tree months ago.

The syringe that I took from the infirmary’s storeroom the night we ran.

What’s strange is I don’t remember actively choosing to take it that night.

I just… took it.

Like, as I considered it, touched it, and felt the walls of my life coming down around me, I realised something deep down in the hollowness.

I just knew a horrible truth.

Something I haven’t been strong enough to face. Brave enough to check.

But this is my last chance to face it.

Serena and I leave soon.

Sofía wants us to pay more if we stay longer—and both of us are itching to get out of here.

We need to leave and start our lives with Sofía’s shield following us around.

We can’t be like the other runaways here. Stuck and too afraid to leave, too afraid of the outside world.

Even though I am scared.

Fear coils through me, like some wet and thick creature, a squid slopping and slashing inside of me.

My fingers drag over the plastic-wrapped bag.

And I falter.

My breath pins to my chest and I can feel it, my heart beating, thumping and thumping.

I dig my nails into the earth at the edge of the bag, then wrench it out.

It rustles, far too loud.

With a glance up at the sky, I see that the sun is gone, and the moonlight brushes over the earth, and the stars glitter so clearly.

Dinner will still be buzzing in the dining room.

I doubt anyone heard the rustle.

Still, I am frozen for a moment, waiting, listening—and I hear nothing more than nature, the breeze through the shrub, the crackling of dry leaves, and my own heart beating in my eardrums. 

The breath shudders out of me.

I can’t put it off any longer.

And I know, deep down, I’m just buying time.

Time is something I’m short on now.

Carefully, I take the syringe out of the bag, then clasp the phial onto the latch.

The needle is separately packaged, and it’s a fumbling moment before I’m slipping it into place, then it locks.

And it feels like a gun in my hand.

Dangerous.

Too dangerous.

I should put it down, bury it again, run out of this garden—and never return.

But I wind a strip of fabric around my bicep and stretch out my arm.

I move slow, slower now that there’s murkiness in my vision, like terrified tears are brewing but not falling.

I pause.

Strap around my arm, my veins are starting to rise, and I aim the syringe at myself—and my hand starts to tremble.

I swallow back an audible gulp.

But it does nothing to soften the lump in my throat.

I inch the needle closer to the larger, lifted vein.

A groan thrums in my throat.

I pierce my flesh—and a hollow sound ribbons out of me.

The pain is more than I expected.

Maybe since I do it to myself.

Maybe that my insides are in turmoil.

But I draw blood.

Red crimson floods the phial. It sloshes and splashes against the glass.

Then, once it’s full, I peel the needle out of my vein.

Teeth bared, I fight off the rattle that aches to shudder me.

But that shudder locks into my hands, hands that tremble as I unlatch the phial, then let it fall onto my palm.

I still.

On my knees, moonlight cascading over my back, I hold the phial of my blood in my shadow.

My face twists.

The tears finally fall.

And I lift the phial into the moonlight—

7

I hiss with the sudden pain stabbing through me.

Baby Salvador tugs at strands of my hair, and my scalp is on fire.

My hot face twists against the urge to shake him.

Stares are sliding to us from all around the public library.

I snub those looks as best as I can.

One arm cradling Sal, I bounce him on my thigh, because when Serena does it, it soothes him.

I’m having no luck.

He just keeps on shrieking and grabbing my hair and scratching at me.

Who knew babies had little talons for fingernails?

I arch my chin away from his reach and click the computer mouse.

The monitor flickers with the change of website. 

Public libraries and their computers have come in handy since we left Hell House. More than handy, it’s been something of a saviour.

The snort catches in my nose, and I aim a dark look down at the baby.

Salvador, the name Serena gave him, her favourite grandfather’s name, means saviour.

And in the few months of his life, he’s yet to live up to that.

He’s more of a hindrance than anything.

And right now, an embarrassment.

A screaming, red-faced, hair pulling monster.

He slows me down.

I glance at the clock on the monitor. Just another ten minutes before I have to meet Serena at the car.

She’ll wait.

Not like she can just drive off and leave me with the baby she is so desperate to keep.

So I bounce my thigh, even though it’s useless and I’m convinced the baby knows I’m no mother, and I make soothing shush-shush sounds, and click from tab to tab on the screen.

I print them all.

Once that’s done, I close down every tab, erase the history, then restart the computer.

Might be overkill, especially since I’m wearing the frail face of a freckled woman whose hair is greying.

To those who glare at me, I look like an overwhelmed, stressed grandmother.

So there should be compassion in those looks.

People, I learn, are selfish wonders.

Pricks.

Most of them, anyway.

No one ever offers to help or gives a comforting smile when the baby starts wailing and I’m obviously overwhelmed. There is no compassion for mothers in this world.

It’s hateful.

And my mood is sour as I push out of the chair and clumsily strap the screaming baby into the car seat. The kind with the handle that helps me cart him around, but it’s not exactly light.

It pulls down my arm, sends aches up my slanted spine, as I heave it over to the printer.

Page after page comes out.

I printed every rental listing for every small town in this state.

Ohio is a relief after the searing heat of Mexico. But, after I shove the papers into my backpack, then haul both the bag and the baby carrier outside, the weather turns on me.

Rain is pelting the pavement.

The sidewalk, as the krums here call it.

But I knew that already.

It’s not too much of an adjustment to be here in the US. I’ve spent my fair share of weekends in New York City and Aspen.

Not these days, though.

Cities are above our budget.

Turns out, it costs a lot for two people and a baby to live comfortably. And we’re already down a chunk of change, between paying off Sofía, and all the driving, the travelling, the baby stuff we had to buy, then the monthly sum to keep us shielded from afar, which is $1,000 a month… each. As in, me, Serena, and also Sal.

So, $3,000 every month just to stay hidden.

How we are supposed to afford to live on top of that monthly expense, I don’t know.

Sofía is eating through our funds faster than we are.

But maybe it will get easier once we are settled.

These print-outs of rentals are our future.

Something stable.

A town to stop in for a little while, a place for Sal to grow from a baby to a toddler.

Hopefully toddlers cry less.

He’s really screaming now.

The rain is getting him, and it’s getting me, too.

The car is all the way up the street, at the supermarket where Serena stopped in for some fresher food, salads and fruit.

When we reach the car, Serena is already sitting in the driver seat, waiting for us.

She doesn’t help me strap in the baby seat.

That’s a nightmare in itself.

But then we’re off.

Two towns over, where those manky motels sit near the highway. Our usual spots.

We endure the drive with Sal screaming in the back—for the next fifteen minutes when Serena decides she’s had enough.

She pulls over and climbs into the backseat with Sal.

I take over the driver’s seat.

Now that we’re out of the bigger town, on a highway, and headed to smaller settlements, the driving practice that filled much of my time at Hell House is coming in handy. Even if I can only drive automatics.

Confidence fails me in busier places and on more congested roads.

Serena says with practice, it will become second nature, like riding a horse.

I hope she’s right.

Because driving is stressful.

Even on bare roads.

The radio is dialled all the way down.

My music for the drive is Serena’s softly sung lullabies and the shush-shush sound we make too many times in a day.

Then, after an hour, both Sal and Serena fall asleep in the back.

I find a motel to stop at.

The tyres roll over potholes and loose gravel.

The shift in terrain stirs Serena awake.

But she says nothing as I park, turn off the engine, then climb into the backseat with her.

She touches up my illusion. Changes it. And a bout of nausea jolts her shoulders.

She swallows the sick down, and my face twists with the blatant disgust cringing me.

I peel off my cropped black jacket, because it’s too feminine for a man, and she always changes my illusion to a man when we get to the motels.

The jeans, boots and t-shirt are neutral, so I don’t change before I creep out of the car as quietly as I can so I don’t wake Sal.

I rush to the office. Luck is on our side today.

We get the keys to a downstairs room, which saves us hauling all the baby stuff up to the second floor.

Serena sticks to the backseat of the car while I do the carrying—moving suitcases and a cot and the baby bags from the car into the room.

But not Sal.

We don’t risk waking him.

I give her the keys, she stays behind, and I head straight to bed in the motel room.

I only get an hour of rest before she’s coming in with Sal, fussing in her arms, and she drops the keys onto the little table next to the door.

It’s my cue to get up.

So I do, arms stretching above my sore, stiff body, a yawn splitting my tired, puffy face.

Serena makes herself comfortable on the bed, then starts nursing Sal. “Did you see the guy out there? The one with the plastic bag?”

I push off the bed and start on the pop-up cot. Sounds easier than it is.

“He’s at the phone booth now, but he was pacing near the diner earlier. He looked nervous.”

I just hum in answer.

I’m used to this now.

Serena thinks every person we see, at the shop, at the filling station, at the motels, is suspicious.

A witch on the lookout for us.

A tracker on our tail.

Every car that travels behind us for more than a few minutes is following us.

Every stranger glancing our way is a spy.

But I say what I always say, “They are looking for two women travelling alone. Not a couple with a baby.”

And that’s what we are.

Me, a man, and Serena, a woman whose complexion is pale and freckled, and whose arms are painted with tattoos.

Only Sal is unchanged.

We don’t illusion him—but even if we did, I doubt Serena could summon the energy to do it. She’s always teetering on the edge of her lassitude limit.

We will need to stick around here for a while, let her recover and restore her energy.

So that is what we do.

In a room that smells like dust-mites, surrounded by thin walls and shouting neighbours, and sometimes randy ones, the baby cries and sleeps on repeat.

But we make use of our time here.

We go through every rental listing, every print-out that details the towns and the demographics and jobs—until, on the third day here, we make a decision.

I drive.

The notebook sits on the passenger seat.

It used to be Serena’s, but over time, it became mine. It’s my manual to the krum world.

Everything I have learned is in that book. And everything I sometimes need help remembering.

Price ranges for food, gas, motel rates, diapers. And in the pages at the back of the book is our list of spending. And on another page, we track how much money we have left.

Serena and Sal stay in the backseat for the drive.

Mostly, they sleep.

I pull over for the feeding, because Serena gets in a twist about driving with the baby out of the car seat.

It’s a long drive to the cold, stormy coast.

But by the time the hatchback is rolling into town, a town small enough to walk, like the village near Elcott, Serena is awake and Sal is rested.

No crying.

Thank the gods.

Moments like these remind me of an eclipse. With all the right but rare conditions coming together, we pile out of the car with just our bags and find a cosy spot in the diner.

We have lunch.

Sal coos happily in his car seat, playing with a straw that’s apparently more interesting than I realised.

“Caesar salad,” I mumble my order, feeling the sluggishness of the drive wearing me down. “Dressing on the side, and three espressos.”

I don’t bother asking if they have almond milk. These places never do.

Serena rubs the dark circle under her eye. “Soup of the day.”

The two safest orders on the menu.

It’s the same at every diner we stop at.

It’s not so much food safety that restricts us—it’s the taste. The taste of the charred, flavourless steak I had almost a month ago; the bland mushy risotto; the over-salted fries; and the burgers that only taste like whatever sauce drenches it, and cheap cheeses that are so much like plastic that I am suspicious of it.

“This is nice,” Serena says, after the waitress puts our drinks down on the sticky table.

I look around the dated diner.

There’s a piece of cardboard stuck under a table leg. Crumpled napkins and crumbs strewn over the next table. Fingerprints on the glass door. Cake in the glass case beside the register, and I’m pretty sure that cake has been in there for days, if not longer.

“I wouldn’t say that,” I scoff, then sip my coffee.

My lashes shut on the horror of it.

Burnt, cheap coffee.

Probably came from one of those brew pots, rather than a true machine and a nice blend.

Still, I throw it back, like it’s a shot of cheap tequila and I’m lost in a maze.

‘Thoughts of home will be your enemy.’

Serena rolls her eyes.

“The town,” she says, firm, moody, always moody. “It’s nice. Isolated. Quiet. What’s the population again?”

That mum brain has affected her.

I tug out a piece of paper from my jean pocket, then unfold it. “Two hundred and four as of five years ago.”

Serena pauses as the waitress sets down the bowls and the breadbasket. Then, when she’s gone, “It’s impossible for them to update the numbers? Five years is a long time.”

I shrug. “Maybe it hasn’t changed since the last time they counted everyone.”

I don’t know how population counts happen, but I get the funny image of all the towners lined up in the street, being ticked off one after the other on a clipboard, maybe by the mayor.

“Let me see the listing again.”

I hand over the second folded print-out.

Then, as Serena skims it, I start on my salad. And I rush it, in strategic order. Parmesan, then croutons, then tomatoes.

Sal might be happy right now, but he’s an unpredictable ticking timebomb, and at least one of us needs to be done eating if he starts crying again.

“There are no photographs on the listing.” Serena’s slender hand reaches my bowl—and she steals a strip of cheese. “What time is the showing?”

I check my phone screen. “Soon.”

“I’ll stay here with Sal. I still feel nauseas.”

“You don’t want to see the place?”

She shakes her head. “Do you have enough cash to make payment upfront?”

I nod, mouthful of lettuce, and let my teeth crunch down on that healthy goodness.

It should be funny, how desperate I am for a Ceasar salad in a small town, when it’s actually quite sad when I think back to dining out, to the restaurants and fusions and cafés I would go to.

My family wouldn’t be caught dead in a diner like this, or a town like it.

But that’s the whole point.

I grab my backpack, tug it over my shoulder. “Be back soon.” I leave the keys on the table. “I’ll walk.”

Without a word, she’s starting on her pumpkin soup, now that the steam has settled.

The bell jingles above the door as I leave the diner and start up the main street.

Buildings border the road, only a few truck-like cars parked along it, and the walk is quiet.

I pass a handful of people huddled out front of the hardware store.

Locals.

I know because they pause to look at me, watch me pass them by, and then whisper about me.

A new face among them.

Doesn’t bother me.

I’m used to stares from my days at the academy. Those stares weren’t so nice, most of the time.

I almost smile at the contrast.

From the wainscoted walls and hardwood floors of the academy, nestled in the white landscape of the alps, to here, a fishing town on the coast of Maine.

My family would have a fit if they saw me now. Strolling up a street that stinks of fish, in a place that whispers its existence in the world, wearing dirty old jeans and a t-shirt that’s been stretched by the grabby hands of a fussy baby.

If they could smell me, the stale food, the mustiness from motels and the car, the faint stink of baby sick…

Grandmother would cane me for it, for all of it.

If she got her bony, strong hands on me, I’d be welted and bruised.

But if Dray got his hands on me—

That one sends a shiver down my spine.

I wrestle the thought of him out of my head.

I try to avoid thinking about him. Any time he pops into my mind, I focus on my surroundings until he’s gone.

But that strategy fails me now.

Because I pass the post office with an old phone booth out front—and it steals me back to the phone booths at Bluestone.

I blink, and a swarm of memories attack me.

The strongest one lingers.

Oliver pulling me into the booth as Dray storms for me—and his hand comes swiping through the air.

I shut my eyes, tight, and my shoes scuff to a stop on the pavement.

Dray has done so much to me, but hitting me was a whole other thing.

It’s something I never really saw coming.

The fear rose in me sometimes, but I don’t think I ever truly believed it would happen.

That he would just backhand me.

It was hard, too.

Sent me flying to the floor. Cracked my cheekbone and cut my lip.

I shouldn’t open my eyes and stare at the phone booth—like I want to draw closer, pick up the receiver, dial in a familiar number, and call home.

Yet, a part of me wants to.

A naïve part of me—a little pocket of delusion that throbs in either my brain or heart—wonders if my father would still hand me over to Dray.

It’s not certain that he knows about Dray striking me. That depends on how much the others said.

But if he does know, and he knows how far I’ll go to escape Dray, between the article and running away, then surely he would at least question the arrangement.

And yet, I don’t feel convinced.

I push onwards, until I’m turning the corner onto a quieter street—and an older man wearing a bucket hat is leaning against the nose of a truck.

I called ahead to arrange a time, and I’m late.

Just a few minutes late, but the sourness wrinkles his already weathered face, and I think he should take a moment to consider injections and retinol.

Not even men should let themselves go, not like this.

But he is at least amiable as he shows me the house. If it can be called that.

More like a shack than anything, really.

Metal weatherboarding, a rotten porch that’s leaning to the side, chipped paint on the door and window frames.

It’s no better inside.

The carpet is old. The kitchen, brown and stained, and the flooring is sort of soft, but it looks like tiles, which baffles me.

The bathroom—on the bright side—has a tub. But the shower is… Well, it’s an apparatus of some kind. An attachment that sticks onto the bath tap.

I’ve never seen anything like it before.

But it’s two bedrooms.

And it’s a place to just stand still for a while.

THREE YEARS LATER

8

Cold, foamy water crawls over the slippery rocks.

Sal shrieks and laughs and runs through the shallow waves, stumbling over the rocky sands—

Serena chases him.

Her smile is bright, her laughter sincere, and I see her in it, through the light illusion of only her nose and hair.

Mine is just as light, and I have a baseball cap pulled over my face, and a hood drawn over my head, just in case.

But I doubt anyone in this little seaside town will recognise us.

I hate this town.

This beach of rocks and boulders and seaweed. The grey waters with thick clouds above, the cold air and the drizzle that dampens my cheeks.

I wrap my arms around my shins and drop my chin to my knees.

My mood is a heavy, grey cloud of its own.

It doesn’t hang over Serena and Sal as they run and splash and kick their way through the cold water.

Their joy is sincere—it’s true.

And it makes my mouth purse.

How Serena can enjoy this wintery, remote beach, when we have both experienced the white sands of tropics is inconceivable to me.

This is no French Riviera.

This is not the Amalfi Coast.

This is the rocky, windy coast of British Columbia.

And it is cold.

I hug myself tighter. My knees creak in the chill.

My glower is lifted to the waters, following Serena’s bright smile through the drizzle.

She doesn’t chase Sal anymore.

Her hands clasp his little ones and she wades through the water, dangling him with her steps.

I hate how happy she is.

There is nothing joyful about the rain just hanging in the air, the cloudy skies, the misery of this beach—

And for my birthday, of all days.

It’s the second last day of February.

All the aristos kids are born in the same few weeks. Serena’s birthday is just three days away.

And this is how we celebrate. Taking the hour available to us—while our clothes spin around in the laundromat washing machine—at a rocky, cold beach.

I drop my forehead to my knees.

It isn’t comfortable.

But none of it is. Nothing has been comfortable since the day we left.

If I was home, I would be celebrating my birthday in style. With all the comforts around me. Probably in the jet, flying off to my new favourite destination, which changed every other year. Oliver would have new watches. I would have a new animal to add to my collection.

But I would be married, too.

To Dray.

Maybe I would already have children of my own. But I would have a team of nannies for them.

I certainly wouldn’t be doing my own laundry and sitting out in the rain, the car parked just up the rocky hill.

We’re on the move again.

Sofía called to give us a head’s up just a few days ago, that the shield was being touched, that trackers were closing in—and that’s our cue to leave. To move on to the next town, states away.

But I do it unwillingly now.

It’s a chore to leave.

Sometimes, I just wish they would catch me already. Instead, we get away every time—and that leaves me doing laundry on my birthday.

I was stupid to chase this little life.

9

There is a phone booth in every town.

No matter the size of the town or the phones that fit in our pockets, there is one constant—

A dingy, stained phone booth.

The first town we tried to settle in, the phone booth was old, scratched, and awkwardly placed on the main street.

I saw it in passing a few times before Sofía called, and told us we had to move on. That she could feel the shield being breached, and that it wasn’t safe there anymore.

We lost all our deposit and rent on the house.

Hightailed it out of there in the middle of the night.

We found another town.

Then another, and another.

Every time we were even close to relaxing, Sofía called to push us out again.

Now, three years on the run, and we’re on our fourteenth town.

In this town, the phone booth is next to a bus stop, bolstered to the brick veneer of the general store.

I stare at it as I pass by, until that tether in my hand suddenly pulls down.

Sal drops his weight, leaning to the side, and practically dangles from the child-safe harness. The leash scrapes over my palm, but I tighten my grip and tug him back to me.

“Stand up,” I snap at him.

But he just sings the Scooby Doo theme song, like I haven’t said anything at all, and completely butchers it.

Still pulling down on the leash, he pauses his song to ask, “Where’s Mumma?”

The corners of my mouth pin to my cheeks. “In the city. Like I told you already.” About five times.

His weight tilts me aside. “I want Mumma.”

“I told you,” I start, after a deep inhale through my nose, “she will meet us here, once she is back from the city.”

“I don’t want to go,” he whines. “I don’t want to go. I want Mumma.”

My face tenses at the sound of his grating, pitchy voice. My teeth start to grind, and my fist is too tight on the leash, knuckles turning white.

I take another breath, deep enough to expand my stomach, then narrow my eyes on him—

I give him that stare of mine.

It only works when Serena isn’t around, because in his short life, he’s already figured out that he can pit her against me in parenting. He can hide behind her, call out for her, and she blackballs me.

Every single time.

But now, it’s just me and Sal.

And the patience is withering in me.

I miss when he couldn’t talk.

My stare throws him upright, and he at least walks with me around the corner of a closed shop—and we see the crowds gathering ahead.

The parade hasn’t started yet, but—like us—everyone is getting here early.

An older couple cuts ahead of us, both carrying those sorts of pop-up chairs, and a cooler.

I don’t rush.

I don’t need to watch the parade myself. I can always put Sal up on my shoulders and he can have a view from there.

My focus is on the stalls around Town Hall. The courtyard is full of them.

I make a beeline for the stalls with snacks.

And that perks Sal up.

Maybe pumping a toddler full of sugar isn’t the best idea, but I buy him a candied apple, and it keeps him complacent as I wander the market.

Stall after stall, nothing really stands out.

Between the tables full of old junk, a lot of the same sweets over and over, and a woman who insists on selling a bunch of Beanie Babies for too high a price, insisting they are collectables, my purse goes untouched after the candied apple.

The Founder’s Day celebration is a weekend-long affair, and I’m glad that our apartment is a few blocks out from the town centre, away from the heart of the chaos.

The whole town is out, and those from other neighbouring, smaller towns and settlements and farms.

The parade is about to start.

Town Hall’s clock tower is a mere minute from striking noon.

That’s when I spot it.

The stall with the second-hand treasures.

A treasure in particular has me handing over a few dollar bills.

The man running the stall is familiar to me—then I place him as the very same one who runs the antique shop.

He gives a stiff, judgemental smile as he hands over the music sheets.

And it startles me.

Then, Sal pulls on the leash again, and it cuts into my flesh. “Look, look, look!”

I stuff the sheets of piano compositions into my back pocket. “The parade is about to start—”

“Cars!”

I trace his little finger that points over to the carpark, nestled behind the buildings of Main Street, but with direct access from Town Hall’s courtyard.

I let a sigh deflate me.

I am so not interested in cars.

But Sal is.

Serena spends too much time telling him about the past, about a grandfather he’s named after, the one who loves cars.

It’s not worth the argument with Sal while he’s hopped up on sugar, in public, and my patience is thinning.

“You don’t want to watch the parade?”

He shakes his head, face scrunched up in that stubborn expression of his that threatens a full-on tantrum, and honestly, I can’t blame him.

The parade doesn’t sound too interesting.

Rumours from the pharmacy, where I work, is that the parade is mostly beauty queens from the towns around here, going all the way back twenty years or so.  

I did think that was strange when Sawyer—a guy I work with—told me, but then I looked up what beauty queen means, and the oddness just became something dull.

The internet is my favourite thing about the krum world. Maybe the only thing I like about it.

The closer we get to the carpark, the more Sal bounces his steps with glee.

It irritates me.

Sal’s love for cars is fake.

It’s performative.

It’s a love borrowed from his mother, who was taught it from her grandfather, and Sal imitates that passion annoyingly for the next whole hour.

He wants to sit inside every car.

He wants pictures with every car.

He wants to tell anyone nearby about the cars—which is really just regurgitated warbled lines from a cartoon film about cars that he’s obsessed with.

For the most part, he garbles nonsense, because he’s not even three years old, and if it’s not nonsense, it’s a string of random words and broken sentences.

Finally, his attention homes in on a buggy, a sort of horse-drawn cart, and he gets a few pictures on that.

The parade is cheering and dancing down Main Street by the time we wander back.

But all the good spots are taken.

Over heads, ribbons are slashing and curving through the air, trumpets are blasting my eardrums. And it’s all very exciting to Sal.

It should be.

His childhood is actually dull most of the time.

So I crouch down and let him climb onto my shoulders. It’s something we’ve picked up in the krum world. The aristos would never.

But Sal sits on my shoulders to get a great view of the parade, and I slump against the brick façade of the local shops, keeping one hand gripped firm on his thigh.

I fish out my phone from the back pocket of my jeans.

Stiff jeans. Crispy, almost.

Before I ran, I owned maybe two pairs of jeans. Both black. These aren’t those. These are stiff, cheap jeans I picked out of a ‘bargain bin’ at a major store in the city.

I got a good deal on them.

But I feel the cheapness. That low-quality fabric scratching over my skin, like an unwanted, rough exfoliation on my legs.

Worse is the t-shirt.

It has some logo for a band I know nothing about, but it seems that’s custom in the krum world.

It’s hot under the t-shirt, it’s sweaty and clammy. Nothing breathable about polyester.

Same with the baseball cap.

Sweat gathers on my scalp with each passing second out here in the heat.

I keep the cap low over my eyes, welcoming the shade as much as I can, and wait it out.

The next while, Sal shouts and claps and laughs on my shoulders, and the parade is deafening.

Slumped against the brick wall, I scroll through news articles on my phone.

It’s the best I’ve got to entertain myself.

Social media isn’t something we can risk having—especially because Serena thinks I’ll start stalking everyone’s social media from back home.

And she’s right.

The urge to type their names into the search engine clutches me. It hesitates my thumb over the glowing screen for a heartbeat—

Then, as though she knows, Serena calls.

The name in my phone takes over the whole screen.

‘Mumma.’

I’m Auntie Em.

That was chosen when Sal started to talk more, and my cover name was Emily. Now, we stick to names beginning with M.

Like here, in this town, I’m just plain old Mary.

I hit the answer button and lift the phone, firm enough that the pressure immediately aches the shell of my ear. But it’s so loud out on the street with the parade thumping by and Sal screaming above my head.

I shout into the phone, “Hello?”

Serena hisses a curse. There’s a fumble, then, “Can you hear me?”

“Hang on.”

I side-step along the brick façades, weaving around shopfront doors and people, until I reach the lane between the pharmacy—closed for the parade—and the butchers.

I dip into the lane.

Just a couple of steps. If I move away any further than that, Sal will have a fit. He’s too absorbed by the parade.

“Better?” I ask.

“Better.” Serena’s voice comes sharper, not in tone, just in sound. I don’t hold the phone so tightly to my ear now. “I pulled off the highway a couple of minutes ago. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“We’re near the pharmacy,” I tell her. “We can meet you at the markets—”

“Where are the markets?”

“Out the front of Town Hall. It’s packed here. You’ll be better off parking at home, then walking to—”

“Wait. Sofía’s calling.”

My brow furrows. “Didn’t she get the deposit?”

That’s the whole reason she heads into the cities. The whole point of Serena changing her illusion, leaving me with Sal, then driving out of town. So she can deposit cash for the monthly fees.

The risk with going into the cities so often is more than we can afford.

But it’s not like we have another choice.

Can’t transfer from apps on our phones, or from bank accounts, because Sofía said that’s easier to trace.

“I’ll call you back.” That’s all Serena says before the line cuts off.

I wait.

Bordered by brick walls, in the echoes of the lane, I stare down at the screen and wait for her call.

Sofía might not be happy with the deposit for some reason. Maybe she’s increasing the fees. Again.

She’s done it twice already. Just a few hundred dollars each but it’s too much. We can barely keep up.  

She says we are a great risk to her and what she does, and the safehouse, that she doesn’t have to work so hard to keep other rogues shielded, just us.

I think she’s an opportunist.

A serpent, like any other.

But gentry.

And rogue.

Trackers probably aren’t getting close to us at all, she just moves us around all the time so she has a reason to extract more money from us.

We’re not a risk.

We’re just a pair of suckers.

I’m about to give up on the call, put my cell back in my pocket and get closer to the parade again, just for Sal to get a better look at the float passing by now, the one that has him shrieking above me, pulling on my baseball cap.

The float is stacked with a bunch of knockoff cartoon characters, a mouse, a mouse in a dress, a dog with a long face, and they all wave for the shrieking children.

But before I can put the phone away, it buzzes in my hand. I’m quick to answer it.

The huff is restrained in my voice, “What did she want?”

Serena’s words come out whooshed and fraught, “Get out. Get out of there now!”

My illusioned face shutters.

The angular face of a woman in her thirties—not much older than me, but with a warmer complexion and lovely dark hair and chocolate brown eyes—slackens.

Serena’s shout clangs like an instrument, “They’ve breached the shield! They’re in the town! They are in the town right now. Get out of there!”

10

My heart sinks.

Serena’s words hum in my mind, on a loop, and I can do nothing but stare at the brick wall opposite me.

The shock of those words has me rooted to the spot. Icy tendrils unravel through my veins—and I slowly lower the phone from my ear.

I turn my cheek and look at the parade, bursts of colour and confetti and sparklers dancing down the street.

A float passes, three tiered like a white wedding cake, textured with frosting, and the beauty queens stand primly on it, waving their hands in a curved, restrained motion.

And I think I might be sick.

I stagger back into the wall and slump.

Sal shouts something annoyed at me and strikes me on the head.

But it’s all so distant, like I’ve been plunged into an echo.

The plan, the plan, the plan.

I try to focus.

We have a plan for every place we go. Even motels we stop at along the way.

Here, the plan is to get the money from the apartment, then meet Serena—the one with the car—at the filling station on the edge of town.

She’s only ten minutes away.

She’ll be there before me.

She will wait.

I wonder—for a second—if I should leave Sal with someone. Someone I work with, someone I recognise from town maybe, and come back for him once I have our money.

But no, I can’t do that.

It’s harder with him, but I have to stick to the plan, Sal or no Sal.

I tug him off my shoulders.

A screech bounces off the walls before he lands in my cradling arms, and looks up at me with his wide brown eyes.

I force a horrible smile onto my face. “Remember the Sudden Game?”

The Sudden Game is when a call comes and, suddenly, we have to race to the next town, all without being noticed, and if we do that, Sal gets to order whatever he wants from all the sweet shops and all the diners, and in the car, he gets to play games on the tablet.

Sal blinks, once, twice, his face slack and startled.

The clash of the Sudden Game and his excitement around the parade, it comes together in the frown creasing his round face.

I don’t give him the chance to pick the parade.

I flip him upright, holding him to me, and rush up the lane.

It spills open into the carpark, so I come tumbling out to rows and rows of collector’s cars.

Sal knows the game, he knows the drill.

His arms loop tight around my neck. He drops his forehead to my collarbone, hiding his face, and holds on tight.

His role in the game is to be silent.

Be invisible.

I only wish we were.

Because across the lot, with rows of polished cars between us, standing by the old buggy that Sal loved for a hot minute is—

Dray Fucking Sinclair.

My insides lurch at the sight of him.

My illusioned face pales, all the blood in me rushing to my racing heart and twisting stomach.

Time stands still.

A second, a blip, a racing heartbeat—

I am unmoving.

The world freezes all around me.

The breeze pauses, sound stills, and I can do nothing but gape at him.

The blond of Dray’s hair is the muted shade of sawdust. Not gelled or combed, strands fall into his face, brushing over his darker eyebrows.

But not even the sawdust hue of his hair can soften those sharp diamonds he has for eyes. A blue so pale that they are glass and shallow waters. There’s something inherently cruel about them.

He stands out in the town.

Like he was wearing a suit and just discarded the jacket, his black shirt is a stark contrast to the pallor of his complexion—a paleness I haven’t seen on him before.

The years haven’t aged him, but there is a new seriousness in his demeanour.

One that jolts my heart back into motion, forces time to snap back into order, and I stagger back.

Dray hasn’t spotted me yet.

His chin is lifted, and he looks out in the direction of the markets.

I need to get out of here before he senses me.

Crowds are moving, smiling, laughing, waving and hollering. The parade is a burst of noise coming up the lane behind me.

Dray stills.

He pauses.

He senses.

I don’t give him the chance to even look this way before I throw myself back into the lane and go running towards the parade.

The panic swelling in me is both hot and cold. It’s the clamminess that spreads over my chest, my forehead, my cheeks, my hands, but it’s the ice creeping through my insides and tingling all the way down to my toes.

I don’t look where I’m going or even pause before I barrel into the crowd gathered on the street.

I knock into someone or something. I don’t stop to see what. I just throw myself between a father and a son to my left, hearing their shouts clash in the air as I run through the mob.

But I’m slow.

Too slow.

Blocked by people moving closer to the parade, reaching through the open space for beer cans being passed around.

In my fist, the phone vibrates, and I’d forgotten until now that I was even still holding it.

It buzzes over and over as I jolt and duck and turn and weave up Main Street.

Then I almost go tumbling over.

Not because I knock into anything.

Not because I trip.

Not because my boots suddenly plant on the hard pavement, suddenly unwilling to move another step—

Another step closer to Mr Younge.

My throat thickens.

I tighten my arms around Sal.

And slowly, I move. I walk closer to him, in his plain but tailored suit.

He moves towards me.

But his gaze isn’t on me.

He looks around, from face to face, person to person—then he stops right in front of me.

He stands in my way, turning towards the two women slumped against the wall, passing a chrome flask between them.

Both in their twenties, youthful smiles on their pretty faces—exactly the sort of illusion Mr Younge is looking for.

I step aside, then squeeze around his back.

I don’t stick around to hear what he says to them. I get out of the crowd, away from the parade, and dive into the market.

From here, I have a view of the carpark.

The buggy.

Dray isn’t there anymore.

He must have sensed me. Followed that instinct to the crowd along the parade.

Which means he might be right behind me.

That’s the least of my worries.

Because right there—two market stalls down from the steps leading up to Town Hall, at the very stall I bought the music sheets from—is my brother.

Oliver.

My insides constrict.

I suddenly can’t breathe.

If I had a fright when I saw Dray, and I had dread when I passed by Mr Younge, then the sight of my brother’s profile spreads a dense ache through my chest.

Heartache.

The urge to run at my twin and throw my arms around him is as strong as the sudden need to punch him on the mouth.

I do neither.

I tear my gaze away from the rich brown hair he runs his fingers through, and the glint of emerald from his eyes catching the sunlight.

And I look around him—to the other side of the Town Hall building, where another lane opens up, and leads away from Main Street.

Oliver moves—

And my heart lurches.

But he only places his hands on the edge of the stall and leans closer to the furrowed-face man.

My breath loosens, but it’s chopped and grated.

I walk between the stalls, deeper into the markets, because I have no other choice really.

I can’t turn around to Main Street, not with Dray and his sense back there.

But as I hold my composure, and walk casually, inconspicuous, behind Oliver at the stall, I catch some words he shouts over the racket of the parade.

“Two women! They would have arrived in town recently! Likely to keep to themselves—”

“The gay ones?” The man shouts back. “The ones with the kid?”

I walk faster.

I walk until I’m turning around the steps of Town Hall, the last row of stalls, and closer to the lane that cuts around the back of the hardware store.

It’s my only way out of here.

But when I’m about to turn the corner, I ruin everything.

I fuck up.

I make the mistake I avoided since spotting Dray.

I look back.

I pause at the mouth of the lane, and I look over my shoulder at the stall, at the furrowed-faced man pointing his finger right at me.

Oliver is angled my way, his expression stark, and the moment our gazes touch, a flash of recognition ignites his emerald eyes.

He pushes from the stall—

And that’s all he manages to do before I throw myself into the lane.

My boots come smacking down on the concrete ground.

Sal stiffens in my hold, rigid, but he keeps quiet, invisible for the game.

I know it in my gut, Oliver is chasing me.

Sal joggles in my iron embrace, side to side, up and down, but I can’t slow down. I can’t even pause to readjust my arms around him, just digging into his ribs.

I scramble down the lane, past the rear of the hardware store, then I swerve off onto another narrower, thinner lane.

The brick walls around the network of alleyways and lanes are tall. The smacking of my boots down on the hard ground echoes off the walls—and another running pair joins them.

The clack of Oliver’s expensive shoes striking the ground chases me.

I jerk off the second path into a claustrophobic alleyway, and I don’t stop to catch my breath or steady the dizzy waves churning through my gut.

I know the way.

I have learned these lanes and alleys like the slender keys of a piano, a shortcut to work. A ten-minute walk slashed down to just five minutes.

I come spilling out onto Stuart Street, just one over from Main Street, and without missing a beat, I rush across to the other side.

The lanes here cut behind the residential buildings, where all the bins are lined up. I stick to them. It keeps me off the roads where I might be spotted and recognised.

I don’t hear Oliver anymore behind me, chasing me, his shoes striking down on the hard concrete.

I can only hear my heart beating in my eardrums, deafening, as I stumble down the last lane.

We live just around the corner.

Maybe ten or eleven steps from the mouth of this lane.

And in that home, we have all our monies stashed.

Sal’s grip around my neck hasn’t eased. It’s firm enough to spring an ache up my spine. And the tears and slobber he’s getting all over my t-shirt is sending tiny flares of irritation through me.

But I know I’m just overwhelmed. That my instinct is to drop Sal and run, or to sit down right here—and brace myself for the wrath of my family.

At least then, I could go home…

At least then, I could leave this shitty, little life.

But I have Sal.

That might be all that’s controlling me, that’s cautioning me as I stop at the end of the lane and, slowly, peer around the corner onto the street.

The front door of our two-bedroom is a charming red, even if it is scratched and stained.

A man splays his hand on the door—and pushes it open. It leads directly to the stairwell.

I watch him go inside.

I see the back of his coat, the heels of his shoes, and I know who that man is.

Father.

My insides drop.

My lips part—and I don’t know why, if I mean to say something, call out to him, or just let a serrated exhale escape me.

But before anything more can happen, a hand slaps onto my mouth and silences me.

It’s a split second of chaos and fright.

The air flings around me, and I’m yanked back, right into what feels like a brick wall, but could be a chest, and that hand crushes against my mouth even firmer—until I’m locked in place, trapped in this man’s arm looped around my midsection.

Then my boots are skidding and scuffing all over the floor.

Sal is silent, a statue clinging to me, but my own throat thrums with a muffled cry.

The man slams us into a door.

He hauls me through it—and the echo of a stairwell bounces around us. It’s a whirl of noise and faded paint as I’m shoved against the wall.

And my heart stills in my chest.

The whole world goes quiet.

I stare at the bewildered, flushed face of my brother, just inches from mine.

The sharp green of his eyes has darkened in the poorly lit stairwell, but the pinch of his brows is nothing short of worried.

Hands firm on my shoulders, he looks at me, sweeping his gaze around my face, seeing a complete illusion, one that should be fading in a couple of hours.

But there are no cracks on the mask yet.

Still, he recognises me.

“Liv.” Oliver’s voice is soft, a whisper, and his hand leaves my shoulder to cup my cheek. “It’s really you.”

I blink, surprised—

Then Sal peels his face away from my clavicle.

I tighten my arms around him, but Sal still turns around and looks right at Oliver. He blinks, then looks up at me. “Game?”

My breath comes out in a shudder.

I bring my hand up to the back of Sal’s head, and add pressure, enough to force his face back into hiding.

“We’re still playing,” I say, soft, but it doesn’t matter how quietly I answer him, because Oliver is right there.

His hand slips away from my cheek, and he looks down at Sal.

A frown wrinkles his brow. “Is that boy mine?”

I shake my head. Numb. Rigid. Silent.

Not even tears fall and wet my cheeks. I’m too startled, like I can’t believe this is even happening.

Oliver lifts his gaze to mine, shadows darkening his face. His tone tightens, strained, like it hurts to ask, “Is he yours?”

Again, I shake my head.

The relief softens him. Just a touch, just an inch of the shoulders, a slight breath between his lips.

Then—as if Sal doesn’t exist at all, as if I don’t cup the back of Sal’s head to hold him closer to me—Oliver reaches out and touches my face again.

He steps closer, marvelling at me, at this face that isn’t mine.

Words are clashing around in his head.

His lips part, then shut, then twist, over and over on a cycle, but he can’t quite decide on what to say.

Neither can I.

For a moment that feels like a pocket of eternity, we are quiet, staring at one another, then—a ping hits his pocket.

His phone.

Oliver’s face hardens and he steps back, taking his hand with him. He takes out his phone, reads the message on the screen, then loosens a tight breath.

He says, “Don’t go to your apartment. Father is there. Mr Younge, too.”

Another ping.

Then he adds, “And Dray is walking the streets to find you.”

I blink—and finally, tears come.

They burn my eyes, wobble my mouth, thicken my throat.

Oliver lifts a soft look to me. “I miss you, Liv. We all do.”

His smile is pained as he reaches for his wrist—and unclasps his watch.

It slinks off his wrist, gold and glistening.

I haven’t seen a timepiece like this since we unloaded all our jewellery in Geneva—but then, I haven’t seen a timepiece like this Jacob & Co in probably a lot longer.

This timepiece that exceeds any Vacheron that I bought him, this pure treasure, this million-dollar artwork, is slipped off his wrist—and pushed into my hand.

Oliver jerks his chin to the side, to the back door of the stairwell. “Go. Now.”

My fingers clasp around the watch.

But I don’t move.

I don’t want to.

I want to be free of this little life.

I want to go home.

My face twists with the fresh surge of tears—and Oliver misreads it entirely.

He leans in to close the distance between us, and clasping my cheeks, he rests a kiss on my forehead.

His voice is a soft murmur, “Call when you are ready to come home.”

That’s all he says before he pulls back and schools the pain on his face.

And he leaves.

Just goes through the door, back into the lane, and leaves me in the stairwell.

I look down at the watch in my hand.

I stare at it for a moment too long—time that I should be using to get out of here, to get a head start.

But it takes everything in me to not run out there and chase my brother down.

It takes every scrap of will to focus on Sal in my arms—and getting him to Serena.

I turn on my heels and race for the back door.

I run all the way to the filling station on the edge of town. The car is parked there, a brown station wagon next to the pumps.

Holding onto Sal, I throw myself into the backseat and slam the door shut after us.

“Go,” I shout at the trembling, tense Serena in the driver’s seat. “Go, go, go!”

She does.

She speeds out of town—and we leave behind everything we own in the apartment, including the bags of money hidden under the bed.

But the cold touch of the watch in my hand might just be a lifetime of funds. 

11

Serena watches the rearview mirror more than she watches the road ahead.

Even when she calls Sofía and updates her on loudspeaker, her eyes swerve back to the rearview every other second.

But no one is following us.

Sofía confirms it.

Says our shield is restored.

I don’t heave the same breath of relief that Serena does in the driver’s seat. I don’t sob a happy cry, choke on it, like she does.

Crammed in the back, the door pressing into my side and the kid’s car seat digging into my hip, and Sal squirming on my lap, I just stare at the middle console, all the scuffs and scratches and juice stains on it.

I can still smell him.

Oliver’s cologne lingers in my nostrils.

‘I miss you. We all do.’

My fist tightens around the Jacob & Co timepiece. Not the one I bought for his New Year gift—but it makes me think about the watch that I accidently sent to Eric Harling instead of Dray Sinclair.

It’s not like I haven’t thought about everything that went down back home. But it was years ago. And I haven’t seen them in all that time.

I blended into this new life on the run. Unwillingly. And I had thoughts of home here and there, but when I did, it was more like living in echo.

Then Oliver appeared in front of me, real enough to touch my cheek, real enough to smell his cologne, and it burst the bubble around me.

A whole other kind of shield.

And he let me go.

I look at the watch in my hand.

Sal is tugging it, agitated, held still for too long.

The rise of his whining into tears is just background noise to me, blended with Serena’s warble. She rattles off her anxiety, our next move, formulates our plan out loud, and it’s only now I realise that Sofía isn’t on the phone anymore.

Frowning, I sit up straighter and push Sal onto his car seat. He’s hitting me now, kicking and swatting, demanding his smart tablet.

I wrestle him into the straps, then buckle him in.

I ask, “Where’s his tablet?”

I lean over the backseat for the boot space. The station wagon is roomier than the old hatchback.

Better for us since we move around a lot.

Besides, we can’t go driving the same old car for years. That’s one way to get caught.

“It’s at the apartment,” Serena says, and her voice is almost shrill with the panic. 

I grab at the bags in the back, tugging them closer, rummaging through them at random, all with the seat digging into my middle.

“Didn’t you get it?” Then, like she’s just now realising I don’t have anything with me but her son, silence strikes her. “Why don’t you have anything from the apartment?” Panic hitches her voice. “What took you so long to get to the car?”

“My father was there—at the apartment. Mr Younge was at the parade. Dray was at the car show. I don’t know where your father was.”

But he must have been around somewhere, now that I think about it.

Desmond, too, her brother.

“The bags…” Serena’s whisper is guttural. “The bags! Oh gods, all of our money—”

“I know.” The words heave out of me, from the defeat and the seat pushing into my gut.

I snatch the blue backpack from under the duffel bag, then haul it onto my lap.

I thud down on the seat with a grunt.

Sal is screaming now.

Screaming from a purple face, that kind of shrieking that clangs my bones and surges rage through me.

I dig through the kid’s backpack.

I bite down on the insides of my cheeks.

Sal reaches out of his seat—and starts scratching me, pulling my hair, kicking.

I promised him the tablet.

But all I can find in his go-bag is an old game console that he is too young to understand.

“Fuck,” I mutter, then pull out my phone.

I switch through the apps, then click on the slithering snake game that sort of hypnotises him, and shove it into his hands.

Immediately, his scream turns to a snivel, and he takes the game.

It silences him for the most part.

And I breathe a sigh of relief.

Stuffing the watch into my jean pocket, I clammer into the passenger seat.

Serena’s cheek is turned to me—and I see the silent tears running down her warm complexion.

“Your illusion is fading,” I tell her, then flip down the sun visor.

Mine, too.

I flip the mirror back up, then run my hands down my face. “Just keep driving.”

She does.

We drive until the tank is empty and we have to pull over for petrol. I fill up after she fixes my face, then we’re on the road again.

This time, I drive.

She sits in the back with Sal, and even after he’s fallen asleep, Serena just sits there, staring out of the window.

Her tears don’t fall anymore.

But the loss is written all over her.

Serena doesn’t even give me directions or demand the direction I’m headed in.

Doesn’t tell me one state is better than another, or what backup plan we should move onto.

Because in all the schemes and plans we had in place, losing all of our money was never accounted for.

I could tell her about the watch.

But I can’t talk right now.

And if I tell her, she won’t stop talking, she won’t stop vocalising her thoughts as she calculates steps on pawning it, how much we’ll get, where we can go—

I just can’t deal with any of that right now.

Not when I’m barely holding it together.

Hands gripped too firm on the steering wheel, my face is pulled tight as I fight off the tears.

I steel myself against the rolls of sorrow crashing through me.

I need everything to be quiet.

So Serena sits back there, catatonic, and grieves our money.

And I drive.

On the foot of the narrow bed of this dusty motel room, we count every dollar we have.

The television flashes colour over the walls and closed curtains. The speakers are old and crackly. But it keeps Sal entertained on the other bed with all his snacks.

Serena unfolds crumpled notes. “Thirty dollars.”

I pick through my backpack. “That’s from your jacket pocket?”

She nods.

Illusion-free, her dark hair slips over her shoulder. Once, it was long, like spilled ink down her back. Now, it’s cropped to her collarbone, and a little on the oily side.

I don’t even want to know what I look like right now. I’ve been avoiding the mirrors in here.

I flick through the notes in my hand, pulled out from a pocket in the backpack. “That’s two hundred. How much was in your purse?”

“Four hundred and twenty-one.” Serena takes the cash from me, just to drop it onto the mattress between us on the pathetic, meagre pile. “So, in total, we are screwed.”

Given how much we started with, it’s a blow to the gut to look down at only a smattering of notes.

Now that I’ve worked jobs in the krum world and counted the meagre amount of cash I earned at the end of the week, I know this won’t go very far at all.

Sofía’s monthly fees don’t help.

If only we didn’t need her to shield us against tracker witches. She’s needed, and she knows it, so she charges grossly for her service.

I can barely make enough cash to keep up with it all, the groceries, the rent, the fees, the bills.

My only day off in two weeks, and I get stuck with Sal and a parade, and that didn’t go well.

It’s not like Serena can work. Not while she’s constantly teetering so close to her lassitude limit, since she keeps us both under illusions most of the time.

If she rests some now, she might be able to illusion the pages of the bible on the nightstand into hundred-dollar bills.

I reach into my back pocket, the denim of my jeans scraping against my fingers.

I pull out the watch, then toss it onto the mattress. It jingles faintly, a sound that sweeps me back home for a heartbeat.

Serena stares down at it for a long moment.

The television blares on, flashing blues and reds and oranges all over the motel walls.

I glance at the other bed.

Sal has fallen asleep. Or passed out, since he’s sort of folded over and rolled onto his side.

Serena reaches for the watch.

Her fingertips glide over the smooth, polished gold. “Is this a Jacob?”

“It’s Oliver’s.”

I can say it now that Sal is asleep. There are things we don’t talk about around him.

Serena’s sharp grey eyes lift to mine. “How did you get this?”

“He gave it to me.”

She blinks, once, a stunned look, confused, and then her face hardens into something dangerous.

“Oliver caught me.” I glance at the sleeping boy on the other bed. “Us. He caught us.”

Her olive complexion pales into something ashy. And, as I tell her everything, her face is more and more horrified.

It takes everything in me to hold onto that numbness I find solace in. A numbness that I think I live in every day.

An echo.

I live in it, and I fight to stay in it, because if I don’t, I cry.

I cry a lot. At night, in the car, in the bathroom of whatever place I work at in whatever town we pick.

Just as I weep now, and Serena merely stares at me.

Blank, unmoving, just staring.

Then she looks down and runs her thumb over the face of the watch.

After a beat, she says, “He let you go.”

I shift on the mattress, leaning against the wall. Slumped, I nod and pick at the bedspread.

Serena’s shoulders relax with a whooshing sigh, an exhale so loud and raw that it’s undeniably guttural.

The only thing I keep from her is the last words he said to me, ‘Call when you are ready to come home.’

If Serena knows I’m miserable here in this little life with her, she doesn’t acknowledge it, and I don’t either.

Maybe it’s something unsaid between us. But to tell her what Oliver said would be to shine a light on it.

Because even Oliver knows I’m unhappy.

Serena lets the watch fall to the mattress. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

I turn a faint, tired frown on her. “What doesn’t?”

“That Oliver let you go.”

A heartbeat passes.

I level my stare with hers. “It surprised me.”

Serena cuts her gaze to the TV glare stretching up the wall. “Oliver always talked about you in a way that… that made me accept you would be living at Elcott Abbey for the rest of your life. He spoke about it as though it was a given.”

That frown cuts deeper into my face. “But I had offers.”

A faint scoff pushes out of her.

“Oliver did a lot to kill those offers,” she says. “He was in your father’s ear almost every day. I think Oliver wanted you to stay at Elcott. Forever. So when Dray put an offer on your contract…” Serena exhales with dread, her slim cheeks puffing out, “Oliver was livid. He left the academy for a whole weekend to argue with your father.”

I make a face, all frowns and creases and pouts.

It doesn’t make sense.

Oliver was a part of it.

He was always part of it…

He wore his mask.

He played his part.

And I’m supposed to accept that he’s been working behind the curtain to save me?

I rub my temple, hard, and my face twists.

“I asked him once—” Serena gently nudges the timepiece, watching how the gold dances in the light “—why he was so intent on isolating your whole future. And truthfully,” she adds with a grimace aimed at me, “I didn’t love the idea of living with you for the rest of my life. That motivated me to be in Oliver’s ear and help push you into a marriage.”

I drop my hands to my lap and turn my cheek to her.

I stare at the wall sconce, dusty and dated.

But my mind tumbles back to Bluestone—to Serena pulling me into a game of Truth or Dare, knowing Dray was coming down to the parlour room to join, and dragging me along to a party with the promise of Dray not attending, but of course he did show up.

Serena’s motives were far more layered than I ever gave her credit for.

She was doing the most.

She was pushing me and Dray together, aligning herself with me, and also grooming me to run—all at once.

But there’s something about it that doesn’t sit quite right in me.

Oliver’s protection.

I ask, “Why wouldn’t he want me to marry Dray?”

Serena shrugs, but gives an answer, “Oliver said the same thing every time I asked. He doesn’t think that anyone deserves you.” The bitterness on her face startles me. “Truly, it made me hate you for so long.”

“What did?”

“How much Oliver worked to protect you—and how much he cared about you,” she sighs, shaking her head. “I would have given anything for him to love me half as much.”

I’m completely unmoved.

Or in shock, it could be either, it could be both.

My tone is monotonous as I retort, “It’s not exactly how I remember it.”

Love and care and protection?

No one deserving me?

Oliver running off to battle Father and save me from Dray?

That was not my experience.

“You weren’t in it,” Serena tells me, and there’s a sharpness to her voice, like the edge of a blade. “You don’t know what went on in our group. You don’t know what my relationship with Asta was like, or that your brother was always chasing her, my best friend—” She spits the words out, and they strike me. “You don’t know that Landon was always on the outs, and future plans were being made right in front of him, but they all excluded him, too. You don’t know that Oliver and Dray would openly discuss who would replace the Barlows in the coven.”

Her eyes are alight now, both with ferocity and tears that she fights back, stubborn.

All of these feelings and resentments have been buried for years.

Our rule to not speak about the past, about the coven, about Bluestone, or anything to do with the Videralli, means we bury things and they spoil.

They rot inside of us.

And that’s exactly what’s being unleashed in front of me.

Rot.

Serena’s face reddens, and she hisses out the words between clenched teeth, “You don’t know that, after Oliver failed to convince your father to reject Dray’s offer, he came back to the academy—and jumped Dray in the middle of the parlour room. You don’t know that the fight was so bad that Oliver’s arm was broken, and Dray had to have some teeth put back in.”

She strikes the pile between us.

The money flitters to the wall, and the watch jangles.

I don’t flinch.

“You don’t know the pain you caused Asta, that she would cry on my shoulder because of you—that her boyfriend pursued you, her fiancé loved you, and that all those times I had to comfort her, the man that I loved was chasing her and protecting you.”

I watch her unravel.

The words don’t hit me as they should.

Numbness.

I hold onto it.

Like a rope in the dark, a tether in a storm.

“You think we had perfect lives and you were the only one suffering,” she goes on. “We all had our pain, but you were the only one who could pout and cry her way into favour.”

Serena’s scoff is harsh, the tears on her blotchy cheeks are angry—and it’s all aimed at me.

She spits, “Do you think for a second that if Desmond found me, he would give me a watch and let me go?”

I look at the watch, crumpled against the wall, partially buried by the dollar bills that she hit aside.

“If you hate me so much,” I say, soft, “why did you bring me into this?”

She couldn’t stand the thought of living the rest of her life under the same roof as me.

Maybe more than she hated me, she hated my brother’s alleged favouritism of me.

But either way, she chose this—to live with me.

“Who else would come?” Serena runs her dark gaze over me. A snivel shudders through her before she swats at her cheeks. “You were the only one who hated her life enough to run. And I…” Her lips suck inwards for a beat, before she adds, “I can’t do this alone. I can’t take care of Sal, and work, and run, and keep myself illusioned all the time.”

I nod, faint. “You’re right.”

My words startle her.

She blinks—and waits for me to continue.

So I do.

I turn a look on her, unkind, and my lashes are low over my eyes.

I say, “I did look at your group and think it was lovely and perfect. I was jealous. For a long time. But you’ve just made me realise something. I looked at you and saw a witch who knew her value, who was self-assured and commanding.” My smile is bitter. It’s cruel. “But you are nothing more than a scared, insecure, jealous little girl—who fucks made ones and has their babies.”

Serena’s face hardens to stone.

The outrage is steel in her eyes.

A look I’ve seen before—seconds before she lunges.

But she doesn’t, and she won’t, because she can’t risk my leaving, and she can’t wake up Sal to a brawl.

So I spare her a cold glare, then slip off the mattress. The base creaks under my shifting weight.

Sal is deep in that comatose sleep of his, the kind that comes with open-mouthed snores and drooling.

I push him to the edge of the bed, then climb in beside him.

It’s a tight fit, and Serena’s molten gaze burns into my back, and it’s all so claustrophobic.

I stare at the back of Sal’s head—and wish I’d let Oliver take me home.

12

I hate my job.

I didn’t know what the work would be when I spotted the ‘HELP WANTED’ sign in the window a few weeks ago.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into the general store that day—a shop that also moonlights as a liquor store and the town’s only post office.

Wish I didn’t have to get a job at all.

The pawning of the Jacob & Co watch brought us a little more than a hundred thousand dollars, and if I don’t work, then Sofía’s fees will eat through our funds too quickly.

So I unpack and cut and fold boxes.

Box after box after box.

The razor thin blade cringes my bones with every swipe through the cardboard. How easily it cuts, like it’s gliding through warm butter.

Once all the cardboard is cut up, I start sorting the stock on the tall, caged trolley to be rolled out front.

This is servant work.

I just can’t get used to it, not even after three years of living as a krum.

A weight sinks in my chest.

Three years and… three months.

I’m softly startled as I work out the maths.

It feels like a long time, but a short time.

It feels like forever, but no time at all.

And still, my old life niggles into my thoughts.

The pout pulls down the corners of my mouth. The unwillingness furrows my brow.

And I hit the stock down on the trolley harder.

Moodier.

Because this—

This is not the life I imagined for myself.

Not ever.

I’m just a servant now. A low-paid one, too. Not Mr Younge, Mrs Younge, or Abigail.

I’m the woman in the backroom who stocks trolleys and cuts boxes. Then I leave, pick up a kid from daycare, and go home to bad food in a small, crammed apartment.

I grab the blade from the workshop bench, then start hacking up the last of the boxes into smaller pieces that can fit into the bin.

My hands work monotonously. Instinctively.

I’ve done this so many times now that, even as I fight off the memories of home and comfort and wealth, my hands move without thought.

Like they do over the piano keys at home.

Home…

Home will never be these towns we stop in.

Home is Elcott Abbey.

A sprawling green estate of lush gardens and quaint cottages.

A surge of longing guts me.

Then the door groans open, and the manager’s thin face pops out from behind it. “Wrap it up. Shift’s over.”

I slide an unenthused glance to the white plastic clock on the wall.

A second should tick by, but it doesn’t.

Batteries have died.

I slice the final box, following the glued edges for a smoother cut.

I say, “I still have to take this out back and stock the shelves—”

“Well I’m not paying you overtime,” he snaps, and it’s like glass breaking, the hitch of his naturally whiny voice. “This ain’t a union town, darlin’.”

The sigh deflates my chest like a balloon.

It’s not that I’m chasing overtime.

It’s that I don’t want the second shift supervisor who works evenings to chew me out tomorrow for not finishing up.

This guy will fuck up somehow. He always does.

And I get shafted for it.

Shafted.

A word I picked up from our travels.

Krum slang used to be one of my biggest challenges. That, and learning monetary value. But slang especially.

Back in Regina, someone called Sal ‘the goat’, and I thought they were calling him a goat.

Serena’s better at communicating than I am.

My theory is that, because she had a smartphone back home and I didn’t, she understands the slang better.

She had access to the culture of the krums.

I didn’t.

“I’ll take this out to the bin first, then I’ll go.”

“No overtime.”

That’s all the manager says before his thin, pock-marked face disappears, and the door shuts.

No acknowledgement, no thanks, no nothing.

He doesn’t like me much.

Not since I rejected his offer to show me around town… all ten streets of it.

Happens in every town we go to.

The shiny new woman looking for a job.

Losers like him flock.

And it’s been an adjustment.

The attention.

Serena is used to it.

But in our world, I wasn’t exactly fawned over.

So it’s new.

I don’t love it. Not from losers like him.

Still, I need this job for as long as we’re in town, so I do what I said I would do.

I stuff all the cardboard scraps into the bin out back, then find the manager at the till for my pay.

Monday is payday, and he pays in cash.

I head to my car parked on the street.

It’s a small enough town that I don’t need to drive back and forth from the crummy apartment and the general store, but I was running late this morning after a night of tossing and turning.

The drive is quick.

It’s just a few minutes before I’m pulling into my parking space behind the building.

As I wrangle out the old rusty key and kick open the creaky door, I arch my neck—and look all the way up the fire escape.

Sometimes Serena’s head is bobbing around the kitchen window. But the late afternoon glare catches on the glass, and I can’t see a thing.

I tug my lumpy, flaking bag out the car, then boot the door shut.

If Serena’s up there, awake, there’s no doubt she heard the car door groaning. It’s loud enough to cringe me before I start up the fire escape.

I think there was a goldrush here at some point in time. There are a lot of these old buildings, apartments above shops, but most of them are taken.

It was by luck we got this one.

Pulled over to eat at the diner after too long on the road and saw a sign for the rental tacked to the window.

Apartment is a generous word for a place that’s really a studio. A kitchen, a lounge, a bedroom—all in one.

The only thing that’s separate is the bathroom, but that’s through the front door, then down the corridor.

No bathtub, but a lot of mould.

I avoid the front entrance as much as I can.

The little antique store downstairs is too dusty, and I get stuck with the owner every time I try to pass by. She’s one of those people that will hold someone up for an hour.

The fire escape leads me all the way up to the long window that opens into the bedroom area.

I stumble in, my sneaker snagging on the windowsill.

With a flushed glance at the double bed that we all cram into at night, I notice Serena hasn’t gotten around to refitting the sheets.

Sal had another accident in the middle of the night.

The mattress is bare, stripped of the sheets, but the fresh set are nowhere to be seen as I step over empty laundry baskets.

I move around the partition and find that the kitchen is empty.

Serena is nowhere to be seen.

But she has at least cleaned a bit.

The two-seater couch that faces the old bulky television has been brushed free of crumbs, and the ugly wooden dining table that can only fit two chairs has been wiped down.

I toss my bag onto the scratched surface of the dining table, then drop onto a wobbly chair and tug my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans.

The screen lights up.

No texts, no missed calls.

I set it down, then fish out the cash I stuffed into my front pocket.

I only just start to count it when I hear the familiar slap of slippers coming up the corridor.

I don’t look up at the door as it opens directly opposite me, but out the corner of my eye I can make out the basket perched on her hip.

It’s a generous hip. Both of them.

Serena never lost the birthing curves.

She doesn’t say anything before she shuts the door behind her.

Neither do I.

No need to ask where she’s been, since she carries the basket to the bed and starts fitting the sheets. The laundry room is downstairs at the back of the shop. Maybe she got stuck with the owner for an hour or two.

That’s my kind of hell.

Maybe more than this life…

I shove out the thoughts.

Save them for bedtime, like I always do, so I can toss and turn the night away, then work a shift with sleep deprivation, then come back to the apartment where Serena and I hardly speak outside of the things we need to say.

I finish counting the cash.

Her terse voice comes from the bedroom area, “How much is it?”

“Three hundred and ninety-three.”

A pause before she says, “That’s more than last week.”

I secure the stack with a rubber band. “Because last week,” I retort, and there’s undeniable snark in my tone, “I worked the weekend shifts.”

The silence that comes is predictable. Serena grasping as scraps of patience. Then, “Add it to the small treasure.”

Sal’s mind comprehends the stash of cash under the mattress as our small treasure box. It’s an envelope, but that doesn’t stop his imagination from running wild.

He has to be watched like a hawk most of the time, otherwise he’ll find a way into it.

Not a risk either of us wants to take.

The big treasure is in the car, tucked away with the spare tyre. That’s a lot of envelopes, slotted in where it can fit, and we move the bulk of the cash to the car when we find moments to.

Learned our lesson when we lost all that money a couple of months back, and our only saving grace was Oliver giving me that watch.

The mere thought of him hurts.

It pangs my chest, and I distract myself quickly.

“Any word from Sofía?” I ask.

For a beat, there’s no answer.

Just the billowing of a quilt, the fluffing of flat pillows that never fluff because they are filled with cotton and not feathers, then the creak of the bedframe.

I shift in the chair.

Serena finishes making the bed before she crouches down and lifts the corner of the mattress up. She reaches into the gap and lures out a yellow envelope, then turns on me, illusioned auburn hair falling into her flushed face, and flings the envelope my way.

I catch it with ease.

“I haven’t,” she says. 

It takes me a second too long to realise she’s answering my question. She hasn’t heard from Sofía.

I stash the cash into the envelope, then throw it back her way. “She’s due the next payment this week.”

Normally she’s called us by now. Either to increase her fee or tell us of her new bank account details.

Maybe she isn’t calling because she’s been caught by the Videralli, and the shields are all coming down, and I get to go home—

That’s not a safe thought.

I can’t let anything happen to Sal.

It’s just the exhaustion getting to me.

The misery of working all the time to replenish the money we spend, the care of a child, the damp bathrooms and rough bedding, the old clothes, the fucking polyester. It’s making my own coffee, getting my own snacks, doing the grocery shopping—it’s all so exhausting.

But it’s more than that.

This simply is not me.

I haven’t relaxed into this life and world the way Serena has.

And I don’t want to.

Serena thinks that if our families just let us go, then we could live free of illusion and have a better life.

I don’t agree.

Even with my true face and standing still in one place, this world isn’t for me.

Serena’s illusioned face turns to me, freckled and angular. “Any requests for dinner?”

I shake my head.

And I let thoughts of home creep into my mind.

Serena is rough in the kitchen, tossing pans onto the counter, clattering chopping boards, and throwing pots onto the burner.

I drop my head and flatten my palms on my ears.

And I tune her out.

I think about home.

Oliver will have married by now.

I wonder who he married and if he has children.

Dray probably married Asta, since I basically threw a grenade at her engagement with Eric before I left.

He probably replaced me after a few days.

I’m not a pawn on the chessboard anymore.

Also, I did that thing with the article.

I gave Courtney an interview about him.

Gods, I hardly remember it.

A memory bogged down by the sludge of too long on the run in this fucking miserable life. 

I want to sink into the feathery embrace of my bed, the one at Elcott.

I want Abigail to wait on me, bring me trolleys of teas and dinners and snacks and sweets.

I want her to pick up the mess I drop on the floor.

I want her to run the best bubble baths I’ve ever known—and can’t figure out how to replicate.

I want my piano.

The Bösendorfer.

I want my fingers to glide over the keys, smell the crispness of the sheet paper parted in front of me, hear the melody dancing around me.

I want to write my own music, follow a melody along the keys that comes from somewhere inside of me.

Then I want for everything else.

My cuticles and nails done. Fingers and toes. Hair trimmed, treated, styled. Massages and spa treatments and facials.

I want to go shopping. With the black card.

I want better clothes. I want to go to nice restaurants again. Go on holidays in Monaco and Saint Tropez. Summer trips on the Riviera.

I run my hands over my face.

Elbows planted on the table, I listen to the hiss and sizzle of food in the pan.

“It’s raining again.” Serena’s voice is interrupted by the sudden loud sizzle of water spilling over a pot and onto the heat of the burner. “You’ll have to pick him up in the car.”

I barely register her words.

For a moment too long, I watch her cook. Then I hear what she said, and I look at the window.

Beyond it, there’s a slight drizzle.

Just a drizzle.

We have both walked in worse.

But since Sal…

I don’t know what is different about Serena exactly, or if it’s everything about her that’s different, but now a light drizzle is to be avoided?

His daycare is only a five-minute walk around the corner.

But I don’t argue.

It’s not worth it.

When it comes to Sal, my mouth is to stay shut.

Because all of a sudden, it’s her child. Her place to make decisions for him. Not mine.

With a huff, I slip the keys off the counter, but my mind is elsewhere, torn between the luxury of home and picking up Sal from that house with the tobacco-spit stains on the porch.

On my way out, I sneak a look at the pots and pans. Satay noodles.

I pretend to like her cooking.

It’s one of the ways we coexist better while permanently living on each other’s last nerve.

But truth is, she overcooks noodles into slush territory, and there’s either too much peanut butter or not enough in her satay sauce.

Also it’s the third day in a row she’s made it.

I tighten my grip around the keys, then clammer out the fire escape.

The coast is clear to the car.

No annoying, chatty neighbour in the carpark. Her car isn’t even here anymore, so she must have gone home for the day.

That means I was too lost in my thoughts to hear the car start and drive off.

That happens more often now. Like seeing Oliver opened a door in my mind, and it’s harder to keep my mind straight.

So much harder.

I toss my bag onto the passenger seat, then start the loud, chugging engine.

The car sputters and chokes to life.

I have time to spare, so I pull over at the bus shelter. It’s at the edge of town, where the phone booth is.

I come here every other day.

I stare at the phone from the car.

But I never get out.

I know some numbers by heart, like Nonna’s.

I called her often from Bluestone, so it printed into my brain over the years.

I wonder how bad it would be if I called her.

Just to talk.

Just to feel her warmth.

I wonder if the sound of her voice would feel the same as her hugs.

I think even if I called Grandmother Ethel, I would break down in tears.

That’s how bad it is, the homesickness haunting me. That I even consider calling Grandmother Ethel.

But really, if I was going to get out of the car and make a call, would it be to anyone but Mother?

Just the thought of her doubles me over.

The steering wheel digs into my forehead—and the violence of a sob rattles me.

I want to go home. I want so badly to go home.

But all I can do is fight back the sobs, and snivel, and wipe my cheeks, before I drive off and head to Ms Brown’s house, the only (unofficial) daycare in town.

We don’t send Sal there too often.

Sometimes Serena needs a break to recover from her lassitude limit.

And I’m working almost every day, so we send Sal to the old run-down house at the end of Fair Street, the house with the rotten porch that’s splintered and stained.

Ms Brown’s house is full of random kids and babies from around town, mixed in with her own three grandchildren.

I’m pretty sure she just smokes cigarettes on the porch most of the day with her son who chews and spits out tobacco.

It’s not ideal.

But there is not always another option when Serena passes out from throwing up for too long.

I’m barely through the door when I hear Sal’s familiar cry, “Auntie Em! Auntie Em, Auntie Em!”

Little legs and all, Sal rushes at me, pen streaks all over his hands.  

My practiced smile is empty of the fatigue that weighs me down.

I drop to a crouch and spread my arms—and he smacks right into me.

A sticky, smelly mess.

Kids.

I don’t love them.

I love Sal.

But I don’t love the smell of spilled milk that’s wafting from his overalls, I don’t love the mysterious stickiness on his hands or the warble of his voice as he still shouts my name over and over.

Hooking one arm around his middle, I hoist him off the floor.

I snatch the backpack from the hooks on the wall. The bag is stickered with the faces of characters from a show Sal is obsessed with.

I carry him outside to the car.

Never thought I would be one for juggling, but here I am, a child hoisted onto my hip, a bag slung over my forearm, my own bag hooked over my shoulder, and keys jangling in my hand.

One of the worst parts of coparenting a child?

Car seats.

Bane of my existence.

Sal is warbling on about the pictures he painted today and a movie he watched.

I drone back, “Oh, did you? That’s wonderful. A superhero? Oh my.” I learned it’s best to ask questions, too. Shows I’m really listening. “What was your favourite part?”

His face lights up and he jumps into another garbled spiel.

The buckles lock in, and I slam the door shut on him. Faint agitation follows me into the driver’s seat.

I tug down the rearview mirror until I have Sal in my sights.

The warm complexion of his cheeks is blotched with blue fingerpaint, the brown of his eyes is as deeply hued as rich soil, and he has the same inky black hair as Serena—

Without the illusions we live in.

He prattles on for the short drive back to the apartment, but I don’t listen to a thing he says.

The only words in my mind are—

‘Call when you are ready to come home.’

13

Another day in an endless line of them.

This crummy little life of ours.

Back when we bought our way onto the boat, and I watched the waters split, I was flooded with every emotion my body could possibly contain.

Before Serena burst my bubble, and told me she was pregnant, underneath all the despair and hurt and fear—there was a little flame of hope.

Hope.

In those few moments, just a handful of minutes, sitting at the front of the boat with Serena right next to me, images of our future flashed in my mind.

I blinked, and I saw possibilities.

Pretty stone and moss cottages on a little self-reliant homestead. Villas overlooking white-sand beaches. A modest penthouse in a bright city. A little shop by the sea. A life of breezy, leisurely travelling, drifting from country to country, living off a supply of money that never runs out.

Fantasies.

Delusions.

The reality is, I stock shelves at the general store. Literally, I do that now. Then when that’s done, I sort through the parcels for the post office storeroom.

A pinkie nail snaps off as I move boxes.

I don’t get manicures anymore, but the nail breaks over the skin, and it stings.

My mood is sour for the rest of the shift.

It’s a good thing I’m stuck out back for the bulk of it. For some reason, the customer-facing roles are an unofficial upgrade from storeroom work.

I don’t agree.

Customers agitate me a lot more than a snapped fingernail.

Walker pushes a small parcel across the workbench towards me.

“Check that out,” he says, and his face is pinched, but also twisting with a smirk.

I don’t need to wonder what he’s talking about.

The stink hits me before I can even touch the parcel.

“What is that?” I hiss.

I hide my nose and—with a pen—push it back towards him.

“Probably something dead.” Walker considers the address penned onto the label. “Those Appalachians, man. They order the weirdest shit.”

We all live close to the mountain ranges.

But the ones who live in the forests and the woods, away from the towns, are weird.

They come in to pick up their mail, their parcels, since nothing gets delivered that far out. And those are some krums that pebble my skin with their oozing creepiness—like they were born from rituals, from necromancy, and aren’t altogether real.

I eye over the parcel. “I’m not checking it.”

We’re supposed to.

Part of the job.

But I don’t know what’s in that box, and I am not keen on finding out.

Not with just a few minutes left on my shift.

Walker flashes me a smile. “Hey, if it’s bad, we can plant it in Danny’s car.”

I force a smile back.

But while it’s good to know I’m not the only one who hates Danny, the daytime manager, the smile doesn’t reach my eyes.

I don’t remember the last time I really felt anything, or had a genuine smile, not a performative one.

I don’t remember the last time I felt like I was living.

Walker makes jokes, laughs, smiles, for the last few minutes of my shift—then, as it always does when we’re on together, his face falls when my time is up.

He’s cute for a krum.

Cute for a small town.

But nothing like the handsomer faces back home.

‘Pretty for a villager,’ Grandmother Ethel once called me, and it must be so sick and twisted that I actually miss her at the reminder.

I do miss her.

What exactly I miss about Grandmother, I don’t know. I can’t pick out a single redeeming quality in her.

But I’ve been gone for a long time. Long enough for time to have caught up with Grandmother.

She might not be there anymore.

She might have passed on.

Nonna, too.

What if Nonna’s villa and Craven Cottage are empty now with only memories to haunt them, and the death rituals have been and gone, and I am all the way across the world, hidden in some town out of the way of civilisation?

It’s a thought that weighs me down.

And after my shift ends, and I should head straight to Ms Brown’s, that despair in me takes me to the phone booth.

I pull over, put the car in park, and switch off the engine.

I lean my temple on the car window, and my angle shifts to get a direct view through the open door to the scratched phone inside.

My fingers drum on the steering wheel.

My shoe taps on the floor.

My teeth bite down on the insides of my cheeks.

And I think of Mother.

The rain doesn’t fall today, there is no drizzle to wet the roads, but there is a stagnant dampness in the air.

An eternal humidity in this place.

It murks the plastic walls of the phone booth, makes it harder to see inside.

So I get out.

And I walk into the phone booth.

I stay in here a while.

The moment I’m back in the car, my bag vibrates on the passenger seat. My phone is buzzing.

The fright jolts through me, because I know that’s Serena calling.

Probably because I finished work almost an hour ago.

I scramble to accept the call.

The moment I hit the button, the lies spill out of me, “I was held up. I just finished—and I’m almost at Ms Brown’s.”

I put the call on speaker, then slot the phone into the holder that’s stuck to the dash.

I turn the car back towards town.

Her tone is distant, distracted, and I apparently worked myself up for nothing, “I figured you stayed late. But I hoped to catch you before you left—I just noticed you didn’t take the list this morning.”

My teeth bare in a grimace.

Fuck.

I didn’t look.

Serena sticks shopping lists to the fridge every night for me to take in the morning. But each time I wake up, even after all this time, I’m slow.

My mornings used to be catered to me.

I could stay in bed and Abigail would bring me breakfast and all my coffees, all my favourite roasts. And at Bluestone, the coffee machine was always on and powered up, ready to deliver a freshly brewed liquid heaven.

Not here.

Not in this new life.

I give a lame excuse. “Sal wasn’t meant to go to Ms Brown’s today, so I was running late for work. I forgot to take the list.”

It’s true. But Serena decided this morning, when I was already behind, that she needed more rest, and so that meant I had to drop him off at Ms Brown’s.

Serena’s sigh is long. “You didn’t get the shopping then?”

There’s a clatter on the other end of the call before the screen shifts, and a video request comes through.

I hit the accept button, but I don’t watch her face come up, not as I pull on Fair Street, and Ms Brown’s house comes into view.

I stop a few houses down and pull over.

Serena holds up the shopping list to the camera.

“The store shuts in an hour,” her echoed voice tells me what I already know, because I literally work at that store. “We need most of this tonight. Sal doesn’t have milk for his breakfast cereal, no bread for his lunch sandwiches, there’s no coffee—”

No coffee.

That is a disaster.

We buy instant, granulated rubbish that tastes more like dishwater than coffee, but my body is hooked on the caffeine, and I do get desperate.

I huff a drawn-out grated sound. “Ok. I’ll get the shopping done now, then come back for him. It’s too hard getting him in and out of the car seat.”

I also need Sal to stay out of this part.

“I’ll text you the full list,” she says.

The video flips around, and I can make out the truth of her face, one she hasn’t illusioned today, which means she hasn’t left the apartment all day. Not even to do laundry.

Serena rattles on, “And maybe pick up a toy for him, if there’s something new in-store. Are the magazines in yet?”

My fingertips drum on the steering wheel. “They came in this morning.”

Every month, Sal gets those plastic-packaged kid’s magazines that always have a bonus toy in them. And when we’re on the move, we tend to pick fast food places that give out little toys, too.

Keeps him happy.

Or complacent.

Either way, it distracts him for a little while, and that’s peace and quiet.

Serena props the phone against the microwave.

The new angle is a wide scope of the apartment, except the bathroom and bedroom area.

Serena moves out of sight, and I hear some rummaging around.

“We have pizza bases—but no sauce.” Serena’s voice is accompanied by the clattering of cans and rustling of plastic. “I promised Sal we would have pizza tonight and watch a movie. It’s your day off tomorrow, and I need to go into the city to pay the fee.”

So a pizza-and-movie night was Serena’s way of bribing Sal out of a tantrum. He always hates when she leaves for the day.

“I’ll check what they have in the frozen section. I’m sure there’s pizza.”

I sound just as enthused as I look in the small square of my face on the screen. Not my face, not really, just another illusion in a line of many.

I avoid looking at it too long.

It’s not something I’ve ever gotten used to.

“And potato chips.” She’s just adding to the list now. “Dip. Some chocolate—he likes Twizzlers, too. The sherbet ones.”

I know.

I’m raising him, too.

Serena tugs out of the pantry—leaning into view of the camera, but her face is pinched with a frown. “Do you hear that?”

I stop picking at the peeling leather of the steering wheel. “Hear what?”

Serena moves away from the pantry, her steps silent, and her whisper barely audible, “Someone’s coming up the corridor—”

She jolts—and so do I.

Because the door shudders with a firm knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

There’s a pause between each one, and I feel the tremor of the door in my bones.

Serena, turning her back on me, starts to run her hands over her head. She begins to pull on an illusion—

But she doesn’t get past her hairline.

Not before the door bursts open, like it’s been booted in from the other side.

Serena staggers back.

Eyes wide, I stare at the doorway over Serena’s shoulder—and though I’m separated by a video call, not in the apartment itself, I shrink into the seat as though I am there.

Mr Younge swallows up the doorway.

14

Mr Younge is all I see.

Not the back of Serena’s head, or the kitchen, not the lounge and the dining table, or the door that hangs off the hinges.

My gaze is hooked onto Mr Younge.

The panic in me is soft. Cold, but gentle, like a stream of water gliding through me.

I should be surging with urgency—but I’m not.

The breath ribbons out of me and, slowly, I reach for the phone. Finger pointed, I press the little camera button on the screen.

I turn off the video, then press the microphone button.

On their side, the screen should go dark.

Serena can’t see or hear me.

Mr Younge can’t see or hear me.

Still, my breath is pinned to my throat as though if I breathe too loud, it will give me away.

The same tension has Serena rooted to the spot. Hands fisted at her sides, she is utterly still.

Mr Younge considers her in the silence that thickens the air between them. Then his sharp gaze swerves around the squared room.

And I know he’s looking for me.

My hand tightens on the steering wheel. The leather creaks in my grip, my knuckles turning white.

Mr Younge takes two steps in. His brogues thud softly on the runner rug. Then he steps aside, clearing the path to the door.

Stare locked onto Serena, he backs into the spine of the couch.

This time, I do hear it.

Steps coming up the corridor.

Through the phone call, it’s a distant sound that starts faint but grows into creaking floorboards.

Serena is utterly unmoving. Like all the years we’ve managed to run and escape and evade are flashing in her eyes—and it all comes crashing down around her.

There is no escape.

Not this time.

I don’t think she’s even breathed since Mr Younge kicked in the door.

I can’t see her face. I can’t see the terror on it, if she’s washed out and pale or green with sick, if she weeps or stands strong.

The final groan of the floorboard comes before a tall, suited man moves into the doorway.

My heart drops to my worming gut.

My hands slip off the steering wheel and I sink into the driver’s seat.

Father comes through the doorway.

He only looks at Serena for a second before he’s stepping into the loft. He moves for the barred window, the one without a fire escape, that looks down into the lane.

Father scans the apartment.

With his back to the corner, he glances out the window, then looks around the loft.

It’s only a video call, so I can’t make out the details of his face, no matter how much I try, how sharply I focus.

I lean forward, closer to the screen.

Father is wearing a suit, but I can’t make out what kind, if the material is cashmere or Vicuña, if the cut is Savile Row or Italian.

But it is my father—and the sight of him sends waves of emotion rolling through me.

I swipe at the thick, quiet tears wetting my cheeks. And, as I do, another silhouette comes into the frame.

I blink the watery film of my eyes away—

And I see Oliver.

He wanders into the apartment, hands in his pockets… as though he’s relaxed, as though his heart isn’t thrashing against his ribs like mine is.

He looks utterly calm.

I strain against the breaths jutting in my chest, on the verge of sobs, the guilt rising up in me with too much violence.

And my twin is the opposite.

Too relaxed, too casual, his gaze sweeps the room as he wanders further in. But he brushes right over Serena like she’s not even there.

No acknowledgement, no greeting.

As though she doesn’t exist, never has and never will, he strolls towards the partition in the bedroom and considers the room for a moment before turning around to face the others.

Oliver is at the edge of the frame. I can only make out a sliver of him, his shoulder leaning against the partition.

And I understand what they are doing.

Father by a window that looks down on the lane between the street and the carpark.

Oliver by the bedroom—his back to the window that leads down to the fire escape.

Mr Younge just a few backsteps away from the door.

They are covering every exit.

Serena can’t flee.

She’s trapped in there.

She’s caught.

I know what I’m supposed to do.

This is a scenario we’ve gone over a hundred times, if not more.

If one is caught, the other grabs Sal—and gets the hell out of town.

Sal is the priority.

Not us.

But I don’t move from the driver’s seat.

I don’t hang up the call or stumble out of the car and barge into Ms Brown’s house.

I stay stuck to the seat.

Serena moves for the first time. Her neck cranes and she looks over her shoulder.

She looks right at Oliver.

Her grey eyes are clouded by tears, turning them silvery. But her tears don’t fall. Her cheeks are dry.

She holds them back, her mouth a stroke across her face.

But something grows in her as she stares at my brother, something a lot like old, awakened hatred.

Mr Younge clears his throat. “Miss Serena.”

Her jaw tightens for a beat, then slowly, she turns her cheek to Oliver and looks at Mr Younge.

He clasps his hands at his front. “You might be feeling some apprehension at our unannounced arrival, but I insist that you do your best to focus. This interaction has only one outcome. Whether or not it is delayed is entirely your decision. But I do ask that you acknowledge the ramifications of such delays.”

The wobble of my damp lips comes with shuddered breaths.

I watch Father in the video.

He is angled to face the kitchen, but his chin is tucked to the shoulder of his suit jacket.

I can’t make out more than that, but I’m certain he looks down the side of the building to the lane.

Serena’s voice wavers, “I’m not going with you.” Guttural, she repeats, “I’m not going.”

There’s a rustle behind her.

I know it came from Oliver because she whips around, eyes wild, like that of prey realising the predator is lunging.

But he isn’t.

He doesn’t move into the scope of the camera.

He moves out of it.

I don’t see him anymore, not even the sliver of his shoulder leaning against the partition.

But the rustle continues.

Serena’s eyes narrow into restrained storms.

I wonder if he’s rummaging through our things. Maybe digging around the shelves, or the dresser or the bed-side table.

“Olivia isn’t here.” Serena turns her back on him. “It’s just me.”

Mr Younge’s face is unchanging. His gaze steady. Piercing. Sharp brown eyes, like mahogany chiselled into stakes.

I can’t make out the colour of his eyes through the video call, but I don’t need to. I know that look well.

It’s that same look he would give me when he caught me in lies—and would stare, wait for me to crack, to break.

But Serena is sharper than I am.

Stronger.

She’s a sword.

Polished, even in the krum world with constant fatigue and lassitude limit and living in household chores, the stare she returns to Mr Younge is probably the fierce stare of a woman born into the highest families in the Videralli looking at a mere gentry servant.

The dull drone of Oliver’s answer comes from out of view, “Suddenly taken an interest in sheet music, have you?”

My teeth grit together.

The sheet music is too obviously mine. Even without a piano, I just love to read the music and listen to the melody in my mind.

Serena doesn’t play.

She doesn’t yearn for the smell of the paper or sometimes even parchment, or the glide of the keys beneath her fingertips.

Oliver is looking for something that proves I live in that loft.

And he found it.

Serena is smoother than I would be.

Her shrug is silk. “It must have gotten mixed in with my things when we packed—and separated.”

I can hear the humour in Oliver’s voice as he echoes, “Oh, you separated?”

“You got too close to us once.”

For a heartbeat, Serena holds his stare—and there’s a message in that look.

‘I know you let Olivia go. I know you gave her the watch. And I will tell everyone here what you did.’

Then she turns her stare to my father. “I’m alone.”

Father hasn’t budged from the window, hasn’t torn his steady gaze from the lane below. But he’s furthest away from the phone camera, so the image of him shifts every other moment into a blurry-grainy picture.

For a second there, it looked like he did move, maybe nodded his head at someone down in the lane, but then the image clears, and he’s still just a statue sprouted in the corner of the room.

He doesn’t acknowledge that Serena spoke to him, doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge her existence at all.

Mr Younge is the one who speaks, “We have reason to believe Olivia is with you, and that you have a child in your care.”

Serena is quiet for a moment—and it’s a weighted moment.

I can almost feel the cold panic spreading through her chest.

But her voice comes practiced, smooth, and she lies, “There is no child, and Olivia went her own way. I don’t know where she is—”

A crash crinkles the speakers.

Serena whirls around, her slippers scuffing over the floorboards.

She backs up two steps—until her spine digs into the hard benchtop of the kitchen trolley.

Oliver steps into view.

I watch my brother advance on her, as slowly as all the times Dray would corner me.

I watch a man who should be so familiar to my eyes—but seems so much like a stranger instead.

He stops an arm’s reach away from her. “We are not here for you. It is in your best interest to give her up, Serena.”

“I don’t know where she is—”

Mr Younge cuts her off, stern, “Let us save time, Miss Vasile. I have a letter from your father.”

She shifts her watery gaze to him.

Mr Younge lures the letter out from an inner pocket of his suit jacket. Then he expertly frisbees the envelope through the room.

It skids onto the benchtop—and Oliver smacks his hand down on it before it can fly off the counter.

Serena uses the opportunity to worm away from Oliver. She slides the envelope with her retreating steps, until she’s at the edge of the camera.

Oliver casually leans against the bench, watching as she slips out the letter and unfolds it.

A patience blankets over the room.

But I don’t feel that patience with me in the car.

My leg bobs, up and down, up and down; my fingers twist and tug and weave on my lap; my breaths tremble, slick with tears.

Right now, I should be clambering out of the car, grabbing Sal, and speeding out of town.

But I listen as my father speaks, and my insides flip—

“As the letter details,” he starts, disinterested, “you are officially disinherited and disowned by the Vasiles. Your father does not wish to see you, or speak to you again. Any attempts to contact the Vasiles, or anyone in the Videralli, will be considered the actions of a rogue.”

My insides run cold.

Serena pauses reading.

Her lashes flutter—wet, glistening—then she lifts her numb, disbelieving stare to my father.

This time, I swear he does incline his head.

He nods a slight gesture down in the lane, like someone is there, and he’s giving them a signal.

Then he tears his gaze away from the window, and finally, he looks at Serena.

He looks at her as though he hasn’t known her since she was a baby, like he isn’t friends with her father, all the way back to his academy days.

He just looks at her like she is a total stranger.

“Your father is generous,” he says. “He offers you liberation from the Videralli. But how will you sustain this freedom of yours? Whatever money you had from pooling your earrings and necklaces together,” he says it with such disdain, “has been lost. I am certain you have little left, because, as you have learned by now, life is expensive.”

Oliver peels away from the kitchen. But he doesn’t move towards Serena.

Instead, he goes back to the partition, just at the edge of the camera scope, and he reclines against it, folding his arms across his chest.

Serena trembles, and the letter quakes in her hands.

My father continues. “We are not leaving here without Olivia. But if you are cooperative, you will be compensated for your assistance.”

Oliver lifts his moody gaze to Serena. “I hear it is awfully expensive to raise a child these days.”

Father nods his head in Mr Younge’s direction. “That brings us to the other matter.”

Mr Younge reaches for the doorframe, and he knocks the wood just once.

Serena’s silence is tense. Her hands tremble.

The letter shivers in her tense grip.

She turns her wide, watery eyes on the doorway—just as he steps inside.

A guttural sound is tugged out of me, like a serrated ribbon that comes all the way from my gut.

Polished Oxford shoes step over the threshold.

The thuds are gentle and soft, but his presence is wholly commanding.

He swallows up the room, the apartment, the camera.

He’s all I can look at.

Dray Sinclair wanders into the room.

Dressed in all black, from trousers and shoes to his sweater, he slips his hands into his pockets, and glances around the deterioration of the old loft.

I sink deeper into the seat.

And my tears fall freely.

“Now,” my father slides down the window to sit on the ledge, and he folds his hands on his lap, “tell us about that boy.”

That boy…

My heart is hammering now.

A sweaty gleam mists my forehead. I swat at it, wipe at my face with too much pressure, but I can’t tear my wide gaze away from the phone screen.

Dray’s pace into the loft is wandering. Casual. But there’s an inherit intensity in him, like there always has been, that of a predator—a tiger prowling, sleeping, relaxing. It’s still a tiger.

Then, behind him…

My eyes almost bulge out of my head.

James, as meek as a mouse, side-steps along the open door. His gaze is downcast as he backs up to the stand at the wall.

Serena’s shoulders sag and she backsteps until her spine slumps against the window.

She stares at James, and she understands.

His power.

His print.

Iitrin.

Serena’s hollow laugh is cracked glass.

Her head drops, inky hair falling over her cheeks.

I can only make out slivers of her profile as she sets the letter and envelope on the window ledge.

Dray stops at the edge of the bench and considers the kitchen.

His mask is impassive, unaffected, but there’s no doubt in me that he is flooded with disgust and judgement—that we live like this, with cabinet doors leaning off old hinges, stains on the splashback that never wash off, and a faint smell of stale cigarette smoke that we’ve never managed to get rid of.

He stands close to the camera, so close that all he needs to do is look down, and he’ll see the screen.

Not me.

But maybe evidence of the call.

There should be little buttons on the screen—unless Serena threw a quick illusion on it.

That makes sense.

Now that I’ve thought it, I’m almost certain she has done just that.

Maybe illusioned the phone away entirely.

Dray’s tone is cold, “Who does the child belong to, Serena?”

And the sound of it, his voice, steals me out of the car and hurls me back in time.

I blink, and I feel like I’m at Bluestone, at his mercy all over again, pushed up against a table, his hand running up my thigh, his mouth hot on my skin.

Serena’s whisper crackles through the speaker, “Mine.”

A tension loosens in my chest.

Her father gave her an out with that letter.

My father is giving her another out. Doors to walk through—and maybe finally be free.

Dray looks over his shoulder at James.

And for a beat, their gazes are locked.

Neither speaks. Just stares.

And I wonder…

It’s been three years.

How much has James’ power grown in that time? Can he just… speak into Dray’s mind? Tell him telepathically if Serena is lying or not?

Apparently something like that.

Because, satisfied, Dray returns his stare to Serena. “Who is the father?”  

Her cheeks glisten. “Avi Kohen.”

Dray doesn’t react.

No change to his unreadable face.

He just looks at James again.

A moment passes, then Dray nods once, as if to confirm to my father, to Oliver, that it’s the truth.

Oliver’s voice comes from the edge of the camera, “Is the boy the reason you fled?”

Serena nods, and I hear the swallow of her tears.

Oliver presses, “Is that why Olivia fled?”

Her face twists.

She runs her hands down her cheeks, then loosens a harsh defeated breath.

She answers, “I knew what would happen if I stayed. But I didn’t tell Olivia about the baby. I convinced her to come with me another way. I told her it was her only escape from all of you.”

More truths.

And still, Dray just looks at her, listens to her, but says not a word.

This time, he doesn’t look at James.

Oliver says, “The Home for the Misplaced will take good care of the boy.”

Serena whips around to face him. But she says nothing. It’s just a silent, wild stare that could turn violent any second.

Then Dray offers, in that cold, distant tone, “You have been granted a krum life. Your father has decided that you are too great of a shame to bring home. However, this freedom was not offered to the boy—as your father did not know about the boy when he wrote that letter.”

A breath is pushed out of Serena.

Father, still perched on the windowsill, looks as stiff as a statue, brimmed with tension.

And I realise what’s happening.

They will keep Sal a secret from Mr Vasile, they will leave Sal with Serena…

If they get me.

“Now.” My father’s question is direct, “where is my daughter?”

Serena doesn’t hesitate.

Doesn’t struggle with the decision.

She just turns—and looks right at me.

At the phone.

But I turned the camera off on my end.

The screen will be blank to them.

So they can’t see that my mouth twists, that my cheeks are slick with tears, or that I wipe away snot with my sleeve.

Every gaze in the loft latches onto the phone, and I suspect that whatever illusion Serena put on it is fading away now to reveal the call.

But not my face.

Not until I reach out for the screen, my finger trembling—and I tap the button.

I reveal myself to all those stares on the screen.

Dray’s face shutters.

Father pushes off the windowsill.

Oliver softens.

Only Mr Younge and James are unchanging. The latter doesn’t even look up from the floor.

I slide my trembling finger to the unmute button. And I press it.

Serena looks right at me, and I see the plea in her eyes, in the way she holds her hands in prayer to her twisted mouth.

“I’ll do it.” The sound of my own voice is an echo, and it’s quick to be overwhelmed by the choked cry that rips out of Serena, pure raw relief. “I’ll come home—if you leave them alone.”

Serena’s face twists with a fresh surge of tears. But she hides that crushing relief—buries her face in her hands and slumps against the window.

My voice is weak, strained with tears I swallow back, “I’ll be there in two minutes.”

That sob finally breaks free from Serena.

She drops to the floor, crouched, and a horrible wailing sound rips out of her.

15

They are all waiting for me.

Mr Younge stands on the street at the mouth of the lane, and as the car rolls by him, he follows behind.

I drive into the carpark, and spot James loitering near the bins. He doesn’t look up at me.

My hands are fisted on the steering wheel, so tightly that my knuckles are blotched white, and I pull into the parking spot.

Father stands back.

The nose of the car almost grazes him, but he doesn’t retreat, not even a step.

I avoid looking at him, but I feel his stare burning into me through the window.

The thickness of my throat chokes me.

I focus on the direction of the car—until the sole of my canvas shoe comes down on the break and I wrangle the stick into park.

My breaths shudder out of me as I unbuckle the seatbelt.

Then I flinch.

Because at the exact same moment that the seatbelt whizzes by me, the car door whips open.

I cringe, my wide eyes swerving to the suited figure in the doorway.

Mr Younge.

Without a word, he reaches into the car and takes the keys out of the ignition. Then he swipes the phone from the dash and pockets it.

My breath is pinned to my chest. I hold it, as though to breathe will ignite a spark, a blast, and rage will suddenly storm around me.

But the tension holds.

Silence pulls taut over the carpark.

I step out.

My limbs move slowly, like the dread has turned my bones to lead. Yet there’s a wobbliness to my legs. As I stand, and the late afternoon sun glares at me without its warmth, my legs are turning to jelly.

The sun is setting over the building, but rays of its light are angled right at me.

Turning my cheek to it, I squint against the glare—and my gaze locks with Father’s.

His face is stone. But not unreadable.

The charge of fury brightens his eyes into emerald daggers. His mouth is tight, on the verge of pursing, and his grip is too firm around the edges of his cell phone.

I wonder if he texted Mother…

The thought of her reading a text that I’ve been captured and will be home soon, and the sobs that will wrack her, surges a wretched sensation through me, like my insides have been carved out.

I turn my cheek to Father.

And I find Dray.

At the bottom of the fireplace, directly across from me, he sticks to the shadows—and I bet he’s there to stop Serena from fleeing prematurely.

But in those shadows, the last of the feeble sunlight doesn’t reach him. Doesn’t illuminate the pale eyes that I remember so clearly, like they are etched into the grooves of my brain. But those eyes are shadowy right now, and they don’t meet my gaze—they wander my body, more filled out now, and stuffed into a tight shrunken sweater and pair of jeans.

The crunching of loose gravel draws in my gaze.

Oliver comes around the other side of the building, where there’s a narrow alleyway only large enough for a person to fit through, not a car.

He must have been blocking the exit. Making sure I didn’t run—or that Serena didn’t.

They need me first, before they will let her go.

I look at my brother, at the tension on his face, and find that he is the most blatant in his judgement.

He runs his gaze over the scuffed black canvas shoes on my feet, up the stained blue jeans that I got for ten bucks, over the polyester sweater that’s too small because it shrunk in the wash—until his gaze snags on my face, the dark circles around my tired eyes, the pale hue of my chapped lips, and the split ends that fray my hair around my face.

It’s not even my face.

It’s an illusion.

But it will be fading soon, and so the truth of my looks now are coming through the mask.

My split ends, my tired eyes, my pale complexion—it’s all me.

I look down at the oil-stained concrete.

Behind me, the jangle of keys comes before a light clattering sound.

I step aside and look back at Mr Younge.

He sets the keys down on the hood of the car.

And that simple gesture has me looking for the window above.

Serena is a shadow, a silhouette, hidden from the fading sunlight. She stands at the window. She watches, her shoulder quivering, and so I know she’s crying.

I lift my hand.

I don’t even wave, not really. But the gesture is there.

She presses her hand to the window.

A ‘thank you’.

Because I’m giving myself up for her to be free with Sal.

Truly free, in a way that we have never been.

It’s time for Serena to leave me behind, to live her life with her son, no shield, no fees, no illusions. Just life.

“The cars are coming around,” Mr Younge announces behind me, and his voice is too close, like it’s pushing into me—pushing me into step.

And it does.

A sniffle runs through me.

I wipe at my nose before I move for my brother.

Oliver waits for me to pass, with a face like stone, a mask moulded for the audience around us.

He plays his role.

I understand that.

But I don’t understand him.

I turn a dark, watery look on Dray.

Unflinching, he just stares back at me.

He waits for me to pass—and I’m being herded to the lane.

And there is another man at the end of the lane.

One I don’t recognise.

The man turns his back on us and, with his broad shoulders set, he leads the way around the corner of the building.

We pass the rows of shop windows below the loft, then onto the street, across the road, and around the corner onto another narrower street.

A pair of sleek sedans with blacked-out windows idle quietly on the side of the road.

Rentals.

BMWs.

Not a car brand I would have considered luxurious back in my days of wealth.

It’s luxury for the middle class.

But now, as the red-headed man who is a stranger to me pulls open the car door, and I fumble into the backseat, the smell of leather floods my nostrils and it’s nostalgic.

It’s an echo of luxury.

I’ve spent so long in rusty cars and mouldy motels, it’s ruined my taste.

Before I can scoot over to the other door, it opens, and Oliver slips onto the seat.

Father sits to my left.

Mr Younge takes the passenger seat.

I don’t know who the driver is. I don’t recognise the glimpse of his face I can make out in the rearview mirror.

But I do know the car is full.

James, Dray and the red-headed man take the other car.

But just because Dray isn’t in this car, and Mr Younge is in the passenger seat, doesn’t mean my family speak to me.

I am flanked by silent, tense statues.

For the drive out of town, and a while longer, I stay quiet. I keep my head down. Hands wringing on my lap. Nails cutting into my skin.

I weep.

Quietly.

Face twisting, sobs swallowed down.

No one says a word.

It’s only when we’re on the highway that Father speaks—and it isn’t to me.

His phone buzzes in his hand.

It vibrates just once before he’s bringing the phone to his ear.

His voice is low, a murmur, and I can only make out a word here and there.

That resurges the tears through me, because I know, I know, he’s talking to Mother.

My sobs are choked—and they continue long after Father gets off the phone.

And still, not a word is said to me.

Not even when the cars come off the highway, and pull into the small private airport, hobby airports.

Parked there on the tarmac is a black plane… much, much bigger than the jet I remember.

It’s as large as the commercial planes Serena and I took to get out of Europe.

But my awe is hesitated when the car doors are pulled open from the outside, and the crisp night air strikes me.

Oliver steps out first, his shoe thudding down on the concrete.

He pauses, turns to me, and offers his hand.

I avoid his cold stare.

I smack my hand down on his—and the slap steals me back to the corridor at Bluestone, when Dray’s hand came cutting through the air, and he struck me right across the face.

My lashes shut on the memory.

And when I open my eyes, Oliver has firmed his hand on mine, almost like he’s reassuring me with an imperceptible squeeze.

It works.

I get out of the car and look over at the other.

Father has wandered to that BMW.

He stands with Dray, and though Father’s mouth moves around words, I can’t hear anything he says, not over the winds lashing down the tarmac.

Dray nods at something my father says—and his eyes find me over the hood of the other car. His eyes are as sharp and piercing as the cold air.

I turn my cheek to him.

Nothing kind in that gaze, not with the tension stroked along his cheeks, a quiet rage contained behind a mask.

At the nose of the car, Mr Younge clears his throat, and it’s an obvious nudge-along.

Oliver’s hand tightens on mine before he leads me to the stairs leading up to the plane.

Without a glance back at Mr Younge, I know he follows. Probably treading all over my shadow.

Oliver’s fingers slip away from mine. He lets me go, and I climb the stairs before him.

I’m first inside.

And I falter.

I knew it wasn’t the same jet as before I ran. The sheer size of it gave it away.

But I didn’t expect it to be on this level.

I’m faced with a marble staircase that spirals up to the second floor.

To my left is a thick glass sliding door, and beyond it, a commercial kitchen.

Staff move around in there. I only count three, but they are all dressed in kitchen attire, with striped pants and proper shirts and aprons. The chef is identifiable by the white hat on his head.

I look to the sliding glass door on my right—and beyond it, there is a sort of lounge area, with a curved leather sofa and two armchairs.

Oliver’s smooth, quiet voice comes from behind me, “Come on.”

He moves around me, and just stepping near the door, it slides open automatically.

He leads the way through the lounge, and down a generously sized corridor that’s flanked by windows overlooking the airport on my right, and on my left, closed doors that lead to enclosed rooms.

The corridor goes on too long for a private plane. It’s the sort of extravagance Father always said was too obnoxious.

But for whatever reason, in the past three years, that changed.

The corridor ends where a large room begins.

This is nothing like the old jet.

This is a living room.

Long sofas line the left wall, and on the other are lush armchairs are bolted in place.

The sheer amount of space is startling.

Oliver stops, looks over his shoulder, and Mr Younge must be close behind me, because there’s nothing gentle about the way Oliver considers me.

“This way,” he says, then leads me down the living area to the end of the couches.

And it’s like a jet of cashmere and silk is gliding over me with every step I take down the Brazilian Walnut flooring, all the way to the privately situated armchairs at the back.

Oliver understands my need to hide.

To be tucked away in the corner while the entire party is angry with me.

He gestures to the sliding door—but this one isn’t glass. “The bathroom is through there.”

I nod, because I can’t find words.

I can’t find the words to speak to my brother, my twin, and I can’t find them for the sheer grandiosity of this plane, either.

Oliver leaves me, and heads back to the spacious living area as the others start to file in.

I avoid the stares that flicker my way and consider the two armchairs angled towards each other.

I take the one in the corner, giving me a full view of the entire lounge, the couches, the corridor, and the corner bar.

I consider the bar, from the black marble to the gold trim, the reinforced glass cases lined with crystal tumblers and decanters, and I think I could do with a strong drink right about now.

On the smaller jet, I could lean to the side and reach out my arm, and touch the next chair. But not on this one.

The bar is metres away.

So I can’t just reach out and snatch a drink—not without getting up and being noticed.

The need to be invisible is too strong.

I loosen a weighted breath and chance a look at the spacious lounge.

Father drops onto the chaise-end of the couch, and lets his spine sink into the cushions.

Exhausted, he shuts his eyes and brings his hand to his face. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

Mr Younge sits on the couch opposite, talking with the redheaded stranger, who I think is also a right-hand man. Oliver’s maybe, since James seems to be working for Dray.

James might be working for Dray, but he tucks himself away on the distant corner of the couch, far from the others, and he stays out of that—

Oliver and Dray haven’t taken their seats yet.

In the middle of the lounge, Oliver’s face is stone, his eyes are daggers, and whatever hushed words he delivers to Dray don’t seem at all friendly.

But Dray is unaffected.

His face is unchanging before he says something I can’t hear, then draws away from my brother.

Dray comes down the lounge—right for my little area.

I sit up a bit straighter, a bit stiffer.

Oliver just shakes his head, then drops onto the couch. He falls onto his back, arm draping over his eyes, and that’s it.

Like Father, he just shuts down.

Dray passes me by.

Without even a glance down at me, he pushes through the door and disappears into the back of the plane.

Oliver said the bathroom is through there, but I crane my neck and peer into the gap before the door shuts, and I saw a few other doors.

So maybe another lounge is back there. Or a couple of bedrooms. Or more than one bathroom.

I need a print-out of the floorplan for this plane.

There’s already so much on this level, what could possibly be up the staircase?

I sink deeper into the creamy leather seat. It welcomes me, an embrace.

My lashes shut on the luxury.

Blind, I kick off my flat sneakers, then draw my legs up onto the seat.

The commotion around the jet is a distant, muffled noise. Attendants march up and down the aisle, tending to their last-minute preparations for take-off.

My eyes stay shut.

The jet starts its smooth drive to the runway.

My head falls back as we start to speed up the runway—then the nose tilts upwards.

We lift into the air.

We glide.

I sink further into the seat. I sink into the relaxation. And I already feel like I’m back where I belong.

16

Guess at some point, I drifted off, because I’m now stirring to a rash-like sensation on my chin.

I drag the back of my hand over my tingling mouth and wipe away a small smear of drool.

The strips of sleep are peeling away from my surroundings.

The airliner.

My family.

For a moment there, I forgot.

A white blur moves in front of my face.

I stare at it for a beat. The sharpness of my vision takes a second too long to return to me, but when it does, I realise that the attendant is offering a hot towel.

I must not have slept for very long at all if she’s handing out the hot towels.

It dangles from the pinch of the silver tongs.

I swipe it with a muttered ‘thanks’, then slap it to my face.

The relief is instant.

Hot, steamy warmth.

I take a moment with it.

The attendant waits. Patient.

I run it down my nose, along my chin, from temple to temple, and make sure to get at the drool patch on my chin.

I wipe down my neck, even into the collar of my shrunken sweater.

Then I hand it back to her.

Her smile is small, polite, as she sets the towel down on the silver platter with the other used ones.

But that smile clicks in my mind.

I remember her. A vague recognition.

She was new once.

Back on the old jet when we were leaving Versailles, and I didn’t think she would last long, since she was getting so flustered.

Now, she seems practiced. A veteran.

And by the stripes crossed along her sleeve, and the pin on her vest, I can tell she worked her way up to the top.

The dip of her head is polite and silent.

But before she can go, a smooth, cold voice orders, “Three coffees, oat milk, no sugar—and a double scotch on the rocks.”

I throw my gaze to Dray as he advances on my little section.

The breath pins to my throat.

Time has altered him.

Not changed.

Altered.

His sawdust hair is still gently wavy, but dimmer, too. The light golden strands are darker now, as though the sun hasn’t touched his hair in a while. Once soft, it’s now the shade of a wet sand beach.

The sweater he wears is a soft, black cashmere, that looks as smooth to the touch as the feathers of a crow. It’s not exactly tight fitted, but it is formed and cut well enough to his frame that I can make out the work he puts into himself.

I can tell he probably still practices martial arts, and swims often, especially if they ever built that indoor pool at Thornbury Park.

He drops onto the chair opposite me.

I am so focused on him that I don’t even notice that the attendant leaves us and that time ticks by—not until now that she returns with a silver serving tray.

She lowers it onto the table.

Dray slightly flicks his hand the moment the tray touches down; a disinterested dismissal.

She leaves.

Dray considers me in that distant, cold way of his. Then he shifts for the table between us, black marble threaded with gold, and starts to pour creamy oat milk into the three cups of coffee.

Real coffee.

Not instant, granulated dishwater.

My mouth floods.

“I wondered when the illusion would fade,” Dray says, then sets down the cold metal milk jug, slick with beads of condensation, “and I would see your true face.”

Instinct has my hand lifting to my cheek.

But that’s pointless.

Illusions don’t change what I feel. My face is still my own, just distorted to the eyes of others.

But not anymore.

And… it’s strange.

It’s strange to think that Dray can sit across from me—and see my real face.

I lived my life for so long wearing a distortion. Another mask.

Now, there is no mask.

There is only me.

Dray sinks into his seat, bringing the tumbler of scotch to rest on his thigh—but his gaze sweeps every centimetre of my face.

It’s something I’ve always hated about him.

The way he considers me.

Even now, years later, it all floods back to me, like no time at all has passed, and I’m just a deadblood at Bluestone that he has cornered.

He studies me, the sharpness of my cheekbones, the ashy pallor of my complexion, the dark circles around my hazel eyes, then his gaze shifts to the sagged ponytail that leans on my shoulder.

He considers the frizzy strands and split ends.

Dray looks at me like he’s inspecting me, learning every detail of my face, committing every crease and blemish to memory.

But there’s that inherent coldness in him, the kind that makes me think he’s going to caress my cheek, then snap my neck.

My voice is rough, “Why are you here?”

I clear my throat and snare a cup of coffee from the table. I take just one sip—and my lashes shut on the bliss.

The lush brew pours down my throat and warms my insides.

I open my eyes—

And Dray’s unflinching gaze hooks mine.

He lifts the tumbler to his faint pink lips. The sip he takes is small, it’s to savour.

He brings the glass down to rest on his thigh, his thumb gliding over the rim, back and forth. “Why wouldn’t I be here?”

I set the coffee cup down, then drag the glass of water closer to myself.

My throat is so hoarse, it feels as though I haven’t had any water in days. Maybe I haven’t. It’s hard to stay on top of things like that between raising a kid and working and generally being on the run.

Now, I feel… lighter.

No confliction in me, no dread or panic.

I wish I was better.

Because I just feel relieved.

Dray’s gaze tears from mine and he looks down at the glass in my loose grip.

A faint frown tugs his brow.

“You finish three coffees before you take water,” he says.

His observation churns something old and ugly inside of me.

I would think that it’s obvious, that life on the run might have affected my morning routine.

Life, it turns out, is different when I have to work for everything I have. Even bad coffee.

I sip the water, and I endure his piercing blue stare, a silent accusation.

A sigh grates me before I set the glass down. “Shouldn’t you be up there, sitting with them?”

Ignoring me, like the others do.

Father has barely spoken a word to me.

Actually, he hasn’t said a damn thing.

Oliver has been curt.

James hasn’t looked at me.

Mr Younge—he’s always a prick.

No change there.

But Dray should be like that, too.

Ignoring me, punishing me, furious with me.

“Are there seating assignments I’m not aware of?” He arches a dark eyebrow. “Or do you miss the old days of your exclusion?”

I spare him a dull look.

Dray takes another sip of scotch.

Then, coming down the aisle, James is as slender and stringy as he’s always been.

I can’t stop my stare from latching onto him.

He only looks at me with his sheepish brown eyes for a heartbeat. Then he’s tucking his head down and moving a bit faster.

He passes us.

Goes into the back area.

I hear the creak of a door, then a faint thud.

I turn a blank look on Dray, who apparently hasn’t taken his eyes off me, like if he does, even for a moment, I’ll lunge out of the plane.

“So you took James, then.” The accusation is in my flat tone.

It’s not a question, and Dray needs no elaboration.

The corner of his full, pink mouth twitches. Almost pulling into a smirk.

Back at Bluestone, when James revealed his sheer power, Dray probed me about him.

I suggested he leave James to Landon.

My advice obviously went ignored.

Not that I’m surprised.

Dray does nothing that doesn’t serve him.

“He comes in handy,” he says. “If it wasn’t for James, I wouldn’t know if Serena was telling the truth about that child.”

I stare at him from beneath my lashes. “You thought he was mine?”

Something shifts in him. Like an ancient rage stirs. “It was a concern.”

A concern…

I scoff on the frivolous word.

The moment they realised we had a child travelling with us, Father would have fallen into a frenzy. Dray probably raged out on something—or someone.

Their panic would have been scattered.

Is the boy Olivia’s, is it Dray and Olivia’s, is it Eric and Olivia’s?

That explains why Dray went along on their errands to find their problem daughter, when I’m sure he had a million other things far more important to be doing.

The Sinclairs and Cravens are obviously still besties.

The jet changed, but not their bond.

The door rattles again—and James comes out.

I look up at him, his acne-scarred profile, the nose that’s too big for his face, his narrow lips that he thins even more into his mouth.

“Hello, James.”

My cold greeting pauses him.

Still, he doesn’t look at me.

He blinks his wide eyes on Dray instead.

Dray downs the last of the scotch, then tosses the tumbler. It skids along the table before knocking into an empty coffee cup. 

I flinch. Slightly, but he notices.

His smile is small.

And that is James’ cue. He scurries back up the aisle and disappears behind the partitions.

I slide a dark look to Dray. “So I’m not allowed to talk to an old friend?”

Dray tilts his head to the side, just an inch, but strands of sandy hair slip over his arched brow. “Are you not doing that now?”

I give a curt, bitter laugh.

“Shame you didn’t leave him to Landon,” I say, and recline in the chair.

Now James is living his worst nightmare.

All the people he has to be around, all the travelling, the time away from home, which is probably a room in Thornbury Park.

“And have an iitrin print wasted in the vineyards?” Dray’s smile is soft, relaxed. “James receives the appropriate time off,” he adds, “to do and see whatever he likes. Or should I say, to see and do whomever he likes?”

I snub the crassness. “The vineyards? Landon is still doing that?”

The vineyards were something of a hobby for him and his family.

Mildred’s family had it as a career. Production of some of the finest champagne in the world—but everything has an expiration date, people get bored and something better always comes along, so they started to slip.

Dray tells me, “Landon married Mildred Green, and together, they overlook the vineyards—and away from the temptations of gambling and debauchery, they enjoy a lovely, little life.”

His smile is cruel.

The jab is aimed at me.

So I jab back. “Last time I saw them, it wasn’t on the best of terms.”

It was when Dray backhanded me to the floor, then let Asta finish me off.

Our stares are locked.

That message churns through the silence, loud and clear.

But I play by the rules of the game—a game I’ve been out of for so long now.

“How is Asta these days?” I ask. “Married Eric Harling and had little demons for babies?”

Dray leans closer.

His forearm braces on the edge of the table.

He says, soft and dangerous, “She married higher.”

The scent of smooth scotch is on his breath, blended with spearmint.

‘Married higher…’

I bet she did.

Bet she married all the way to the top after I took everything out from under her.

“And as for offspring, she is with child now.” His growing smile is dark. “You might be spending a lot of time with her. Do try to be nicer.”

My insides coil.

There’s too much in what he really says.

And all of it pisses me off.

Asta is happily married, obviously to Dray, since she’ll be around so often, and for my sake, I should be nice so I don’t get my ass whooped again.

My jaw tenses, firm, until my teeth ache.

Then the attendant cuts into my peripherals. She comes to the table, a platter balanced on one hand.

The colour is draining from my face.

I fall back in the seat, slumped.

I stare at Dray.

The scent of scotch lingers in the air.

“The chef has prepared homemade fettuccine with white truffle and sous vide duck,” she says—

But her voice is an echo.

It’s so far away.

It climbs on the wings of the plane, tumbling around with the engine and the murmurs further up the aisle.

The plates are served, the coffees taken away, a fresh glass of scotch set down on the table, and all the time that takes, I drift further and further away.

I can’t explain it.

A sinking sensation inside of me.

A sense of... jealousy or hurt, like I just want to shove a pregnant Asta down a flight of stairs.

It’s the fight.

It’s definitely the fight.

Long buried anger and resentment waking up inside of me.

Asta won the fight, then she won life—all while being accepted by the other witches.

I drop my gaze to the plate.

It’s a strange thing to have my mouth flood, but my stomach be as still as the air in a sauna.

Dray makes no move for his cutlery.

He drapes the napkin over his lap—and waits for me to start.

It’s a propriety rule he doesn’t need to follow when it’s just us two at the back of the plane.

But he does, and he waits.

I move slow.

It’s not petulance or resistance that slows me down. It’s the daze that’s settled over me.

Like I lost that fight with Asta all over again.

My grip tightens on the silver fork.

I mumble, “I guess I should say congratulations on her pregnancy.”

I shouldn’t be this surprised.

Every time I let myself imagine what was going on back home, I saw Asta and Dray together.

It wasn’t so much a question.

Dray arches a brow. “I will pass it on.”

I turn my cheek to him and look out the window.

Dray uses his cutlery to place strips of duck onto my plate. A polite nudge to start eating.

“It doesn’t feel real,” I confess. “It feels like I’m dreaming.”

“Do you dream of home?”

My mouth flattens into a tight line, as if to stop the truth from escaping my lips.

Dray presses, “There is nothing to be ashamed of.”

My gaze is lured back to him.

“You were raised with certain tastes and luxuries,” he says. “It isn’t unsurprising that you didn’t take to your little life when it came to it. The food, the clothes,” he adds, and looks me over, the polyester sweater that clings to my midsection, wider than the last time he saw me, “and empty connections, surrounded by those who will never understand you. It was more than always looking over your shoulder, wasn’t it? You missed it. You missed this.”

He gestures to the overall extravagance enveloping us—

And it’s so sickeningly true.

I eat my feelings.

It’s an effort to not shovel the strips of duck and fresh strands of fettuccine into my mouth. I have to actively force myself to be polite, to remember my manners, manners I lost somewhere along the way.

Dray lets me eat in peace for a while.

It’s only when I’m starting to slow down and relax in the chair that he says, “My mother is pleased you are returning. She did attempt to call a few times too many as we were boarding.”

Staring down at my plate, I shake my head. “No one is happy to see me come home. They’re just relieved I’m back so they can put an end to the rumours.”

Politics and all.

Reputations.

No actual love for me.

But Dray surprises me—

“Rumours? No one knows you are gone, Olivia.”

I flick my glower up at him.

His stare is unflinching, a quiet challenge.

I force down a swallow. “What do you mean? I’ve been gone for years.”

“Yes.”

“But the Videralli don’t know I’m gone?”

He answers, “Not outside of the coven.”

The face I make is confused, an unkind grimace. “How?”

Dray gives a smile that chills my spine. “Asta’s illusions have gotten much better with practice.”

For a heartbeat, two, I just stare at him. His cold, unyielding gaze.

Then a scoff jolts me.

Asta has been illusioning herself to look like me, to play a part, a role, with my face?

It feels like an intrusion.

A violation.

I set the cutlery down, a tad harder than I should, then slide off the chair.

Dray watches me stand but he says nothing as I toss the napkin onto the table.

My canvas-style sneakers thud on the hardwood floor.

I pass James who sits alone.

Huddled up against the window, his lashes are low enough that, at first look, I think he’s asleep.

But he isn’t.

He just watches the clouds.

His suit is finer than any I ever thought I would see on him, his hair is clean and properly combed, no oil glistening on his nose or chin, the way it used to all the time back at the academy.

Still, it looks like him. The glasses, the sullenness, the acne scars, the crooked nose, the overall mousiness.

I pass him without a word, then stalk by Mr Younge and the redheaded man.

Mr Younge looks up as I pass, and his eyes narrow.

I make a face right back at him.

Then I march straight for Oliver.

He’s closer to Father now, but they don’t talk.

Oliver’s eyes are shut, and Father has his elbow propped up on the spine of the couch, his head fallen back, and he pinches the bridge of his nose.

Lashes shut, he doesn’t sleep, but he is resting.

I have a gut-wrenching realisation that this could be the first time in years that he can rest properly. Not thinking about me anymore, out there on the run, causing scandals for the family that they have to patch up with an illusioned, well-married Asta.

I snub Father and nudge Oliver on the leg with my dirty, worn sneakers.

He opens his forest eyes.

And he lets a small smile ghost over his lips.

I blink, and it’s gone.

A crack in the mask.

Oliver slips off the couch with a grace I wish my body remembered. Since they found me, I’ve felt like a bull around them, a stumbling, fumbling krum.

That feeling is magnified as Oliver swipes a hand down the front of his shirt, smoothing out the creases, and he makes to speak—

But I shake my head and silence him.

I don’t want to disturb Father.

Not for his own wellbeing, but for mine.

If he opens his eyes right now and sees me standing here, it might unleash years of anger—and all I want to do in this moment is hide.

I fix a pleading look up at Oliver.

And before I can say anything, his mouth curves into a smile, like he knows exactly what I’m doing, which manipulation tactic I’m dusting off.

I mouth the word, ‘Bed.’

He nods once, then slips by me.

I follow him back down to the armchairs.

The soft lights above warm his chestnut hair. It was properly groomed back at the loft, combed into place. But now it looks as though he’s ran his fingers through it too many times, and it’s a little dishevelled.

He takes me to the back of the plane, passing Dray who doesn’t look up from his phone as he types texts or emails.

The door opens to a small lobby of a few doors.

All blackwood and lacquered.

Oliver leads the way through the one across the lobby, and into a bedroom that’s larger than the loft I left behind.

There’s a generous wardrobe, a vanity, a desk, and a bed that’s larger than even my own at Elcott. Undeniably custom made.

Oliver keeps his hand on the doorknob, and he gestures to the folded silk pyjama set on the foot of the bed.

“They might too large for you, but it’s better to sleep in those than…” He looks down at my coarse jeans. He fixes a tight smile onto his face. “I wish we had a change of clothes for you.”

I scoff. “Me, too.”

The sweater is getting itchy. The jeans feel stiff, the sneakers tight and uneven.

One of the bathrooms will have a shower, but what’s the point when I will have to climb into dirty, stiff, cheap clothes right after?

“How long until we land?”

Oliver considers me for a beat, a soft gaze, then glances at his watch. “Another eight hours.”

I reach out for him, his wrist, the glistening face of the gold Jacob & Co timepiece—

Oliver stills.

My fingers graze over the glass, and beneath it, is a gold mechanical design that reminds me of the guts of a grandfather clock.

Oliver turns his wrist, his hand, and clasps his fingers around mine.

For a beat, he just holds my hand—then his grip firms, his thumb running over mine, and he lifts a pained look to me.

He asks, “How are you?”

A loaded question.

It pushes the breath right out of me.

“I… I’m tired.”

It’s an honest answer.

But it stretches over time—to more than this moment.

I mumble, “I’ve been tired for a while.”

“Do you need something to help you sleep?”

A little splash of kindness.

Something that warms me.

Something that almost makes me forget what a terrible brother he’s been to me all my life.

Oliver hasn’t changed.

He’s always had these moments, these cracks and fractures in time, where he’s kind to me.

But now, knowing what Serena told me about Oliver not supporting my engagement to Dray, and that Oliver did give me his watch and let me go, it changes things.

I don’t know how, but it does.

He holds my hand and offers me a kindness, and I think he might be my only ally in this world.

My throat bobs with a thick swallow.

And I nod.

Oliver lets my hand go.

He digs into his trouser pocket and lures out a small phial, no bigger than my pinkie nail.

He hands it to me, then leaves.

17

The attendant wakes me less than an hour before landing. I change back into my clothes, wipe myself with a hot towel, brush my teeth in the bathroom, and down a coffee.

Two Rolls-Royces are waiting for us on the tarmac.

I’m ushered into the car—and, like the jet, the old has been pushed out for the new.

The rear of the car is still four creamy leather seats opposite one another, surrounded by privacy screens and tinted windows, but there isn’t a scuff on any part of the leather.

Like the previous Royces, it’s probably custom made.

Oliver and Father take the seats backed against the privacy screen. They settle and buckle in.

Father doesn’t look at me, and I’m starting to wonder if he can’t bring himself to.

That leaves the chair beside me open.

Dray takes it.

I guess the henchmen take the other car.

I settle in for the afternoon drive.

I’m still a little tired but the brew worked a charm; it gave me a solid sleep without any tossing and turning.

So, I feel at least rested as the Royce comes off the highway, and the sky is starting to darken into twilight.

I glance at Dray’s watch as we’re driving past Stonehenge, and being almost eight o’clock, I’m not surprised my stomach is rumbling.

After my sleep on the plane, my mind is tricked into thinking it’s time for breakfast. But it’s way past dinnertime in England. If anything, it’s suppertime—that light meal before bed.

The sky is only just now turning into the pinks and purples of twilight. Summer in England means the sun sets late, between 9PM and 10PM, and so I’m hoping I’ll be given some supper before…

Before what?

Father might banish me straight to my room and lock me away and toss the key into the Thames.

Mother might take one look at me, decide I’m too fat and immediately impose the strictest diet on me possible.

I have no idea what to expect at Elcott Abbey.

No clue of what I’m walking into.

Mother might hate me, now.

She might ignore me, banish me, disown me.

What if she accepts me home, but never looks at me again—and Father?

He hasn’t looked at me, not since the carpark behind the loft.

My stomach doesn’t just rumble anymore.

It churns.

The closer we get, the more I squirm on the seat, even though we’re moving through the nostalgia of the village, with cobblestone and mossy stone walls and the smell of rich fields seeping into the car, and villagers out for twilight walks with their dogs and families.

Again, I feel home.

I feel like I’m going back to where I belong.

But my fingers are tangling on my lap.

My fingernails cut into my skin, and I watch the village fade into free-to-roam fields.

The red post box passes by the window first, then the bus stop a few moments after, and I startle at the sight of them.

Those were a huge part of a whole other life.

In that other life, I chased Eric Harling to the altar. I snuck off to that post box in the rain to mail letters in secret, because I was sure my correspondence was being read at home.

And the bus stop was my escape hatch.

But it was a hatch that opened to nothing beyond a steel wall.

Because I knew that each time I ran off to that bus stop, Mother would come and make me feel better, make me feel loved, then she would convince me to come home.

Except the last time, she wasn’t warm, and she did not make me feel better at all.

I saw Mother without her mask.

I wonder what face she will wear for my return home, if it will be tolerant or true or false.

My hands press to my gut, as though I can soothe the coiling in there, and the car pulls onto the estate’s private road.

The gates are open and waiting for us, and once we’re through, they shut behind us.

Tyres roll over packed dirt—and the noise is so familiar, so overpowering, that it’s a blow to the gut.

Such a simple thing.

But it almost unravels me.

The panic lurches through me.

I fold over and bury my face in my hands.

My fingers thread through my scraggly hair, attacked by a comb in the jet bathroom, but still not smooth.

Mother will notice.

She will notice everything wrong with me now.

The way I move, the way I speak, the way I act.

I’ve been among the krums too long. In small towns, doing hard labour for work—

Oh gods.

I hope she doesn’t find out I had a job!

Panic is ice-cold in my chest. It’s spreading, tingling, reaching even my fingertips.

I flex my fingers, once, twice, and fall back to slump in the seat.

I flatten a hand to my chest, as if to soothe the cold anxiety, to steady the uneven thuds of my heart.

It does nothing.

And instead, I find myself staring at Father’s cheek, turned to me, and he watches the lush, green land in twilight pass through the window.

Moonlight cascades over everything, the ponds, the barns, the sheds, the cottages.

The driveway is both impossibly long and terribly short.

Before I know it, before I’m ready, but also after the longest ride of my life, Elcott Abbey looms against the moonlight.

The stone façade and long stained-glass windows stretch all the way up to the sky with a grandness I missed, a grandiosity I yearned for.

A stone courtyard is now fixed in front of the entrance, pushing back the driveway and offering some stone arches above. It’s now a private little spot for those who come and go.

I look up at the vines that coil around the arches, and the ivy growing up the stone face of the home, and I smile.

The car pulls into the courtyard beneath the arches and rolls to a slow stop.

The moment it does pause, and it idles for a mere heartbeat, my smile fades—and the nerves are quick to overthrow me again.

Father doesn’t wait for Mr Younge or any servant to open the door.

He exits the car with a brisk, stiff haste.

Dray steps out after him.

But Oliver lingers for a moment, taking his time with the seatbelt, then once the others are out, he reaches for my wrist on my lap.

He gives a gentle squeeze. “You’ll be fine.”

I nod.

He gets out of the car.

With the doors wide open, the tepid evening breeze snakes inside and tries to push me out.

Slowly, I unbuckle my seatbelt, then scoot over to the door.

I peer outside—and flinch.

The front doors of the abbey whip open so violently that they crash into the stone walls, and the noise is thunder over the courtyard.

But then a cluster of silhouettes come rushing into the light. The forked black lampposts circle the driveway and illuminate the courtyard.

Some of the silhouettes will be servants sticking to the shadows. But one, at least, is Mother.

I’m certain she is among the two that are running across the driveway in my direction.

I stumble out of the car.

And I’m barely a step away from the door before the force of a body slams me right back into it.

Something screams up the length of my spine.

My cry is hollow—and crushed immediately.

Mother has barrelled into me, wedged me between her frantic embrace and the edge of the car door.

Her arms might be thin, but they are strong, and I’m enveloped by them, crushed, and another hollow sound ribbons out from me.

“Door—” My voice croaks out the word with a wince. “The door—the door!”

Mother doesn’t hear me.

Or she doesn’t care.

She makes me suffer.

I grit my teeth against the pain, a grimace that’s hidden by her loose dark hair.

I endure it.

I wrap my arms around Mother’s slender frame. So thin compared to my own body.

I feel like a whale in her arms.

But she’s the one blubbering.

I feel it before I hear it.

The jolt of her chest, the tears on my cheek.

She utters a tangled mess of sounds, whines and guttural words I can’t make out.

And, after a moment, I shut my eyes.

I hold her tighter.

I melt into my mother’s arms.

My face twists against her shoulder.

The courtyard is not silent for our reunion. Murmurs ripple through the night air, the gardens are chirping with grasshoppers, and the sound of expensive dress shoes coming down on pavers is all around me.

Mother still doesn’t let me go.

And I don’t let her go, not for a long while of murmurs and movements, until all I can hear are the grasshoppers.

I relax my arms around Mother.

I soften the hug and, finally, open my eyes.

Right behind Mother is a dainty woman in creamy silk, whose skin is marble and eyes are glass.

Amelia Sinclair.

She hovers an arm’s reach from us, her watery gaze flicking between me and Mother, like she’s searching for a way in.

She wants to move for me, to pull me into her arms, too.

But Mother monopolises me.

Her arms are solid around me, and I don’t think I could get out of her hold if I tried. Slender, but strong.

I look up at the open doorway.

The fireplace in the foyer must be lit, because a warm orange light cascades over the stone steps, and licks over the edges of Oliver’s shoes.

He stands there by the door with Father and Dray. Mr Younge is nowhere in sight, and neither are the other henchmen.

It’s just us out here.

Family.

Even the Sinclairs. Amelia, especially.

I loosen a soft breath, relaxed by the slackening hold of Mother’s arms as she starts to release me.

Slowly.

And wetly.

Her tears have soaked the shoulder of my thin, flimsy sweater. The material clings to my skin, and it’s uncomfortable.

But, as Mother draws back an inch, I see that it’s not just tears that she got all over me. Her nose glistens and I have the sudden urge to jump into a scalding bath.

I’ve never seen her like this before.

Unrefined. Unpolished.

Unravelled.

Her hands tremble as she reaches for my face.

Still, just behind her, Amelia hovers—not taking a step in either direction, just watching, waiting for a clear path to reach me.

Mother’s hands firm on my cheeks, pulling my gaze back to her, and she holds me so tightly that it’s as though she’s afraid to let go, because then I might run away again.

A pang strikes my heart.

I swallow, thick, as she looks into my eyes.

The guilt hits me like a blow to the gut.

My cheeks roar with shame, and I can’t hold her gaze another second.

I look down at her lovely, delicate diamond necklace.

Mother considers me.

And that turns into an inspection.

I know it when she says, “Nothing a little Botox can’t fix.”

She runs her thumb along the corner of my eye, and she says it like it’s a kind fix, something I shouldn’t fret about, because Mother will take care of it.

But I didn’t know there was anything wrong to fix until now.

She steps back—and the moment she does, and her hands leave my face, the dainty form of Amelia Sinclair shoulders past her with surprising urgency, and she latches onto me.

I endure another long embrace.

I return it, but each second that passes is another that Father is waiting.

And his patience won’t hold forever.

Maybe I wasn’t so nervous about seeing Mother after all. Maybe it was the inevitable face off with Father that’s been churning my insides like butter.

I might be nervous to face him.

But I’m not hurt by his snubbing of me. Not now that I know the truth. The truth about him. The truth about me.

A truth that has killed a part of me.

Ever since that night in the garden of Hell House, while Serena recovered from childbirth inside, and she held her baby, and I sat under the moonlight…

Ever since, I have been different. Changed.

And so Father doesn’t hurt me anymore. Because I understand.

My smile is watery and pained as Amelia releases me and, taking a step back, she stands with Mother, whose inky gaze hangs on my waist, as though the whole time Amelia held me, she was just standing there, considering my shape, my curves, my outline, and judging every inch of it.

Mother’s mouth thins.

And, like their minds are synchronised, Amelia looks down at my body, too.

It’s not a small amount I gained.

I’ve gone up a couple of sizes.

So I imagine I’ll be living off of peanuts and water for the next few months.

“It’s…” Amelia’s silken voice halts, it hesitates, and she touches her fingertips to her lips. “It’s fixable.”

Out the corner of my eye, Dray drops his head—and I almost think he’s hiding a smile, but as I lock onto him, I see that a muscle feathers in his jaw.

He doesn’t look pleased.

I almost scoff.

Like he of all people can be judging how others speak to me.

Mother’s face tightens the longer she inspects me.

I don’t know what offends her most. The jeans or the canvas shoes, the sagged ponytail, or that I’m a few centimetres wider.

She loosens her breath, fingernails clacking in that annoyed way of hers, and it warms me just to hear it.

Amelia murmurs quietly to Mother, as though I’m not right here in front of them, “Aerobic exercise, calorie deficit, and walking. A lot of walking.”

She turns her smile on me, and her pale inhuman eyes are still glittering with tears.

She adds, “The grounds are lovely in summer.”

Father has been a statue by the steps this whole time. But Amelia’s suggestion cracks his patience.

His retort is sharp, “Out of the question.”

I flick my stare in his direction.

Father cuts his sharp, outraged glare between Mother and Amelia.

The strength of his commanding voice leaves no space for argument. “Olivia will not be permitted to leave her chambers.”

Mother’s complexion should keep a warm hue to it, a lovely rich tone.

But all the warmth has been washed out, and there’s a deep ashy undertone to her cheek as she turns her dark, inky stare on Father.

She starts, “Hamish—”

His eyes flash.

“I will not be argued with,” he snaps, and even though it’s directed at Mother, I flinch. “Olivia will be confined to her bedchamber for as long as I command it, and if that is the rest of her natural life, so be it.”

There was a time I would have wept.

There was a time I would have cried and pleaded and blubbered.

Now, I just huff something tired.

Mother turns a sharp look on me.

I’m unaffected.

Amelia arches a brow.

I’m unapologetic.

I know now, in this moment, it won’t be easy slipping back into this life.

I have distracted myself with thoughts of how time has changed those around me. How it changed Oliver, Dray, my father, my mother—

But I didn’t give enough thought to how time has changed me.  

Mother turns to face Father—to face off with him. “My daughter has been away from home for too long. She is finally returned, and I will be having dinner with her.”

Father’s jaw tenses so tight that his teeth should be creaking in his mouth. His lips curl, parting, ready to retort, and I don’t think his words will be kind.

Before he can utter a word, the clack of a cane strikes the stone steps, and it’s a sound that whips through me.

I know that sound.

I fear that sound.

I slide a stiff, scared look to the willowy figure standing in the doorway.

Grandmother Ethel.

The breath pushes out of me at the sight of her.

I hear her glove creak as she flexes her grip on the golden lion-headed knob of the cane—a new cane with a new adornment.

Her gaze is steady on me through the dim light of the courtyard, but she speaks to the group as a whole—

“A late dinner has been prepared for the party. The entire party,” she adds, with a side-look at my father—a look that has his jaw rolling. “Now let us fuss over the return of the black sheep like civilised people… over a meal in the dining hall.”

That settles it.

That ends the spat between Mother and Father.

But Mother still stabs him with a sharp look, one that is filled with a hatred, an unspoken loathing that chills my insides.

That…

That isn’t a look often shared between them.

That isn’t their relationship.

Even when they quarrel, it isn’t like this.

Father makes no move to go inside.

He waits.

Oliver and Dray, too.

As though they have no faith that I won’t go running down the driveway in another escape attempt, and so they must follow behind.

Like I didn’t return home willingly…

I could roll my eyes.

But Amelia moves for me with a smile on her lovely face. She slides her arm around mine, hooking us together, and starts for the doors.

“You are just in time for the summer season. It is my own favourite of the year,” she says, and Mother agrees with a hum as she comes to my other side and takes my arm in hers. “Oh, the weddings are just delightful, and of course graduations, and the trips—”

The second I notice the other silhouette in the doorway, I tune Amelia out.

I bristle.

Next to Grandmother Ethel, a smaller woman appears. Her wandering steps to the doorway are nervous, cautious, and she peers out into the courtyard.

Smaller than grandmother in height, but that round belly looks rather odd next to grandmother’s stretched willowy figure. 

Asta is with child, like Dray said.

And the years have been fair to her.

There is no change in that perfect, sharp face of hers. No change in the icy pale hair that’s coiled up and held in place with a gold clip. Her cheeks and lips might be a little fuller, but since that pregnant belly of hers looks about ready to pop, I dismiss that as baby weight.

Serena gained a bit, and never lost it, not in her hips.

I don’t know if it’s the memory of that pregnancy or the sight of Asta Ström that sours me, but either way, I know my mood is darkening as I climb the steps.

Suppose it’s Sinclair now, not Ström.

Amelia must have brought her over from Thornbury Park when she got the message that I’m returning home.

Their estate isn’t far from here.

And I guess that means Asta is my neighbour.

I’m not thrilled about it.

I look at her, and I see her face twisted with rage and tears, it’s blotchy and feral.

But it isn’t.

That’s just how I remember her from when she beat me senseless in the phone booth corridor at Bluestone.

Now, she is utterly calm.

Put together in a way I’ve never been.

Her sharp chin is lifted, her glacier eyes switch between me, Mother and Amelia, and there’s something calculating about her gaze, like she’s figuring out her next move, or the new dynamics.

But she has a tell.

It’s the way she digs the nail of her middle finger into the pad of her thumb. Almost unnoticeable.

But Grandmother Ethel has a sensor built into her brain—and she turns a quiet, simmering glare on Asta.

Asta immediately stops.

She flexes her hand, then with a sharp look over at the men who are unmoving beside the stairs, she goes back inside.

Grandmother Ethel waits in the doorway.

Amelia and Mother only release me once we reach her.

And for a long moment, grandmother considers me, stopped on the step below her.

Grandmother Ethel does not give false smiles and reassuring words.

“You look pitiful, girl.” Her gloved grip creaks on the cane again. “That life has roughened your edges.”

I agree.

So I nod. Faint. Small.

But she notices.

And her sharp, hollow gaze burrows to mine.

“Well, girl? Was it worth all the trouble?”

Grandmother essentially points to the giant elephant in the room with the tip of her cane and calls it what it is, while everyone else ignores it.

She oversteps.

This is Father’s area.

But grandmother is who she is, and she will always be that.

My lips part—but I have no answer for her.

She knocks me off the shin with her cane. “We open our mouths to eat and speak, not to think.”

I clamp my mouth shut and, slightly, dip my head.

Grandmother’s presence in the doorway blocks all the traffic. Father, Oliver and Dray wait at the bottom of the three stone steps, silent and patient.

In the foyer, brushed over with the orange firelight and the glow from the iron chandelier above, Amelia and Mother wait.

Asta sticks to them like she’s glued to their shadows and doesn’t know what to do with herself.

But Grandmother has no immediate desire to move, not for anyone.

“Well,” she says, coldly, “you were missed by some.”

I smile, soft, and the words just whisper out of me before I can even accept them as some form of truth, “I missed you, too, Grandmother.”

And it’s the truth.

Never thought of all the people in my life that it would be Grandmother Ethel I missed.

I guess I missed home so much that I started feeling wistful about everyone.

I can’t explain it. I just know it to be true as I withstand her hollow bottle-green stare.

Her mouth purses and she looks me over. Then she just hums a curt response.

“Inside, girl, before the soup gets cold.”

18

Normally for dinner, I would change into more appropriate attire.

It’s an old habit that only rings through me now, a habit that has been dormant for years. But the reminder clangs in my bones as I’m escorted through the foyer by Mother and Amelia.

Amelia, in her silk dress that is far too much for this reunion, and more suited to a dinner on the sandy beaches of the Amalfi Coast.

Mother is little better, with a fitted black dress, cotton I think, and I wonder if I missed a scorcher of day in England but that it’s cooler now that it’s night.

But still, I am wearing jeans and a sweater that’s too small on me, and shows too much of my midriff.

Grandmother leads the way to the lacquered doors, held open by suited footmen, and I feel even more underdressed.

Her simple black ensemble—shirt and slacks and dress shoes—are all Chanel. She keeps it sleek and simple. Elegant. Plain to the untrained eye, and lightly decorated with a pearl necklace and a gold watch.

The brands come back to me, so effortlessly identifiable just with a look.

And I am suddenly hot with shame, my bargain bin clothes scratching and crinkling too loudly as I follow grandmother to the dining hall.

Asta doesn’t walk with us.

She hangs back at the foot of the staircase, her eyes on me.

There’s nothing to that stare, no hatred, nothing warm or cold.

She’s just watching me.

Like she’s waiting to see what I’ll do, if anything.

But it’s not like I’m going to rush at her and resume that fight from the academy.

It was years ago, first of all.

Secondly, she mopped the floor with me.

I don’t plan on getting knocked around again.

And she’s pregnant.

So pregnant she could apparently not fit into anything other than the horrendous, floral print stretchy dress that clings to her—and makes her look so much bigger around the belly.

Asta forgets me the moment footsteps come into the foyer from the courtyard.

The slightest relaxation softens the stiffness in her slender shoulders, like a ribbon pulled taut but it releases just an inch of tension.

I pause at the dining room entrance, and look back as the others come in.

Father and Dray move for us.

My brother draws away from them, and stalks right for Asta.

His smile is bright before he cups her cheek, tilts her head back—and plants a kiss right on her lips.

My brows shoot up to my hairline.

For a beat—I am frozen.

Staring.

Bewildered.

Asta…

Asta married higher.

She is with her second child now.

But it’s not Dray’s.

I throw an accusing glare at Dray, but he isn’t paying attention to me.

He mutters quietly with my father, neither of them breaking stride across the foyer.

I turn my back on them, on the fucking circus act of this coven.

And I land my gaze on the footman who looks at me from across the dining hall.

His blank expression is patient as he draws out a chair from the table—

It sends the message loud and clear.

My position at the table has changed.

Oliver has graduated. He married. He has a child already. His wife lives at Elcott.

And I’m the spinster sister.

I’ve been demoted from my usual chair.

I huff out an exasperated breath—

And glares swing at from all angles of the dining hall.

My cheeks heat in response.

I keep my gaze low as I make my way around the grand stone table. It’s new. Well, new in the years I’ve been gone.

I slip onto the tall-spined chair.

The footman pushes it in towards the new table with a surface that looks porous and rough but, as I glide my fingertips along it, I find that it’s rather smooth.

I lose interest in the table and look around the hall.

It’s as grand and large as it used to be, but this table is bigger than the last, so I feel closer to the stone busts on the podiums against the wall, planted between the portraits of Cravens passed.

My neck cranes.

As the whole party finds their seats, I consider the painted ceiling, the pale blue brushstrokes I used to stare at when I was a child and being stubborn about eating my vegetables and throwing my weight around my chair.

Mother used to wait me out. No leaving the table until the vegetables were eaten. No dessert. No juice.

She won. Every time.

I drop my chin down and look at the faded, scratched denim of my lap.

So out of place. A smear of dirt on marble.

Then the footman drapes a napkin over my lap.

Grandmother must be pleased, because the soup is served hot.

Steam wafts up from the dishes being carried in on silver platters—and something in me melts at just being waited on again.

I should be stiff and uncomfortable and horrified at being back here.

I had reason to run.

But I forget all about that as a bowl of Windsor soup is set down in front of me, the silverware placed on either side already, and bowls of warm, fresh bread rolls are set down along the stretch of the table.

This table is larger than the last.

And seating etiquette continues, lady and gentleman, so I feel further away from Father—which is a relief.

He sits at the head of the table. Mother on the other end. The heads of the household.

My brother is in the centre, dropping into the seat beside me, grandmother on his other side, and so his wife, Asta—which will take some getting used to and a lot of questions—is in the seat across from him.

Dray sits beside her, and on the other side of him is Amelia.

I make quick work of committing the new seating plan to memory, but it’s suddenly obvious that someone is missing.

Harold Sinclair.

I itch to ask—but I shouldn’t.

Instead, I start on my soup.

The whole table does, and it’s… uncomfortable.

The emotional waves of my return have been corked into a bottle, and we sit in the tense silence now.

The atmosphere is thick.

Father is mute at the head of the table. He hasn’t spoken a word since we sat down. And he only took two sips of his soup.

Mother is warmer. She weeps silently, but she is warmer.

We eat through the soup, then it’s taken away and replaced by the next course, and every other moment, Mother’s hand reaches out for mine—and when I meet her gaze, she gives a watery smile.

Amelia catches my gaze. Her smile is the sort of glitter on an ice sculpture. It’s beautiful. She is beautiful.

Her lips part, as if to speak, to ask something, but her words fail, and she returns to smiling.

Glad Grandmother Ethel didn’t see that. She might have caned her, too.

Father’s presence is what mutes the room.

Then the footmen bustle in through the doors, take away dishes, sweeping around the table, then another horde come in to serve the main course and fill glasses with wine and water before they are gone again.

Only two remain, standing against the wall.

I take my glass of red and sip, when all I really want to do is down it just to help me get through the thick atmosphere.

Amelia cuts a small piece of the smoked salmon on her plate. “How was the flight?”

I blink at her, almost with a fright, since no one has spoken since we took our places at the table.

She presses, “How did you like the new airliner?”

I nod. “It’s much bigger.”

And my cheeks heat.

Nerves have me fumbling my words, and I’m apparently not very eloquent anymore, if I ever was.

Mother saves me. “It has to be. With our families expanding, we require more space—particularly for the longer journeys.”

Amelia adds, “We do keep the smaller jet for shorter flights and parties.”

The families are expanding…

It’s a jarring reality check.

Things really have changed in the years I’ve been gone.

I knew it wouldn’t be the same, but I don’t quite like how it feels.

I glance at Asta, the mother of one child and another on the way.

She doesn’t look up from her plate. But she is the one expanding the Craven family.

And I wonder if anyone is expanding the Sinclairs.

I am blunt. Too rough around the edges, according to grandmother.

I just ask it—

“And Dray?” I look at him, directly opposite me. “How is your wife? I didn’t catch her name.”

A stillness spreads over the table.

Father slowly lifts his chin. His eyes are steel—and aimed right at me.

But I stare at Dray.

His trickery. His deceit.

How easily he slips back into old patterns with me. Or how easily I fell out of them, and trusted words too much.

He willingly misled me about Asta. He knew what I assumed, and he went along with it, probably enjoyed it, too.

He brings a small piece of asparagus to his bite. He takes his time and chews, then swallows, and the whole while, I hold him to my question, I stare, and wait.

The chandeliers above cast a gentle light over him.

Still, the sandiness of his hair is darker, his complexion paler, and there’s less of a glint in his eyes.

It doesn’t just look like he’s had no summer holidays of late.

It’s as though he’s more… severe.

The silence holds.

No one answers for him.

And even Asta glances up from her plate, shifting her stare from face to face, looking for a cue.

“I would hope for three children,” Dray says, lowering the fork—and the challenge in his stare is his old self, stirring in my presence. “But that might require an even larger aircraft.”

Amelia chimes in with a nervous laugh, “Oh, certainly. Between the children and the nursemaids and the nannies, perhaps we will need an entire fleet.”

No one laughs.

No one smiles.

But everyone watches me.

Because my question wasn’t answered. The whole topic of Dray’s marriage has been dodged.

I look at his hand on the table—but it isn’t his left hand, and so I can’t check for a ring.

He fixes the napkin on his lap with his left hand.

Asta clears her throat—

And that flings my gaze to her.

She reaches for her water.

And I don’t know why, but rage burns in me at the sight of her.

In my home.

At my table.

Sitting in a higher seat than my own.

A chill runs down my spine.

I gesture my knife improperly between Asta and Oliver. “When did you marry?”

Oliver stills.

The wine glass in his hand hovers at his chin, and he cuts his gaze aside to me. It’s a green wall—a barricade thrown at me.

He sets his glass on the table. “After graduation.”

Asta keeps her head down.

I arch a brow. “So soon.”

Just months after Serena and I left.

We ran in February, a couple of weeks before the aristos birthday season, which is just three weeks of birthdays back-to-back, since all the aristos marry in the same month.

That means Oliver married Asta just five months after Serena ran.

The storm darkens inside of me.

Mother interjects, “Oh, with Serena gone, Oliver could have his pick, but between business and the search…” Her smile renews and she pats me on the hand. “Well, isn’t it a happy thing that it brought Oliver and Asta together?”

Amelia adds, “Their engagement was a sunray in a storm cloud.”

She isn’t being tacky.

Amelia is sincere in that.

Oliver and Asta’s union might have been the only positive thing that happened to the coven that year.

Still, I want to gag.

Oliver doesn’t care to add anything.

Asta picks at the small potatoes on her plate.

She doesn’t look at me. Maybe she can’t bring herself to. The shame of being caught climbing into the bed of her best friend’s fiancé. Practically on her grave, too.

Bet she hoped the day of my return never came, that I would be lost and running out there forever.

I say, “I recall your affections laid elsewhere.”

Father sets down his glass, water that I’m sure he didn't even take a sip of.

He chides, darkly, “People have married, people have had children, found careers, moved, and died. This world did not stop running because you did.”

My face hardens.

Grandmother sips from a teacup, but the sharp focus of her eyes swerving back and forth gives her interest away.

Then a gentle touch glides over my hand.

I blink on Mother, at her faint smile.

She reassures, “You will be brought up to date on everything that has happened before you are reintroduced to society. I do not want you to worry about that.”

I’m not.

She knows it, too.

It’s just a steering.

A redirection.

“You have had quite the journey,” Mother adds with a pinched frown on her brow. “Perhaps it’s time to rest.”

It’s time to rest…

To not run anymore.

Not look over my shoulder with every step.

Not work myself to the bone, then survive on carbs and junk food.

Those words hit me harder than the hug that threw me into the car door.

But I’m not allowed to escape just yet.

Father rises from his chair. “Amelia, Dray, please stay and enjoy dessert. There is much to celebrate tonight.” Father turns on me. “As for you, we need to have a conversation. Come.”

I slide out of my chair, then bow my head in Amelia’s direction. I turn a stony look on Dray.

His jaw is feathered, a side-glare aimed at Oliver who starts to push out of his chair.

“Until next time,” I say.

With that, all manners and masks, I follow Father out of the dining hall—and Oliver follows at my heels.

Father’s office is just as I remember it.

Tucked away in the cerulean walls of the Blue Wing, the moodiness of the room is welcoming with its glossy black fireplace and dark leather couches.

But I don’t feel welcome at all.

Father’s pace is brisk and determined to the blackwood desk across the room.

Mr Younge arrived before us.

He stands by the phone table, hands clasped behind his back, and his narrowed eyes are fixed on me.

Here, I peel off my mask.

Exhaustion takes over me.

It slackens my face and, rubbing at my eye, I drag myself over to the fireplace.

These old manors get so cold at night.

And even though it’s summer here in England, the draught that snakes into the office is too chilly for the thin polyester of my sweater.

Oliver shuts the door with a faint click.

My cheeks puff out with a whooshing breath before I drop onto the firm leather couch. The button tufted spine creaks under my slumping weight.

Angling myself to face Father at the desk, I listen to the faint crackles and pops coming from the hearth, and the rustle of papers in a drawer that he rummages through.

Oliver spares me a charged look—

One that isn’t nearly as kind as the reassuring moments he’s been peppering through our journey home.

I arch a brow at him.

He sinks into the armchair between the couch and the desk, his jaw as tight as Father’s.

From the armchair, Oliver pins a dark stare on me. “We are glad to have you home, Liv. But you choosing to return of your own accord does not erase the things you have done.”

Planting my elbow on the spine of the couch, I rest my temple on my fist.

All tired snark, I ask, “Was it hard to leave Serena behind or were you just relieved she wouldn’t find out about you and her best friend?”

Oliver’s mouth twitches, as though itching to contort into a snarl.

Father slams his hand down on the desk.

I flinch, and my arm drops from the back of the couch. I sit up a bit straighter.

Hand flat on the desk, Father pins down a folded newspaper. He looks at me from beneath his lashes, nothing forgiving in his stare.

My insides liquidate.

I can’t hold his stare. I’m too weak. So I drop it to the newspaper; turned beige with age.

I can’t make out more than that across the office. Not the edges of the paper, if they are smooth or torn from overreading, or the headline, if the ink is faded or well preserved.

But I don’t need to get a closer look to have my suspicions prickled.

No doubt about it, that is the newsletter from the academy. The one with the article.

The corners of my mouth pin to my cheeks.

Father’s fury is caged behind those hollow green eyes. “Let us start with this.” He straightens up and digs his fingertip into the paper. “What could have possibly possessed you to do this, to think for even a moment that this interview would not put everything at risk?

“The atrocious accusations in this piece have fractured the bond between our two families. Harold is furious. Our relationship with the Sinclairs is more than an alliance, Olivia. You know this. I should not have to explain to you what could happen, what would happen, to the world if our families separated.

“But your selfish mind apparently does not comprehend the entire economic crash of the world.

“It is evidently fortunate for us that Dray understands that you have an inclination for chaos when things do not go your way. That understanding from him is perhaps what has saved the world from your tantrum—”

“Barely,” Oliver adds, a dark mutter.

Father goes on, as though not at all interrupted, “Harold has not been so forgiving. If it was not for Dray continuing the family alliance, both The Quin-Que Group and CS United would have collapsed within the first year. The Sinclair-Craven Corporation shortly after. Consider it.”

Father’s stare levels with mine.

He continues, “Truly let yourself imagine what it would mean for those three companies to collapse. The world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of steel, copper, and ammonia—gone. The leading financial institute, the bank that holds the majority of this world’s wealth, gone. And our joint corporation that owns over sixty percent of this world’s mining industry—gone.”

He strikes his hand down on the table again, and a flinch jolts me.

“All destroyed by your tantrum.” His shout booms off the walls. “Do you not recognise what the consequences of such catastrophic failure would be?”

Oliver jumps in, “People would starve, Olivia. The economy would crash, corporations across the world would fall, crops would die, and transport would cease. Thank the gods Dray was more forgiving than Harold, who has refused to even entertain the continuation of our alliance until your shame of his son is resolved.”

“You didn’t listen.” My voice is small, my cheeks aflame, and I can’t even bring myself to look up at Father. “I tried to talk to you—”

Father throws himself away from the desk, and his shout rages through the room, “You are not the only victim of this system, Olivia! You are not the only unwilling bride. For every unwilling bride, there are just as many unwilling grooms! Your utter narcissism cannot come at the cost of the Videralli!”

Tears trickle down my cheeks.

I cringe into the couch, away from Father’s crimson face.

“We are not the wealthy families of the krums,” Oliver says, darkly. “This is the Videralli. You know what we worship. You know who owns us. Do you aim to disrupt the order—to displease them?”

A sickly churn coils in my gut.

Father’s lethal stare, and Oliver’s dark warning, is a stark reminder of the gods.

Not the good kind. Not the kind the krums worship.

I whisper my answer, my waning defiance, “I don’t think the gods care about an article.”

“What?” Oliver snaps—

And it takes me a moment to realise he actually didn’t hear me.

I clear my throat. “Since when do They care about our arranged marriages?”

Father’s eyes almost bulge out of his head. He looks at me like I’m a stain of stupidity poisoning his couch.

Oliver scoffs. “Marriages are arranged with purpose. It isn’t first come, first serve, or any old offer will do. Prints matter. Why risk a brewer reproducing with a predictionist, when the prediction print could be lost to the brewer bloodline?”

He uses the Barlows as an example. And both the Barlow sons—Landon and Grey—are disappointments with their prints.

A brewer and a herbalist.

My mouth twists.

I drop my head as if to hide—hide from the three fierce stares aimed at me like weapons, hide from the unease that’s fidgeting my hands on my lap.

But Oliver chases my line of sight.

He leans forward and braces his forearms on his thighs. “This is about more than alliances, Olivia.”

I lift my gaze beneath my lashes.

Oliver continues, “Without monitoring the production of prints, we risk a generation of witches who can only brew some fucking potions.”

“And how do we hold power then?” Father snaps. “How do the gods respond when their instruments are weakened by sheer neglect?”

I… I don’t have an answer to that.

I truly don’t know.

The Videralli has never lost power over this world, not since they took control, hiding behind whichever face of control was there. Whether churches or empires or royalty, the Videralli was behind them all.

I suddenly feel miniscule.

The Videralli has made itself integral to the world. The Videralli made it that, if we go down, everything goes down with us.

I just always thought of myself as separate to that. An individual among the masses, fairly neutral in these dynamics. Just along for the ride, if anything.

“We all have our parts to play,” Father tells me, and it sounds so much like a warning, “and you ran from your duty. You shamed the gods, you shamed your family, and for what? In your quest to marry some mediocre professor of stars?”

I lift my gaze to his angry face unwillingly.

I shake my head, and the tears cast a filminess over my vision.

I whisper, “It had nothing to do with Eric. It was you.”

I blink and Father’s face is stone. It is contained rage.

“You,” I say, and my voice is trembling now, “were forcing me to marry the man who bullied me all the way through my school life. You told me that my pain didn’t matter, so I decided you didn’t matter.”

Out the corner of my eye, Oliver’s nostrils flare—like he’s suddenly inhaling all the air in the room to subdue the rage swelling up inside of him.

Mr Younge turns his clenched cheek to me, to all of us, and shuts his eyes on the wall, as if to find a grip on his silence.

But Father explodes.

He rounds on me, eyes blazing.

“You do not matter, Olivia,” he shouts. “None of us matter outside of the collective coven. We all make our sacrifices, and if you haven’t learned that by now, then I don’t know how else to get it through your head! Did we spoil you too much, and now you believe you are at the centre of the universe? Or did we not give you enough, and so you self-destruct every five minutes for attention?”

He distorts it.

The truth, the reality I lived, the life I suffered.

“That’s not it—”

Father towers over me, his hiss lethal, “Then what is it?”

The words whine out of me, “You don’t love me.”

My face twists with a fresh onslaught of tears.

“None of you do,” I say, voice trembling.

I lift my watery gaze to Father, to his unreadable face, all that rage re-contained, re-caged, but nowhere near dormant.

I shrug. “Mother maybe, but not enough to protect me.”

Oliver’s face shutters—

It falls.

He pushes off the leather armchair, a slackness sagged over him, like despair. “You think I don’t love you, Liv? You are more important to me than you’ll ever know. You are feeling less than adored in the face of our anger—but to believe you aren’t loved?”

Father tenses, and his gaze swerves to my brother with a warning. “It is another of her manipulation tactics, Oliver. A way to escape consequences.” He turns his dark stare down on me. “Your relationship with Eric Harling is over, do you understand me?”

I nod, because, duh.

If Father just listened to me for once, he would realise I don’t give two shits about Eric Harling.

But he is so determined to not listen.

Father takes a pause in his anger. Reigning it in, he runs his hand down his face, then, “Mr Younge has already confiscated your phone. Do not expect it returned to you. Do not ask for it. The phone in your room is also disconnected.” 

A snivel runs through me.

I nod again.

“You are confined to your chambers. You are not to leave them, you are not to try, and you are not to do anything that I have not approved. Am I clear?”

This nod is hidden behind my hands as I wipe at my wet cheeks.

Snot bubbles at my nose, and I’m fairly certain it’s in my throat, choking me too.

Oliver pulls back towards the desk.

I glance at him, seeing that he’s gathering a bunch of papers and the newsletter, then stuffing them into a folder that looks sort of like a briefcase but disposable.

Father sighs, then drops onto the coffee table. He buries his face in his hands.

For a moment, he just sits there, right in front of me.

Then he drops his hands and his voice is exhausted, “I don’t know where I went wrong with you. Sometimes you feel more like a punishment than a daughter.”

His words are a punch to my chest. All the air is forced out of me, and I double over.

I thought Father couldn’t hurt me.

I was wrong.

Oliver’s steps advance, soft on the rug.

Defeated, I look up at him.

His throat bobs.

His eyes dance with tears, unshed, and he hands me the bulging folder. “This will catch you up on what you have missed. Study it.”

Father says nothing more to me.

Mr Younge escorts me through Elcott Abbey to the Green Wing. But as we pass the staircase above the foyer, I hear it.

The sound of celebration.

Laughter and music and the crack of a pool cue, and glasses clinking.

It’s all coming from the parlour room.

Guess I’m not invited to my own welcome home party.

19

The moment I’m in my bedroom, all my tears dry and I feel a little lighter. Not light, but lighter.

The lavish familiarity of my bedchamber is a world away from mouldy apartments and dusty motel rooms.

Beneath the silvery chandeliers, I wander around the bedchamber, and graze my fingertips along the polished tables, the buttery soft Chesterfield sofa, the smooth mantle above the unlit fireplace, even the sage-green wallpaper with soft white flower patterns.

I touch every piece of furniture in the room, drop the folder onto my desk beside the family photo that stands in a crystal frame, until I finally wander to the two doors in the corner of the room.

I open the door to my left, and it opens to a wardrobe with a fluffy rug that spans wall to wall, that feels like feathers under the scruffy canvas shoes on my feet, and that lights up with glittering lights when I flick the switch.

Not a wardrobe like any I’ve had in years.

Not a musty old wooden cupboard with racks and rails that bow under the weight of my clothes.

It’s a room in its own right.

A faint, tired smile breaks through the exhaustion and curves my lips.

My hand lifts to feel along the clothes that won’t fit me anymore.

Cashmere and cotton and linen and wool and silk.

A caress against my fingertips, buttery and smooth.

Now, I understand how it must feel to be in one of those perfume adverts on the television all the time, to be caressed by luxury. This is that.

I come around the shelves of my shoes, all dust-free and glistening under the lights, but I turn my back on them—and the jewellery bench in the centre of the room lures me in with glittering winks.

I look down at the glass top—and the jewellery beneath it.

I pawned everything I took to Bluestone, which wasn’t much, not compared to the diamonds and gold and platinum and pearls in the glass case.

I drag my fingertips down the glass, over the necklace Mother gifted me for my sixteenth, encrusted with rubies.

That would have fetched more than the earrings and bracelets combined.

The diamond bracelet, as thick as a cuff, was a gift from Father on my eighteenth. It’s gaudy and I always hated it.

I prefer the bracelet beside it, a simple white gold chain speckled with diamonds and crushed rubies.

That one was from Dray.

But the centre piece is a slight mound—with no tiara to fit onto it.

Grandmother Ethel never passed it down to me.

Guess she didn’t get the chance.

It’s meant to be worn as a representation of the Cravens on my wedding day. My groom would wear his family crest on his cufflinks.

But there’s no groom, no wedding day, and no tiara to admire—and honestly, I’m not so sure Grandmother Ethel was ever going to hand it over.

I might have to pry it out of her strong, spidery hands if the time comes.

If.

One giant if.

I’m not exactly in the courting pool anymore. I don’t see my wedding day on the horizon.

I’ve been gone too long.

I’m a spinster now, even though I’m only twenty-six. All my peers will be married. The soon-to-be graduates will already have their offers and contracts locked in. And that leaves me to the widowers.

So I’m the spinster sister who will live at Elcott Abbey—unless Father’s disappointment reaches so deep into his festering soul that he discards me to live with Nonna or Grandmother Ethel.

I feel a slight wedge of disappointment.

“Miss Olivia.”

Startled, I fling my gaze to the door.

Abigail has lifted a pin to my bubble of daydreaming, and popped it. Dressed in plain servant breeches and a waistcoat, her scarlet hair pulled into a bun, she stands patiently in the doorway.

I blink at her, like I’m only remembering her entire existence right now in this very moment, and it’s an odd mess in my head to have it all rushing back to me.

She looks much the same as I last saw her.

Time hasn’t been as kind to me.

I don’t need to look at myself in the gold framed mirror on the wall to know that.

My greeting isn’t formal—or kind.

I look her up and down then, with a scoff, turn my cheek to her.  

Abigail keeps her gaze downcast, her hands clasped properly at her midsection.

I haven’t forgotten. It’s all rushing back to me now, her betrayal.

She handed over the deadblood book to Mr Younge. My father was furious, cut me out of the New Year celebrations, and my mother even struck me.

The anger that’s stirring in me at the sight of her feels ancient and ugly.

I turn my cheek to her. “Run me a bath.” My tone is curt and sharp, and rife with old resentment. “And the room is cold.”

The imps should have been up in my room to light the fire in the hearth before I got in.

I don’t see her bow, but there’s a pause before her bootsteps leave the walk-in. A few moments pass before I hear the familiar rush of bathwater.

I pick out the only pieces that I think will fit me. Loose bed shorts, a cotton strappy top that is stretchable enough, and a pair of thick socks.

I follow the sound of the running bathwater into the ensuite and walk into a room of steam.

I don’t like the fan on while I’m in the tub. It brings a draught in. And just because Abigail remembers that doesn’t mean I’ll warm to her.

I stomp into the warm mist, and each cross step takes me closer to the white leather bench I used to sit on while I applied my lotions.

I drop the clothes onto it, then start to strip off the harsh, scratchy material suffocating my body.

No bubbles rise with the bathwater.

I’m almost disappointed—then I see the trolley beside the tub. Filled with lotions and oils and balms.

Abigail lifts a glass bottle from the silver trolley, then holds the dropper over the rising water.

She drips beads of oil into it.

She’s not preparing a bath for my pleasure or enjoyment. This is a practical wash, with water infused with brews that will ease the tension out of my body as expertly as the hands of a masseuse, a bath that will moisturise my dry skin, replenish the hydration of my hair, and restore balance to my complexion.

The breath I release is soft.

It is content.

Without argument, I climb into the tub.

And I soak.

I soak for so long that my eyelids are pulling down, that—without a stash of sleep brews from Oliver—I’m starting to release all that adrenaline and tension and anxiety… and I might just drift off.

But I don’t.

I blink my heavy eyelids open.

In the mist of the room, Abigail massages shampoo deep into my scalp. It’s hard to stop the moan from ribboning through me.

Bliss.

Absolute bliss.

I’ve always loved this part of my baths. But I really never knew how much I needed it until now—until I’ve gone without it for so long.

She rinses out the suds with warm water from a porcelain jug. I watch her in the mirror, steamy and distorted. Then she works some droplets of oil into my hair, section by section, the kind that isn’t meant to be washed out.

On the run, I used conditioner. A lot. Too much. And my hair shows the damage of the cheapness of it.

Abigail tries to repair it.

It’s pointless, really. I’ll need an expert.

Mother will have noticed.

I expect to be attacked by a hairdresser any minute now.

“Where is my mother?” I ask—now that the steam has faded into wisps, and time has passed, but she hasn’t come to me.

Abigail says, “The party moved to the parlour after dinner service.”

“The party,” I echo, my mouth curling slowly with each enunciation. Because that means the Sinclairs haven’t left yet. “And Father?”

“In his office with Master Oliver,” she says, running a comb through my treated hair.

My answer is a curt hum.

Still trying to work out what to do with me, I suppose. Father and Oliver deliberating where to send me, or if they should keep me here.

It’s not like I can be locked up in my bedchamber for the rest of my life. They need a plan that extends beyond the immediate.

Abigail clips my hair to my head, then her hands leave me.

I listen to the soft thuds of her footsteps around the bathroom, until she returns to my side with a silk dressing gown.

I clammer out of the tub and water splashes all over the tiles. Maybe I’m too tired, my limbs too clumsy and heavy, or I’ve lost layers of my mask over the years.

Abigail takes care of everything.

She dries my hair as I sit on the bench, she lotions my body, then massages a very light retinol lotion into my face.

I’m primped and dry by the time I’m pulling on the strappy top and comfortable shorts that hug my backside a bit more than they should.

Abigail kneels on the tiles as she fits on my socks.

I look down at her. “Why are you still here?”

Abigail lifts a crimson frown to me. “Pardon, Miss Olivia?”

“You’re my dresser. But you are still here. Have you been here all these years waiting for me to come home?”

Her smile is tight, it’s proper. “No, Miss Olivia. I am assigned to Mistress Craven, now.”

My face falls.

My insides sink.

Fucking Asta.

I’m whirled back to Bluestone, Asta digging through her trunk, searching for her ski gear, complaining about her dresser. A dresser who, after the engagement with Dray ended, decided to not do her job so well.

A climber servant.

They aren’t uncommon. They latch onto the status of their employers.

And, now, Asta has taken my dresser.

Abigail got herself a nice promotion.

I scoff and shake my head.

Rats climbing up the ladder of Elcott.

I almost say something—maybe say exactly that, but then a thud echoes through the bedchamber.

A thud that sounds so distant that, if the exhaust fans were on, neither Abigail nor I would have heard it.

But we both do.

She glances up at me with that faint furrowed brow of hers, then looks over her shoulder at the door.

Then, the thud comes again.

“Someone’s at the door,” I tell her, and my tone isn’t very kind.

Abigail dips her head, then pushes up from the floor.

I leave the bathroom in a mess of water puddles and wisps of steam and discarded clothes, and I follow her to the ensuite door.

But I go no further.

Here, I stand and wait—as though I have an easier escape if I stay here. Like, if it’s Father knocking at the door, then I can just barricade myself in the ensuite, because I cannot deal with that again.

I can’t endure it—and keep my mouth shut about what I know, about his secret… my secret.

My shoulder digs into the doorframe.

I lean against it.

Abigail opens the bedroom door and dips into a deep curtsey. She holds it for a moment before rising.

So it’s either Oliver or Father.

I almost shut the bathroom door.

But then Abigail steps back and throws an uncertain look my way.

That hesitates me.

“Mr Dray Sinclair,” she says, her voice uneasy—

And my heart slingshots.

Abigail is right to be troubled about this.

For the same reason I suddenly become rooted to the ensuite doorway.

Men are not allowed to visit my bedchamber. Ever. Not unless they are immediate family, like my brother.

Even Father rarely comes to my room.

Before I can dismiss him, or make sense of his appearance at my door, Dray steps inside.

The shoulder of his cashmere sweater brushes by Abigail, her eyes wide and mouth clamped, as though to shut in any argument.

Sleeves rolled up, he slips his hands into his pockets, and under the chandelier light, the platinum watch on his wrist glitters.

His hair is more dishevelled now, looser and wavier, and falls over his brow—and so I know he was partaking in the celebration downstairs.

I blink at him, the shock lingering in me, hitching my tone, “What the fuck, Dray?”

His gaze is lured in by my voice, finding me by the ensuite door. His eyes are diamonds, made even paler against his cool complexion, like he hasn’t been enjoying the summer sun.

Dray arches a brow. “You will have to be clearer than that,” he says, coldly.

I push from the doorway.

My sock-wrapped feet come thudding down on the hardwood floor. But I only take two steps, because ultimately, I am a coward.

“You can’t be here,” I say. “You can’t be in my bedroom.”

Echoing it apparently makes it truer. To me. Not to Dray.

His smile is amused, patronising, then it’s gone, and there’s suddenly a hollowness in his stare.

“Your father permits visitors, Olivia—since you are not allowed to leave the confines of this room, or have you forgotten that already?”

I’m damn sure my father didn’t allow him to come to my room.

But then there’s a lot of things about Father I thought were true—and turned out to be the opposite.

Dray doesn’t wait for me to respond. Doesn’t wait for my permission to come in.

Without looking back at Abigail, he says, “Bring a bottle of single malt.”

Mute, I shake my head at her.

But Dray apparently overrides the authoritative glare in my eyes, because she turns on her heels and leaves.

The door clicks softly behind her. And the room suddenly feels quieter, the air thicker.

“After that conversation with your father,” Dray says, and he starts for me, “you can’t convince me you aren’t in need of a drink.”

His steps are casual, wandering almost, but the direction is clear.

I back up until my shoulder presses into the doorframe, firmer, as though the wood will split open for me and swallow me up.

If he doesn’t notice my nerves in that, then he does in the socks on my feet, how they curl with my toes.

My voice is smaller than I’d like it to be, “It wasn’t so bad. He could’ve smacked me—but he didn’t.”

My jab lands.

Dray’s smile is gentle over his pink lips.

Turning his cheek to me, he pauses at the bookshelf built into the wall, and looks along the crammed row of music compositions. Mostly piano.

The Bösendorfer springs to mind—and just the thought of playing the piano, being reunited with the instrument, is enough to soothe my insides.

But I don’t think Father will be letting me out of this bedchamber-prison anytime soon.

So the relief is short-lived.

Dray reaches out for the spines of old, leather-bound books. The entire histories of every grand musical genius in existence.

The imps have been and gone, because the fire in the hearth is lit, and the light dances soft over his cheekbone.

Then he turns his sharp, glass eyes to me.

In the firelight, his long lashes cast shadows down his face.

The smile is gone from his pink mouth, and he makes no effort to respond to my jab.

Maybe my old habits didn’t die, they just went dormant. And in the familiar anxiety around Dray, an intruder in my safe place, my bedroom, it’s rising again.

Dray closes in on me.

With each step closer, I fall back a little more—until my spine hits the other door, the one left open to my wardrobe.

Dray only spares a quick, disinterested glance at the walk-in over my head, before he drops his gaze to me—and those diamond daggers have me pinned.

His finger ghosts down the thin strap of my top, leaving my skin prickled in the wake of his touch. “You might want to put something on over these scraps you call clothes.”

Not scraps.

But I am filling out the top and shorts a lot more than I used to. And I’m not so keen on standing around and arguing it with Dray, when his implications linger in his wandering stare—

A stare that glides over my breasts.

I slide out from between him and the door, then dip into the wardrobe.

There isn’t much in here for me. No entire outfit that will fit.

But I don’t exactly want to stoke any latent lust in him. So I grab a dark blue sweater off the rack. I pull on the sweater and rush back to the doorway.

Abigail is pushing a trolley in, one that jangles and jingles all the way around my bedroom, then around the corner.

Dray is out of sight, too.

Probably snooping through my things.

I tug the hem down past my backside and come out of the walk-in.

I find Dray by the desk angled in the corner, between the wall of windows that open onto the stone balcony and the fireplace.

Abigail sets out a platter of sandwiches, which I doubt she got permission from Mother to bring, and a silver tray with a crystal decanter and a couple of tumblers.

But it’s Dray that stops me in my tracks.

I set the giant, overflowing folder down on the desk when I got into my room. Practically discarded it.

In it, is the newsletter.

The one with the article.

And Dray has found it.

He holds it up, slightly angled towards the glow coming from the hearth, and—with his other hand—he waves a silent, bored dismissal to Abigail.

Her hands leave the decanter immediately, and she abandons me.

I wander over to the desk.

The sandwiches aren’t what lure me in. It’s the little bite-sized cakes beside them that tempt me.

Dray doesn’t look up. He scans the article he’s probably read a dozen times over. The bomb I threw into the Videralli then ran from.

I pause at the fireplace, like my legs suddenly think for me, and refuse to take another step towards Dray while he’s reading that.

But time has passed.

So much time. Three years.

And so there’s no ice in his voice as he says, “This was certainly the most self-destructive tantrum I have ever witnessed from you.”

A scoff jolts me. “Tantrum?”

Over the newsletter, he slides a shadowy look to me. “What would you call it?”

I part my mouth to retort, but before I can utter even a word, he’s answering for me—

“An attempt to expose the unfairness of your pampered, privileged life, all to escape what? A marriage that is arranged, as are the majority of marriages in our society.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I mumble. “I already got the lecture from my father, so—”

“This is no lecture, Olivia.” He tosses the article down and takes a threatening step towards me. “This is a warning. If you ever do anything like this again, whether it’s attempting to contact Serena, or writing an unfavourable letter,” his teeth bare around the words, “the consequences will exceed the lengths of your imagination.”

“So you won’t just slap me again?” I lift my chin, but my insides constrict. “Maybe just set Asta on me to do your worst?”

His smile is relaxed, too soft for the memory flashing in my mind. “You think that was my worst?”

“Oh, no you have other ways.” I move around the coffee table, avoiding him as I advance on the desk. But I give a pointed look over my shoulder. “I remember that, too.”

His shaped, dark eyebrow lifts, a contrast to his sandy blonde hair, loose and ruffled. He rests his hand on the mantel above the fireplace, his gaze following me to the cakes.

I pluck a midnight blue piece from the platter. “I remember the blackout, Dray.”

The surprise fades from him, and he calmly watches me pour myself a scotch.

I pop the cake into my mouth.

“And?”

I throw a dark look at him and force back a mouthful of cake. “I remember asking you to stop.”

Begging, more like.

Hitting out at him, grabbing, writhing—

He draws away from the mantel and snatches my tumbler of scotch before I can take it.

He says, “There is no sound in a blackout.”

My dark stare follows him to the arm of the couch. He drops onto it, like it isn’t rigid and stiff under him, like the pain doesn’t bother him at all, and he sips the scotch.

He brings the glass down to settle on his thigh, and he loosens a tired sigh. “What do you want me to say, Olivia? That I forced you? That it was a mistake—and I won’t ever do it again?”

Hesitation steals me. “Would you mean it?”

His smile is lined with perfect, white teeth.

He doesn’t answer.

My stare turns blank. It holds for a long moment, and he makes no move to look away. No shame written on him, no blush on his cheeks, just unabashed resolve.

I turn for the decanter and pour myself another. “I’m even less convinced my father let you come to my room.”

“Shall we call him?”

He teases me with that—a dare to call his bluff.

Because I won’t.

Knowing Father these days, knowing him better now than ever, I get the feeling that either way, I’ll be in trouble.

I’ll be in trouble for questioning Dray’s authority or some crap, or I’ll be in trouble for interrupting Father over something frivolous, or this would be a hugely scandalous visit to my room that I am entertaining, and that also would be my fault.

There is no winning here.

There is no winning with Father, and there never has been with Dray.

It just took me too long to figure that out.

He lifts the glass again. “Why do you do that?”

I watch him take too long of a sip, too generous, and then I steal my own glass.

I drop onto the windowsill opposite him. “Do what?”

He answers, “Focus on your father and the tension of your return.”

I force a smile, one that isn’t in any way polite or kind. “Hard not to.”

Dray is unfazed. “You could easily focus on the joy in the parlour room. You could focus on our mothers in tears over your return, or even your grandmother’s relief. But you seem determined to dampen your own spirits.”

My frown is aimed down at the amber liquid sloshing in my glass.

Dray adds, “You are glad to be home, so why not allow yourself to feel that?”

“I don’t know how I feel.”

He is quiet, watching, as I down the scotch. It scalds all the way to my stomach.

But it’s pleasant.

The first real drink I’ve had in so long.

Dray pushes up from the arm of the couch and pours me a refill. “Tell me.”

I watch the liquid splash and wave against the glass walls of the tumbler. “Why would I tell you anything about how I feel?”

Dray pours his own next, and it’s a healthy amount.

“Who else do you have to speak to?” He leans on the side of the desk. “With Serena gone into obscurity, who’s confidence do you have?”

My mouth flattens into a bitter line.

I hide it behind the glass.

Because, even with Serena as my rogue companion for years, I didn’t have her confidence. Not really.

I could never tell her the layers of every feeling I had out there.

There was a disconnect between us.

If I was a full-fledged witch, I know now that Serena and I wouldn’t have been best friends. Friends, yes. Allies, definitely. But that same disconnect would have been wedged between us, because we are fundamentally different.

I roll the glass. “I feel…”

My whisper is weak, and it trails off.

But Dray is patient, and he waits.

I speak stronger, “I feel fractured. Like I’ve been someone else for so long that I forgot who I really am. And now she’s coming back because there’s space for her, but it’s two masks colliding, and they’re cracking. I feel like two different lives are crashing inside of me, and I’ve only existed as a second mother for so long—a nanny—and now I’m Olivia Craven again, and I don’t even know what that means.”

My throat thickens.

My breath shudders out of me, thick with restrained tears. But they aren’t restrained.

I taste them on my wet lips, I feel them on my cheeks and slipping down my throat.

And Dray sits there, on the edge of the desk, patient. “You feel relieved.”

He’s right.

But I hate that he is.

So I lift a dark, wet glower to him. “You know don’t know anything.”

His smile is small. “I know that you missed home. That it started off small. Thoughts that you let intrude into your mind, perhaps only at night when you were falling asleep. Then those thoughts came in during waking hours, and you fought them a little less each time. The more you realised the freedom you chased was a lie, the more you started to yearn for home.

“Perhaps you didn’t yearn for anyone in particular. Not your grandmothers, your parents, your friends—if you ever truly had any.

“Perhaps you simply yearned for the comfort, of everything being done for you, of being doted on.

“That yearning grew in you until it overpowered the sense of obligation you had to Serena. And I know this, because that—” he lifts the glass in a salute gesture “—is how we managed to stay on your trail.”

I stare at him.

Unblinking, unmoving, I just stare.

The shame is searing my cheeks.

Dray finishes his scotch, then sets down the glass. “The thing about shields is that they only protect you from the outside. But inside, yearning is a rot, and you decayed your shield each time you let yourself miss home.”

A pang hits my chest, hard.

The phone booths.

Sofía warned me about thoughts of home.

I didn’t just reminisce. I parked at phone booths, let my mind fall into my family, and invited them in.  

Dray pushes off the desk. “Even now, you are trying to convince yourself that you should be ashamed of picking up that phone and calling us. But ask yourself, aren’t you happier already? Aren’t you relieved to be home?”

That breaks me.

And I crumble.

The tears roll over me like waves, and I toss the tumbler at his shoes. The glass bounces off the edge of the rug, scotch splashing out, but if Dray makes any move for me, I don’t see it, because I bury my warped face in my hands.

The sobs shudder me.

Because he’s right. I did it.

I yearned—but I also picked up that phone in the booth and called home.

I gave the address and hung up the phone, then parked houses down from Ms Brown’s…

I knew what was coming.

I gave us up.

I…

I wish I was stronger.

I wish I was better.

It’s a shameful thing, something that must be deeply wrong inside of me, broken, because I have every reason and more to not want to be here.

But I don’t regret it.

I run my fingers down my wet cheeks.

The breath hitches in my chest. “I… I shouldn’t…” I shake my head. “I shouldn’t want to be here.”

Dray hasn’t moved from the desk. “But you do.”

My mouth twists, wobbling, wet. “My family—they don’t love me—”

“Olivia, don’t be naïve.” He sighs, soft. “You are our only peer who never realised that all children, all offspring, come second to the gods. Our duties are aligned with the gods. It does not mean your parents do not love you. They just understand the way it is, and you have never cared to comprehend that.”

“That’s not fair,” I say and fall back against the window. “I wasn’t raised the same way as you were, as Asta or Serena. I was diagnosed as a deadblood, and that meant I would be lucky to marry anyone. I didn’t have the same expectations pushed on me—and I was told to just accept it when my whole life got flipped upside-down.”

“So you ran.”

I fight the urge to meet his gaze. But I lose and I look.

The warning is sharp in those cold eyes.

He slips his hands into his pockets and, pushing off the desk, wanders to the window next to me. “It was two years before we got close enough to your trail to learn you were travelling with a child.”

A snivel hitches through me, and I frown up at him. “So?”

His gaze slides down to me. “That night in the blackout. We had no way of knowing whose child it was. I was relieved to learn that it was Serena’s bastard.”

Dray might have chased my contract once. But an out-of-wedlock child is not a good thing in this world. It’s so much more than the disgrace, the reputation, the shame—

It’s a child conceived and born outside of the bounds of rituals.

So I nod, faint, because I understand.

Yet another way my family worried that I disrespected the gods.

His reflection is faint on the windowpanes. “Would you do it again?”

“Do what?”

“Run.”

No.

That’s the answer that thrums in my bones, the instinctual response that curves my shoulders, because it was hell out there.

I never want to go back to that life.

Dray must have been watching me, watching my body tense against the idea, my face turn into a grimace, because he hums, satisfied, then turns his back to the window.

He leans on the frame.

“I want to go back,” I snivel through the words, and his glare flings down at me. “I want to go back to the start and everyone makes different choices. All the way to when I was born.”

His frown comes and goes, quickly.

And, like he understands what I’m saying, which he can’t possibly, he nods, faint. “I can’t deny that this would have gone differently for you if you hadn’t been born a deadblood.”

I shake my head, face twisting, because no. That’s not it. That’s not what I mean.

Dray doesn’t know that.

He can’t.

This secret stays hidden from him.

But he misreads me.

“Our relationship would have held through the academy. Life would have been easier for you. It would have gone differently. But it did not. And all the magic in the world cannot change that. So stop wallowing, Olivia.”

I loosen a harsh breath and it puffs out my cheeks. I drop my head and consider the bruises on my thighs, curtesy of Sal’s kicking and screaming and moving boxes at work.

At work…

The shudder runs through me.

And that’s how I know for sure, I have lived as a whole other person these past few years, not as myself, and now that I am home, she is home, too.

Every time I let myself imagine what was going on back here, among the Videralli, in the world I yearned for, I brought trackers closer to me.  

Every time I sat at a phone booth and let my pain break free—I was calling to them.

Breaking the shield.

And I’m not at all sorry about it.

Dray is right about me.

I wipe at my face, my breaths hitching through me, and look at him.

I see a beast so determined in its hunt that it bypasses all the other prey, just to catch the one that flees the furthest.

He asks, ”Why are you so ashamed of it, Olivia? It is only us in here. Your family do not judge you for wanting to come home. Only you are making this difficult for yourself—as always.”

I scoff, and it jolts my shoulders. But I don’t look away from him. The predator. The one who came to my room, left a celebration in the parlour, to talk to me. Just to talk.

We do not have that sort of relationship.

We are not friends.

And my heart lurches—because it clicks in my mind, and I realise what an idiot I am.

As if reading me, Dray’s stare is unflinching, a quiet challenge.

I part my lips around empty words for a beat.

Then I just do it, just ask it, the question that’s lurking around my mind, the one I don’t want to pay any attention to, because if it’s true and it’s spoken, it becomes real—

“Who did you marry, Dray?”

Dray’s smile is small, that dangerous, knowing smirk of his that darkens his whole aura.

“I did not marry,” he says, unapologetic. “My fiancé has been very ill. Too ill for the wedding ritual. But it seems she has made a full recovery overnight—just in time for the summer solstice.”

A bitter sound chokes me.

It’s me.

He is still engaged to me.

As I am to him.

Father and Oliver aren’t in the office deliberating where to put me for the rest of my life. They are going over the logistics of the marriage—because the quicker they can pass me over to Dray, the sooner it’s done.

Mother and Amelia aren’t just celebrating my return. They are gushing over the wedding they have just months to put into motion—because I’ve been brought home right in time for wedding season.

The smile I lift to Dray is sad.

Defeated.

Because he won.

And I’m the loser who slides down the windowsill and drops to the floor.

I bring my knees up and run my hands over them, back and forth, as if to soothe the trickles of anxiety nipping their way through my body.

“I expected more theatrics.”

I loll my head back against the window.

I say nothing, because I have nothing to say. Only horror spreading inside of me. Gutting me.

He turns his cheek to me and looks out onto the gardens. “I will be a fair husband. I will be generous and loyal—and in return, I expect your compliance.”

Obedience, he means.

My total and utter submission.

A dark tumbling storm is rising in me.

I breathe through it.

The mockery drips from my tone, “A love story for the ages.”

“Love,” he echoes, soft. “You asked me once if I loved you—of course you did not know it was yourself you were asking about.”

At the Debutante Ball, when I asked if he loved his new, mysterious fiancé.

I still remember what he said then.

‘At times.’

“But marriages are not for love, Olivia.” He says it so flippantly that it’s as though he’s talking about the weather. “Marriages are for politics.”

That is just not true.

Mother and Father love one another.

It’s something I always knew never to dream for myself, never to reach for. Sometimes we just know what is not meant for us.

But that is such a sad thing.

To live without love.

Tears thicken my voice, “Isn’t there space for it?”

Dray studies me, long and hard, and his eyes flicker like steel blades caught in the moonlight. “Mistresses.”

His answer is so empty that I suspect he hardly believes his own words. In fact, there is no place for mistresses among the aristos.

So he answers with a lie.

Because Dray is incapable of love.

I shake my head, stubborn. “Aristos men don’t take mistresses, so your answer is bullshit.”

It’s the way. Tradition. How can a man be taken seriously in business, be trusted, when he can’t even stay loyal to his wife?

But Dray’s grin churns my stomach.

It is light and lazy, and he shakes his head slightly. “As naïve as ever.” He scoffs, and it’s pure mockery. “Do you really believe that all aristos men are entirely faithful?”

“My father would never—”

“No, he would not.” Dray agrees, that smile lingering as he takes a step towards me, and that closes half the distance between us.

My neck cranes and I look up at him.

The tears in my eyes blur him, but I don’t sob or double over, or give into these expectations of theatrics and tantrums—like they all think of me.

A dullness has taken over me.

Dray takes another step closer.

His Oxfords glint in the firelight.

He says, “Fidelity is a pretty ribbon we wrap around arranged marriages—so witches like you can stomach it easier.”

Slowly, he lowers to a crouch in front of me.

The mocking glint in his eyes is matched by the small curve of his mouth. “Are you asking for my fidelity, Olivia?”

“You say you don’t love me,” I start with a snivel, “but then why did you say you once did.”

He did. Thought I was passed out and didn’t hear him, wouldn’t remember.

But I remember, I just bury it all.

Dray’s upper lip twitches.

A darkness settles over him.

The shadows stretch over his smooth complexion, and all I can think is how menacing he looks.

“The delusions of a child,” he dismisses it so easily. “And your delusion lies in your expectations.” 

I wipe at my wet cheek, at the silent tears he pays no attention to. “If you don’t love me, why are you so obsessed with having me?”

He reaches out for me, fingertips brushing along the shinbone of my leg.

“You are the right choice,” he says—and he says it so factually, so unemotionally, that it twists a knife in my chest. “You are the Craven daughter. You are a deadblood—and, as it turns out,” he adds, lifting his sharp eyes to mine, “those witches create some powerful offspring.”

I scoff and try to tug my shin closer to my body, out of his reach, but it’s no use. I’m already too tucked up against the window.

I snivel. “So all those years of torment at Bluestone were for nothing?”

Dray’s touch ghosts down my leg to the bunched-up material of my sock. “In retrospect, I might have made different choices if I had known what would be.”

I tug my leg aside. “That’s a crappy apology.”

The move gives him an opening—and my heart jolts inside of me, because Dray’s hand pushes between my squeezed thighs.

His dangerous gaze levels with mine. “It isn’t one.”

I clamp my legs shut against the intrusion. Outrage flares in my eyes, the sudden tension clenching my jaw.

But Dray’s fingers tighten around the meat of my thigh, a hearty grip that I don’t think he has any intention of releasing.

A breath shudders out of me.

I keep my legs clamped, my stare locked with his—and something ugly coils in my gut.

Father probably did let him come to my room. He held up the engagement I ran away from, the one I begged to be free of.

Years on, and nothing has changed.

Still just a pawn on this chessboard of the coven, of secrets and strategy.

I reach down for Dray’s wrist and grip it, tight.

I prompt, “What if I wasn’t a deadblood?”

His lashes lower, a faint frown etching onto his brow. Not the turn he expected.

My tone is a whisper, and it’s cruel, “What if I was a krum?”

He looks at me from beneath his lashes, shadows darkening his sharp eyes. “What an ugly thing to say.”

The softness of his voice is nothing short of appalled, like the disgust that threatens to curl his upper lip.

I double-down. “What if I was a krum, Dray?”

The words echo between us and our locked stares.

His hand is flat, trapped between my thighs, no longer gripping onto me.

I push, “What if I never was a deadblood… and all this time, I’ve really been a krum?”

Dray’s jaw tightens.

Then, after a heavy, thick moment, he tugs his hand out from between my thighs.

His tone is dark, “Is your mind normally rattling with utter nonsense?”

I loosen a trembling breath, the fear curling my toes against the tip of his shoes. “What if I wasn’t ever allowed to read the deadblood books, because then I would figure out that my blood is supposed to reflect the skies, just like witchblood, and so if I ever checked for myself, and I saw that it doesn’t glitter, not even a little, then I would figure out that there’s no magic in me, and so… that would mean I’m a krum. What then?”

Dray is stone.

He is a statue crouched in front of me.

His face, his hands fisted at his knees… then the mask cracks.

His eyes suddenly flare, crushed diamonds caught in the moonlight, and his mouth curls. “You would say anything to end the arrangement—"

I lean forward, closer, and hiss, “You always hated me for what I am. But you were hating me for the wrong reasons, Dray. Doesn’t it make sense?” I blink, and the tears roll down my cheeks. “My father doesn’t love me. You said it yourself. I was never allowed a phone or freedom, everything I did was monitored, and they never let Witchdoctor Urma treat me at Bluestone, not even for a scratch, and… I overheard them once.”

In a blink, Dray closes the slight distance between us. His knee digs into the floor and he snatches up my wrist, tight.

Through gritted teeth, his tone is dangerous, “What did you hear?”

I swallow down the thickness in my throat.

The danger of it, the risk of telling him, churns my stomach. Every bit of me aches to curl up into a ball and scream for help.

Just the sight of his fierce stare—

It shudders my spine.

But there’s a reason I’m telling him this.

This is the final card up my sleeve.

And it will ruin everything.

“My parents….” The tears tremble my whispered words, “wanted to pay off a witchdoctor. For blood tests. Your witchdoctor—and my blood tests. I think they gave him someone else’s blood.”

Dray’s fingers dig so hard into my wrist that the promise of bruises springs aches all over the bones.

It doesn’t stop me.

I push through the thumping of my heart. “When I was out there… in the krum world… I… I tested my blood.”

His lashes flutter slightly.

His face shutters.

Then, his grip tightens impossibly, and I should cry out from the pain, but I feel only that ache inside of me.

“Dray…” I smile something watery. “I’m a krum.”

20

Time stands still for a fleeting moment—

Then Dray is suddenly on his feet.

Wrist tight in his grip, he hoists me up with him, so hard that my shoulder screams and my wrist is aching.

A hollow sound utters out of me, but Dray couldn’t give two shits about that, and he’s yanking me with him to the paned glass doors behind my desk.

He strikes aside the curtains.

“It’s lock—”

It’s all I manage to say before he flicks his hand—and shards of glass go blasting out onto the balcony.

I throw myself back from the explosion, and smack right into Dray’s shoulder. But the glass doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t touch either one of us.

I look, wide-eyed, at what used to be my door, and just as I do, all those glittering shards hang in the air—

Then drop.

They hit the stone floor, scatter over the balcony that hugs the length of my windows.

A shout catches in my throat.

I cringe back, but Dray wrenches me alongside him, out into the chilly night air. He drags me out onto the balcony, his shoes crunching down on the glass—

I jump over the broken shards.

I land with a stagger on the stone, and still, my socks tear. The nips of pain wince through me. I feel the heat of blood. I’ve definitely been cut.

Dray jerks me around to face him.

I smack into him, my forehead colliding with his collarbone and erupting fresh pain in my head.

Undeterred, Dray’s hand twists my wrist. He turns my palm upwards and brings his finger to it.

“Ow—”

A harsh breath cuts through me.

His finger—the makut—slices along the meat of my palm and splits the flesh.

I cry out, but he ignores it, and hot, crimson blood pours out of the cut.

The blood threads through my fingers and drips onto the stone floor at my feet.

But in my palm, there is a puddle of it.

Dray lifts my wrist.

My hand.

My palm.

And the moonlight cascades over us; it cascades over the blood pooling in my hand.

Dray’s sharp, glass eyes are locked onto the blood. The tension in his jaw is so tight that a muscle is stroked across his cheek.

He watches the regular glisten of blood under the light. He watches for the glitter, the reflection of the clear night sky above.

His throat bobs, his grip on my wrist flexes, but still, he waits.

There should be stars in the blood, there should be the whitish wisp of a moon—

But another heartbeat passes.

My blood is unchanging.

Beneath his cashmere sweater, his body is tense, like his skin is pulled tight over muscles of steel.

And still, he waits.

He doesn’t move.

He doesn’t breathe.

He stares and stares and stares.

My mouth flattens against the silent tears wetting my face. My throat is slick, and I swallow back the wretched truth I saw in that same blood years ago, in the garden of Hell House, when I realised my whole life had been a lie.

I am a krum.

I don’t know why my parents adopted me and pretended I was their own.

I don’t know why they chased me to the ends of the earth, a krum child that isn’t their own, not really.

But I do know that Dray will never marry a krum.

The final card up my sleeve—played.

A breath ushers out of him and his shoulders sag.

Blood spills over my hand. Unchanged.

He flings my wrist away from him, like it’s infected with a wretched virus.

His gaze snaps to me—and the look he pins me with sends a chill down my spine.

It’s pure hatred.

His eyes flash with rage, his lip curls with disgust, and I swear, for a moment, he thinks about pushing me off the balcony.

The moonlight washes over us on the balcony, it illuminates the cracks in his mask, his shuttering face.

He looks at me, the deadblood he loved, then loathed, then pursued, then chased across the world, and he sees me for what I truly am.

Nothing.

Not a Craven.

Not a witch.

Not a deadblood.

Just… nothing.

But I see it.

That shuttering of his face, the cracks in that perfected mask of his, and before he can turn his cheek to me, the image is seared into my mind.

A grimace.

A pained one.

Hurt.

Dray reels back from me—from the nothingness that I am—and stalks for the blasted doors.

He storms off the balcony, his shoes crunching down on the glass, and disappears into my bedchamber.

I am rooted to the balcony.

Socks torn and bloody, crimson threading through my fingers and dripping down me.

Then I flinch—because the door slams shut, hard enough to tremble the whole bedchamber.

Still, I don’t move.

Breaths mist at my face.

I feel the cold eating at the wet trails down my cheeks, the chill prickling at my breasts—

And I drop my head.

The tears wash over me like a violent wave strikes a cliff.

I crumble.

Falling to my knees, my hands smack down on the broken glass.

The first sound out of me is guttural. It’s somewhere between a heave and a moan. It’s years of built-up anguish releasing—and I hardly even feel the cuts all over me.

Doubled over, I wail against the quiet night, moonlight dances over the glass like it’s mocking me.

It’s when the sharp inhales spear through me, like weapons, that I hear the knocks rattling the bedroom door.

It comes rapid, urgent, and doesn’t follow with a pause. Not before the door opens and Oliver’s familiar voice calls out my name.

My face twists.

A fresh pulse of anguish jolts me.

Rapid footsteps thud through the room. He’s spotted me through the windows—and he rushes out onto the balcony.

Glass crunches beneath his shoes. “Liv?” Panic has his voice pulled taut. “Gods, are you alright?”

Before I can begin to answer that, or even look up from the blood and my tears on the balcony floor, Oliver has swept to my side.

“Are you hurt? Liv, look at me. Are you hurt?””

I’m aware of his hands feeling along my shoulders, my arms, searching for injury larger than the small cuts.

A moan tethers through me, and I lift my hand from the glass. I show him the gash on my palm.

His murmur is barely audible, “What the fuck…”

The surprise steals him. For a moment, he’s still.

Then he gingerly takes my hand.

I stare at the floor, the glass, the blood, and through the clouding of tears.

From a pocket somewhere on his person, Oliver pulls out a handkerchief and presses it onto my palm.

“Did Dray do this to you?” His question comes breathy, almost disbelieving. “Liv, look at me. Tell me what happened.”

My breaths are too hitched, too sharp, too serrated. I don’t think I could get a word out if I tried.

Oliver realises this. He must. Because his questions stop—and he wraps his arm around me, and pulls me closer.

I fall into him.

I sink into his arms.

Oliver tugs me so close that I’m slumped against his chest. And through the sobs that batter and hack at my chest, he holds me.

Chin rested on my head, he’s quiet. Patient.

He doesn’t ask me why I’m crying—but his mind must be whirring, pinning it all on Dray.

For once, he would be wrong.

This isn’t Dray.

It’s him.

It’s all of them.

Oliver. Mother. Father.

It’s my blood.

It’s all that time that I had to fight back tears and pretend to be ok around Serena and Sal.

It’s that mask crumbling completely, fading into nothingness, and I’m left with the raw pain of knowing exactly what I am…

And that my family must be in on it.

I’ve been on autopilot for so long, I can hardly breathe through the pain of switching back on.

Oliver holds me through it.

Time passes in heaves that wrack my body. The ache in my chest is too much, it’s too serrated, too constricted.

Oliver’s arms tighten around me. He hushes softly, until my breathing starts to ease.

Less shudders wrack me.

Less pain aches my chest.

Gradually, the heaves end, and I’m slumped in my brother’s arms, my temple rested against the steady beats of his heart.

Still, he just holds me, patient—a comforting side of Oliver I haven’t known in so long. More than the years I’ve been gone. More than my time on the run in the krum world. This is a side of Oliver I remember from back when we were children, before the dynamics at Bluestone tore us apart.

The night air is quiet and gentle when Oliver’s embrace loosens, and he brings his hands to my shoulders.

“Father doesn’t know yet that Dray stormed out of here,” he says, “But it’s only a matter of time before he finds out.” His hands tighten on my shoulders, squeezing them with reassurance—and draws me back a few inches. “He will come, demanding answers.”

Reluctance slows me down, but I do lift my gaze to Oliver’s soft rainforest eyes.

My pouted mouth trembles.

Blood has dried on my arms, uncomfortable and itchy against my skin. My eyes are swollen and red raw, made worse by the chilly night air.

I understand what Oliver is saying.

I understand what he’s really telling me—even if it takes me a few moments to get it.

I need to get my story right.

Oliver thinks I did something. That I fucked up in yet another classic me way.

He’s the one who doesn’t understand.

Before I can choke out a response, he loops a strong arm around my back, then hoists me up off the glass-littered floor.

My socks dangle above the shards.

He carries me to the blasted doors, and the chill of the night chases us into the bedchamber.

Oliver drops me onto the chaise facing the roaring hearth. Then he draws back for the brass bell above the mantel and gives it a single, curt tug.

Without a word, he sits on the edge of the coffee table and reaches down for my socks.

Gingerly, he peels them off, letting tiny glitterings of glass sprinkle onto the rug.

The soles of my feet are cut. Not like the gash down my palm that I hold to my chest. Just tiny little nicks along my feet, but enough that I wince as I bring them up onto the chaise.

I sit basket-legged and wait.

The hour is late, so most of the house staff will be in bed. So the bell summons Mrs Younge, who then calls for the imps, and when they come to start cleaning the glass and boarding up the broken doors, she returns with salves and bandages for my wounds.

Oliver downs a scotch, weary and mute, then another before he dismisses her.

It leaves just us and the imps.

Oliver cleans the cut on my hand first.

His silence holds for the imps.

His eyes are tired, lashes low, dark circles made even darker by the low light in the bedchamber—but there are questions in those shadowy green eyes. And he lifts them to me every so often, even when he’s coiling the bandage around my foot, and still, he doesn’t voice his questions.

Not in front of prying ears.

The imps tend to the fire, stack more into the hearth, before they leave.

And the moment they do, skurrying out through the vents, Oliver sighs, exhausted.

Returning to my desk, he pours another drink for himself, one that might push him into migraine territory. He picks through the papers that poke out of the swollen folder.

My tears stopped a while ago.

They are dried on my cheeks, itchy and raw, and my face is puffy.

I’m suspended in a numb state, like my brain shut down but my body didn’t, and now I just exist on the chaise.

The firelight dances over the back of Oliver’s black shirt as he says, “Asta told me.”

I hug a feather-stuffed pillow and rest my chin on it. “Told you what?”

Gods, my voice sounds like it’s been dragged over diamonds and crushed glass.

I probably look as rough as I sound.

“The night ended downstairs. Amelia took the car home. I assume it returned for Dray, because he had no trouble in storming out of here.”

I fix a frown on his back.

Chestnut hair glistens like caramel in the light, much warmer than the ashy dullness of my own.

Because I was just a lookalike.

A ‘close enough’, probably.

An adopted krum with brown hair, even if it is ashy, and hazel irises, somewhere close to my father’s green eyes.

I look at my brother, knowing he isn’t my brother, knowing he isn’t my twin, and it doesn’t feel real.

“Mother retired for the night. Grandmother returned to the cottage. I retired to my chamber, and Asta was awake. She mentioned that she saw Dray leave with blood on his hand.”

I mumble, hoarse, “Did she wait up to tell you that? Does she not have servants to do things like that back home?”

There should be more derision in my tone. I just can’t manage to summon it.

I only know my feelings about Asta—and I hate that she’s here, in my home.

Just the thought of her waiting up for my brother, in his bed, grosses me out… even in this haze.

“It is three in the morning,” Oliver says and turns to face me. “Most of the house is asleep. And you would do well to acknowledge that Asta did in fact stay up to inform me before the news could reach Mr Younge, then Father. She gave me a headstart.”

The meaningful look he aims at me is less powerful in all its weariness.

But I get it. He’s telling me that Asta really gave me a headstart.

That, thanks to her, I have time to get my story straight before Father storms in here with my reckoning.

I scoff, tired. The feathers in the pillow rustle.

I have no intention of padding my story.

“What are you still doing here?” I ask, dull, and throw him a withering look.

Oliver answers, “Father is coming. I told you that.”

“Are you here to shout at me with him?”

A familiar duet.

But my brother shakes his head with a sigh. “There’s so much you don’t understand, Liv. I wish… I wish there was another way…”

“There is. Don’t shout at me. Don’t blame me for my krum blood.”

Oliver startles.

His face shutters and his eyes flash.

That flaring gaze swerves to me, and he stares at me with a blend of horror and confusion on his face. “Krum—?”

The door blasts open.

I cringe into the pillow, shoulders tucking inwards, as though I can escape the loud strike of the door against the wall, the tremble of the bedchamber.

But I can’t.

I lift my gaze, my chin pressing into the feathery pillow, and watch as Father storms around the chaise.

Oliver pushes off the desk.

Before Father’s purpling face can explode in front of me, Oliver holds up his hand and says, “He tested her blood.”

Father hesitates.

His dark purpling face falters—and he freezes.

At the corner of the coffee table, mouth parted, a shout lingering in his throat, he just… stops.

Oliver steals the moment of hesitation, “He cut her hand and tested it himself on the balcony.”

Father’s lashes flutter.

The ugly, angry purple of his face starts to settle. It turns crimson, then pink, and his mouth closes, firm, into a tight line that’s stroked across his face.

A breath utters out of him.

And he falls his weight back onto one foot.

The fresh leather of his shoe creaks in the silence.

And it is silence.

Thick and suffocating.

The fire crackles. It pops. It flickers.

And the three of us exist in a tension that swells through the bedchamber air, thicker than the heat of the flames.

Father’s face twists.

He turns his cheek to me and, slowly, he drops onto the armchair.

Gutted.

Defeated.

Devastated.

I see it all on him. Written in the creases of his face, the way he drops it into his hands, the sag of his shoulders.

He doesn’t speak.

Neither does Oliver, who turns towards the fire and places his hand on the mantel.

I look over my shoulder, and my tired eyes find Mr Younge by the door. The door that he must have shut quietly behind him.

Normally he wears a face carved from stone. Unreadable most of the time. Sometimes cracked with derision.

But now, he has his head dropped. Like he can’t bring himself to look at me, at any of us.

Like this is devastating to him, too.

Father draws in my numb stare.

His breath shudders out of him.

For a beat, I almost think it’s a sob.

Then he lifts his weary face, reddened by the grip of his hands, and the twist of his mouth gives it away.

It was a curt, bitter scoff. Almost a laugh. Teetering on the edge of true shock, the kind that needs a witchdoctor.

I look at Father, and I see a man who—for the first time in my life, maybe his life—doesn’t know what to do.

Elbows planted on his knees, his hands come together in prayer, fingertips pressing into his chin, and he shuts his eyes.

He thinks.

Then—

“You will go to Thornbury.” Father cuts his gaze to Oliver. “This needs to be dealt with now.”

Oliver shakes his head. “We let it settle.”

The outrage flashes in Father’s eyes. “And if he leaks it?”

Like I’m not here, and I didn’t find out the krumness of what I am, they discuss it—like it’s a business deal gone wrong.

Oliver argues, “Dray isn’t a rash man. But his anger will be formidable if we approach now. I will call on him later tomorrow. He will not leak this. It’s too damaging for the coven. He will want answers first.”

“Answers would be nice,” I murmur into the pillow—

And that suddenly reminds them that I am here, that I exist, that I am at the centre of it all.

Father blinks at me once, then frowns… but it isn’t a frown of rage and disgust and disappointment.

It’s pain.

Torment.

Oliver draws away from the mantel and, coming around the edge of the chaise, drops onto the coffee table.

Facing me, he takes my hands in his, careful with the bandaged one.

“Whatever you think you understand,” he tells me, soft, gentle, “I promise you, you don’t. This goes so much farther than your deadblood—”

I shove forward, my teeth baring around the words, “It isn’t dead. It isn’t magic at all. It is krum.”

“No.” Father breathes the word with so much despair that I blink at him, at the harrowed expression slacking his face. “You are no krum, Olivia.”

I falter at his sincerity. The truth I see in his pained, glistening eyes. Like he’s on the verge of crying—for me.

Oliver’s hands tighten around mine.

I wince, and his apology is a murmur before his grip softens.

My breath trembles with the ache spreading in my chest, “What is going on?”

His mouth twists, and for a long moment, he can’t bring himself to look at me.

“I saw the blood myself. I saw it.”

But I see no lie in the way Oliver looks at me, tired, exhausted, but hurt, too.

He exhales, his mouth puffing, then he drops his forehead to my hands.

Father turns his face away, hiding it in his hand, elbow now planted on the arm of the chair—but I see what he’s hiding.

His tears.

Father weeps.

Dread spills deep and heavy in my gut.

I squirm against it, an unwelcome intrusion, and unpeel my basketed legs. I flatten my feet on the rug.

I echo, “What is going on?”

“You are not a krum.” Oliver’s murmur is muffled by our connected hands—and it is reluctant. “You were born a witch. We both were.”

I shake my head, cheeks wet, and a loose strand of hair sticks to the tears.

Father whooshes out another breath, then runs his hand down his jaw. “The firstborn of twins is often the strongest of the pair. That is the case with you and your brother.”

I nod, mute, because I know.

Oliver was born first.

I always thought he ate up my magic in the womb. Or at least I wondered.

Oliver kisses my hands, then straightens his spine—and his wet forest eyes meet mine.

His throat bobs, a swallow so thick that I hear it.

But I almost don’t hear his words—words that echo around me.

“You were born first, Olivia. You were born strongest.”

21

The bedchamber tilts around me.

The air is rushing against me from all angles, disorientating, as I try to push up from the chaise. But my legs give out, and I land back down with a choked breath.

“What?” My own voice is muffled to me, distant, like it comes from the other end of a ballroom. “What does that mean? What does that mean?”

Vaguely, I’m aware of Oliver’s hands on my shoulders, like he’s pushing me back down onto the chaise, and holding me there.

Father’s words bounce around the echo, so far away, “You were born strong. So strong, Olivia. You were glowing with power. But Oliver was dull and poorly—”

“I’m so sorry, Liv.” Oliver’s rushed words warp around me, his face, too. “It’s the way it has to be. It’s the way this world works.”

Father dips into my watery vision, abandoning the armchair, and all of a sudden, I blink tears that roll down my cheeks and slip over my lips, and Father is there, next to me on the chaise.

He steals my hand, the bandaged one, and holds it carefully.

“The son cannot be the weak one,” he says. “The heir cannot be ailing.”

“Please understand,” Oliver’s hand tightens on mine, and he reaches for my face, wipes away the tears that fall numbly, “there was no other way. The ritual had to be done. Father had no choice. They had to syphon your power—into me. It was the only way.”

I can hear my heartbeat thumping in my ears.

It dizzies me.

“We didn’t intend to drain all of it,” Father’s urgent whisper hisses around my spinning head, “but rituals can be unpredictable. We stopped before you could become sickly, but it wasn’t soon enough. The magic was gone from your blood.”

And into Oliver’s.

I was strong.

I was…

I was the alchemist child.

Oh.

My.

Gods.

The room spins, violent.

I wrench my hands out of theirs and, dazed, stagger off the chaise.

My feet ache through the disorientation swirling in my head.

“You’re not a krum,” Oliver’s pleading voice comes from somewhere behind me.

I stagger, aimless, until a coil of nausea purses my mouth.

I almost think it’s better being a krum.

I came to terms with that over time.

I grieved my witchiness, my deadblood status, and accepted that, for whatever, ridiculous unfathomable reason, my parents adopted a krum and passed her off as a deadblood.

I never thought about this…

This violation.

It’s worse.

It’s so much worse.

My body doubles over and a wretched, coarse heave surges through me.

Hands grab at me, tackle me by the shoulders, then a chest is pressed against my back.

It’s all so distant and unusual, like I know it’s Oliver pulling me into his arms, his murmured words echoing through the room, but that I’m also drifting away—out of my body, through the broken windows patched up with wood, and off into the skies…

My brother holds me.

My brother by blood.

By magic. My magic.

My own parents drained it out of me—a violation, a theft that I can’t even begin to comprehend.

I think I’m screaming. Or crying.

My mouth is open, and I feel my throat thrumming with a sound, but I don’t hear it.

I just start to sink down to the floor.

Oliver comes down with me, his arms wrapped around me, and he mutters excuses into my hair.

Father crouches in front of me.

The sincere panic is written all over his face—and I want to claw it off with my fucking nails.

I’m definitely screaming now. Right in his face, like a feral animal.

Then a blur shifts around me, Mr Younge with a phial. Hands are grabbing at my face, prying my mouth apart, then I feel it, the cold pour of bitterness down my throat.

They drug me.

Again, they take from me. Steal.

The life I have lived…

The power I should have had.

Oliver has everything that is mine.

It’s the thought that clings to my mind as my body starts to sag in Oliver’s arms.

Murmurs brush all around me.

I don’t understand a word of what’s being said.

The ceiling lurches closer. Arms are scooped under me, and I’m lifted off the floor.

I dangle, staring at the trim of the ceiling, the chandelier that glistens.

I’m limp in Oliver’s arms all the way to the bed, where he sets me down gently.

22

Father sits in the armchair.

Drink in hand, he watches the sun rising through the sheer curtains, glaring against the windows, and even glinting the amber liquid in the tumbler he nurses.

But he doesn’t take a sip.

Like he’s stuck in a daze.

He’s been in that daze with me since Oliver laid me down on the bed, and Father dismissed both him and Mr Younge, then dragged the chair to the edge of the bed, and sat down with a drink.

He hasn’t moved since.

Neither have I.

The tranquillity of the brew keeps me relaxed. But doesn’t make me sleep. So in this quiet between us, I just stare at my greatest traitor.

I turn over, onto my side.

The feathery quilt swishes under me, the pillows rustling, and it lures Father’s gaze to me.

He stares into my eyes.

He says nothing.

For the longest while, the silence continues between us.

The pinkish hue of dawn presses against the bedchamber windows, and warms the room.

The imps return, tend to the fireplace, then leave again.

And it’s only when the sun has risen, and the colours of dawn settle, that Father finally lifts the glass to his lips.

He downs the scotch in one thirsty gulp. Or anxious.

He gives a soft sigh, and he sets down the glass on the floor. Then, bringing his hands together, like in prayer, he leans forward.

His elbows press into his knees.

I hug the pillow under my head.

“I will be candid with you.” He lifts his bottle-green eyes to me—and they are raw, bloodshot with the silent tears he’s been shedding on and off for hours. “I never wanted you to learn the truth about the transfer.”

My brow furrows, snags on that word.

Transfer.

Not theft. Not violation.

Simply a transfer gone wrong.

But the brew keeps me placated.

Or the exhaustion numbs me.

The exhaustion of everything. Of being a deadblood and fighting through the days at Bluestone, the prejudices aimed at me, the push towards Dray Sinclair by my own family, the dismissals of my pain, the escape, the wretchedness of life out there, the work, the jobs, the motels, the shitty apartments, the motherhood I never asked for, the krum blood under the sky, the phone booths, the call I made, my betrayal of Serena and Sal, the cut that Dray slashed through my flesh, and now, this—

To learn that the weight I have carried with me for the past few years, the weight of learning that I am nothing more than a krum, was so much worse than that.

That this man who sits on the armchair in my room, whose face is taut with shame and despair, is responsible for my disability, that he took what was mine and gave it to my brother.

All of it has just… beaten me down.

It’s pure exhaustion that keeps me curled up on the bed, hugging my pillow like a child holds onto a safety blanket.

Father loosens a heavy breath and starts, “The transfer… It…”

But his words fail.

They flounder between us.

I’m unmoving. I stare. And wait.

But not really. I don’t really wait—because what can he say to make me understand, to make me ok with this? Any of it.

He tries again, “Your mother… She…”

And again, his mouth clamps on words he can’t quite conjure, and his lips suck inwards.

It’s like he doesn’t know where to land, where to start and where to end.

Static hums around me in the air.

Nothing feels real.

Not my blank, numb mind. Not the cuts on my body that I can’t feel anymore. Not the walls around me, the chandeliers above, the man on the armchair—a father who has failed me since birth.

I’m too detached.

Too detached for his excuses.

But that doesn’t stop him from trying.

He runs his hands down his thighs and pushes upwards to sit up a bit straighter.

He says, soft, “I was hard on you. Perhaps more than I should have been.” His nod is faint, and it’s to himself, his own thoughts, his own words. “But there was reason behind it. I feared this.”

He gestures to me.

To my catatonic state.

“I feared your pain if you learned the truth… I feared your reaction. And the reaction of others, if they realised what you are. You are more… complicated than a deadblood, which can be unsettling for others.”

“Is it bad?” I ask, and the bluntness strikes him silent. “What you did to me—would the others think badly of you?”

His mouth flattens into a grim line.

“No, Olivia. Any other coven house would have done the same. Sometimes…”

His lips sink inwards again, and he bites down on them, turning his cheek to me.

Then, he continues, “Sometimes the gods test us and our loyalties to them—how well we will serve them. Oliver was not only born weak of power. He was born sickly. Very,” he adds, and the look he hits me with is severe. “If we hadn’t performed the ritual, your brother would not be with us today.”

I am unmoved.

I am still too numb.

Too detached.

Father’s shame drops his gaze to the rug. “It was never meant to be all of your power. But the pull of the transfer, it was too much, and the ritualist lost control. You were drained.”

My stare is stagnant, just like my insides.

But the thought tugs at me, and I ask, “Doesn’t that make me a krum?”

Father’s frown is improper. His mouth tugs down at the corner—and I decide, right now, that I get my pouting from him.

But the look is gone in a blink.

And he looks at me with urgency in his watery eyes. “No, you are not a krum. You were drained, yes, but you are a Craven, and you very much were born a witch.”

I think that makes a krum.

But then, Father says, “A witch is not a krum with power. A krum is not a witch without power. We are fundamentally different. Our blood is different—”

“Mine isn’t.”

Father’s lashes shut on the hurt.

He shakes his head, just slightly.

“I did not give up on you.” He opens his eyes, and tears glisten them. His voice wavers with urgency, like he needs me to hear this, to know it. “There was a girl. A newborn halfbreed.”

“Who?”

“I do not know her name. I know the name of her mother. Mila.”

“Nonna’s servant?”

The krum girl.

Father’s mouth twists, and he nods once. “She came from the city. A city your uncle Aldo visited regularly on his breaks from the academy. It was so long ago. Mila would have been younger than he was. Considerably younger. But that did not stop him from abandoning her once he got her pregnant.”

The distaste overwhelms the hurt in Father. His dislike of Aldo darkens his eyes and hardens his face.

He scoffs, bitter. “Nor did it mean Aldo would help the girl terminate the pregnancy he was very much responsible for. So Mila travelled to your Nonna’s door, and she asked for help. The timing… The timing was godly, it seemed.”

The question is in my frowned face.

Still I ask, “How?”

“Mila made a deal.” Father’s hands rub together, a nervous tell. “In exchange for a piece of your nonna’s will, an upfront payment, and lifetime help with her child, Mila offers us the newborn for a second ritual.”

My face slackens, lips parting with growing horror piercing through the numbness—

But Father answers that quickly, “Not the life of the newborn. We wanted her magic. The idea was to transfer Aldo’s magic from the halfbreed babe into you. It was family magic, a print from your Mother’s side, so it made sense that it would be a print that would suit you. And… you were so ill,” he says, and his voice breaks, like he might weep, and he turns his cheek to me. “The first ritual took too much from you. And we could not stop it. Oliver was poorly, then he was not. But you became even sicker.

“The second ritual failed. The newborn did not survive it. And you… you showed no magic. Nothing in your blood. Not poorly anymore, but no power.”

I take a moment to process it all—and Father is quiet, allowing me to absorb it.

And I think of the way Mila looks at me sometimes, lingers a stare.

I think of Mother’s hatred of her.

And it all seems so much uglier now that I know my family killed Mila’s baby.

I ask, soft, “Did Mila blame Mother?”

Father lifts a questioning look to me.

I explain, “Mother doesn’t like her very much.”

“Mila was grieving, as expected. The newborn was not supposed to die, she was only intended to be drained of the magic in her. Mila stayed—and she, I suppose, believed there might be a fragment of her child in you. She is krum, she does not understand the ritual. But your mother was equally as volatile. To your mother, we almost lost you in the first ritual and could have lost you in the second.” His jaw clenches, stirred anger from older days. “Then Mila stole you.”

I blink. “What?”

“Mila snuck into your room, crept by the nursemaid as she slept, and took you right out of your crib. There was a search party that morning, and your mother discovered Mila in the greenhouse—breastfeeding you.”

My lashes flutter.

A sickly feeling coils in my stomach.

Father’s face turns bitter. “Again, the next day, Mila was caught by Mr Younge trying to take you and a well-packed bag down the backroads in the direction of the village.”

I hug the pillow a bit tighter.

“The decision was made to give Mila a special brew.” The apathy in him is all over his face. How little he cares about Mila and her suffering. “A particularly effective amnesiac.”

For some ridiculous, insane reason, I think back to Bluestone—to the brew that Dray and I worked on together. Serum of Forgetfulness. It targets a memory. Just one. A layer in the mind.

But one used on Mila would have been much stronger and more delicate than that.

“The memory of her child is gone, but the attachment she has to you never quite seemed to fade the way it should have done.” Father sinks back into his chair and, for a beat, runs his hands down his face. The weariness sags him. “Your mother hoarded you for so long after that,” he says, dropping his hands to his lap. “She would not leave you alone—not even with me. I suppose she wasn’t entirely irrational to think I would try another ritual, no matter how often I reassured her.” He tuts, and it’s sharp. “For so long, your mother wouldn’t even allow your nannies to take you out of the house without her.

“Then another concern emerged. Your interest in the krum world. Your… rebellion against the rules of our world and our expectations of you.

“That concern led to your restriction. I worried that if you had access to the krum-flooded internet, you would resonate more with them than you did your peers. I worried that if you read into what you were—what we told you you were—then you would start to investigate yourself. Rebel. And learn the truth.

“It was difficult to carve out a place in our world for you to feel truly at home. But it was what we tried to do. And attending Bluestone was a large part of that.”

I cut him off, “I told you what that place was like for me.”

“Yes. And I heard you.” He sighs something deflated and rubs his fingers over his forehead. “But I had hopes for—”

“Proposals. Offers on my contract.”

He drops his hand and shakes his head. “I had hopes that Dray would come around, that he would face his feelings for you—and that your constant presence at Bluestone would bring about his offer on your contract.” He meets my gaze. “I never meant for any other suitor to get near you.”

“What about Eric?” I sit forward. “And Landon. Landon said he—”

“My consideration of their offers was not kept a secret.” His smile is tight. “It was merely bait.”

“For Dray.”

“I am not obtuse, Olivia. Dray has always orbited you. He only needed encouragement.”

So all the efforts I ever put into Eric’s offer and convincing my father to consider him, all those phone calls I suffered where Father talked my ear off about offers and gentries and opening my contracts—it was all a show.

I was an ignorant puppet.

Landon, too. And Eric.

All puppets in a show that my father put on for Dray Sinclair.

After a thick pause, I scoff. “Well, that’s not going to happen now.”

Dray won’t be coming near me. Not anymore. Not ever again.

He left here tonight thinking I’m a krum. But when Oliver goes to him, and explains everything that happens, Dray’s prejudices will remain.

A witch drained of magic, born and emptied, is just a krum. If he had such issue with me being a deadblood, it’ll be tenfold with no magic in my blood.

So I guess I get one thing I wanted.

But not Father—he turns his face away from me, but I caught it before it turned out of the light. The grimace.

“It is disappointing,” he concedes. “I hoped… Olivia, you must understand what your disappearance has done.” He looks at me. “You cannot tell your mother that you know about the rituals and your blood. It stays between us.”

The swerve in topic startles me.

I frown at him. “Why?”

“Your mother and I have not… We have not been as close as we should be. Your disappearance has strained our relationship in a way that I have never known with her. Your mother has suffered greatly in the time that you have been gone This is not to blame you, because you did not know what you were doing, what you were putting at risk.”

I sit up, but the brew still has me too relaxed, and so I’m slow, lethargic, until I sink into my stacked pillows. “What’s wrong with Mother?”

Father does not look at me. He runs his hands through his dark hair, and stares at the floor. “Nothing is particularly wrong with your mother—but her… presence has been altered. Most days she struggles to leave her bed.”

Her bed.

Not ours.

I notice the wording.

Father continues, “If she does get out of bed, it is to receive a solemn visit from Amelia. She receives no other guests, including her own mother, who, your mother believes might have been assisting you.”

“She wasn’t.” The answer comes out of me, sharp and offended. “I never spoke to Nonna about running away. I never talked to her when I was out there.”

Father’s stare is intense—it considers me, every muscle on my face, every flicker of my eyes. He reads me, closely, and searches for any hint of a lie.

He seems satisfied as he nods, very slightly, then says, “Your mother does not appreciate Mila’s attachment to you, therefore she is particularly offended by your nonna’s protection of Mila. Perhaps that is where the blame came from.”

“So Mother’s… depressed?”

Not leaving her bed, not sleeping in the same bed as Father, and not talking to her own mother?

It sounds like she isn’t totally well.

And Father nods.

“But she’ll get better now that I’m home, right?”

Again, he nods—but it’s slight, and his smile is forced. It’s hopeful, but pained.

So much pain in this family.

So many secrets and resentments.

“Truthfully, I had my own suspicions,” Father says. “I doubted my own mother, too.”

“You thought Grandmother Ethel helped me?”

He shrugs, and parts his hands. “We could not get close to you out there. Trackers would lead us to towns that you had never been in. The shield around you was too strong, it disorientated the trackers for years.” Father clasps his hands together. “That was the sort of shield that required a strong shield witch—or a very experienced ritualist.”

Grandmother Ethel’s print.

Though she’s old as hell now, so I doubt she’s keeping up with the rituals—except the one she needs to stay alive for as long as she has. There’s no other explanation for her ridiculously long life.

“Grandmother is at the end of her life,” Father says, as though reading my mind. “And any rituals she might perform will come at a great cost for her. My suspicions raised when, a year into your disappearance, I returned from a search, and found my mother unconscious at Craven Cottage. She took a fall down the stairs in the night, and the staff were in bed, so I happened to be the first to find her. The fall was… severe.” Doubt shimmers in his eyes, and he pauses, as if to find the right words. “Severe enough that we had to move her into the pink cottage on the grounds here, and that it took months before she could walk again. Witchdoctor Dolios believes a ritual ate through the cartilage in her hips, and that is where her recovery was halted.”

“So you think she performed rituals to keep me hidden out there, and she paid the price for them?”

“My mother is not as strong as she once was.” Father is unapologetic in his accusation of her. “Now, of course, you can set the record straight.”

“Grandmother didn’t help me.” I shake my head. “No one in the family did.”

His shoulders relax. “Then who did?”

Silence strikes me.

Her name thrums in my mind, Sofía, Sofía, Sofía—but the word doesn’t touch my tongue.

To give her up would be to give up all the other rogues in her care and under the protection of her shields.

That’s no easy thing to do.

Father sighs and, pushing up from the chair, comes to sit on the edge of my bed. He faces me, the shadows of the thicker curtains blocking the light from illuminating his face.

But his face is soft. His eyes are kind.

And his tone is understanding, “Now that you are back, I hope your mother will recover. I placed further hope on your union with Dray Sinclair—that the wedding ritual between you both would appease the gods and repent for your sin against them, and your mother would be well again.”

“My sin?”

“You understand.” Father smiles, and it’s sincere. “You understand me just fine, Olivia.”

To repent, to apologise to the gods, to be welcomed back into their embrace, their shadows, is to give up the shield witch.

Sofía is damn good at what she does.

I don’t know how many rogues she protects out there, or how many are flooding the halls of Hell House now.

I just know that I hesitate.

“Serena will be left alone,” Father promises me. “She was given wealth enough to sustain her and her child for the rest of their lives—and she can live in anonymity. It is a trade we have made willingly, mostly due to Marco’s disgust with his daughter. He could not bring himself to wish her home. But your family never stopped searching for you.”

My mouth tucks inwards, and the familiar slick tremble of tears is climbing up my throat.

“We will never let you go, Olivia. We love you, and you are a part of our family. But the gods own us all.”

The waves of tears roll over me.

“In your repentance, if you offer this to us, the gods will be more forgiving—and perhaps both your mother and mine will return to their proper conditions. You have the power,” he touches my chin and lures my wet gaze to his, “to make them better again.”

Then his hand leaves my cheek.

I hide my face in my own palms. 

“Sometimes the gods test us,” Father’s voice follows me into my hiding spot, and I hear his words over my own shuddering tears. “In that situation, our loyalties were tested. Would we choose our children or the coven—the coven that serves the gods?

“The gods expect our absolute obedience and commitment. We all bow to them. I cannot afford to shield you anymore from this. The sacrifices will no longer be bagged and wrapped for your sensibilities, Olivia. You will see them.”

My throat thickens.

My face twists against my palms.

“But don’t you see, daughter?” Father’s voice is soft, it is warm and inviting. “We would not have been punished if you did not matter. Grandmother would not be ill, your mother would not be ill, if the gods did not love you. And you matter to us, Olivia. You are loved, even when you feel that you are not. But it is time that we let you grow up.”

My fingers slide down my face, along my tear-streaked cheeks, and I choke on a hitched breath.

Father is comforting.

He tucks his finger under my chin, lifting my wet gaze, and his smile is loving. “You are no krum, Olivia. You are as spectacular as the day you were born.”

I part my lips and taste the salt of tears. “Would I have been?”

Father’s thumb brushes along my chin. “Yes. You would have been powerful. And you still are—in your way. Now let’s make this right, Olivia. Let us begin your reassimilation into the coven. Tell me, who helped you?”

I whisper the answer, “Sofía Paredes.”

23

Mother must have waited for Father to leave my bedchamber, because he’s gone for only a few minutes when the door creaks open and she slips inside.

Silk loungewear shimmers under the light as she takes brisk steps over to the curtains—and she draws the heavier, thicker ones along the sheer drapes, until the daylight is banished.

Then she rushes to my bed.

And she slips under the quilt with me.

I smile as her arm drapes over me.

In Mother’s embrace, I find a calm sleep. A dream without nightmares, without horrors, with only peace.

I have done horrible things.

I made that call in the phone booth and gave up my address to the servant who answered at Elcott Abbey.

I exposed Serena to my own capture—and risked both her and Sal.

And I’ve given up Sofía.

But at home, with Mother’s arms around me, and Oliver’s warmth, and Father’s forgiveness, I just don’t feel so bad about any of it.

I feel as light as a feather.

And I’m glad to be home—embraced by my thick feathery quilt and pillows.

end of book four

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