“You mean, the scapegoats have been sacrificed?” Quin interjected, and steam trickled out of her mother’s nose as she sneered.
“You have benefitted from every choice this family has made.” Claryn pointed a perfectly manicured finger at her. “Everychoice. Don’t you dare sit there, with your self-righteous holiness, and pretend you’re any better than the rest of us. We toe the line, Quin, for the good of the family.”
The good of the family. All her life, she had been conditioned to think of the family first. Their reputation, their bottom line, their public image. She had sacrificed her own wants, her pride, her autonomy, her happiness. All for the family. Yet, it was never enough.
Bloated, but still ravenous, the gluttonous creature this family had become would never be satisfied. It would devour her piece by excruciating piece until she was hollow and faded. Monochrome. Lifeless. Cold. Like stone. Like metal.
But she didn’t want to be cold or hard anymore. She didn’t want to be plastic. She wanted to be real. She wanted to be flesh and bone. She wanted to live in a world of technicolor and glitter and warmth.
“What if I don’t want to toe the line anymore?” Quin whispered, and her mother’s tail stiffened, her scandalized expression hardening into something icy and dangerous.
“What did you just say?” she asked, voice carefully controlled. It would have been less threatening if she’d shouted.
Fisting her trembling fingers, Quin swallowed thickly to wet her suddenly dry throat. “I don’t want to marry Waryn. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
The slap came so fast and unexpected that Quin didn’t have time to dodge or deflect. At first, she was genuinely confused by why her cheek was burning and her eyes were stinging. She gasped through the shock, her brain struggling to catch up, as she slowly lifted a hand and touched the hot skin of her face where her mother had struck her.
“You selfish child,” Claryn spat. “You ungrateful, little—”
Rage rendered her mother silent for several seconds as Quin gaped at her, still trying to make sense of the pain in her cheek. Claryn Deboi was many things, most of them sharp and terrible, but she had never raised a hand to Quin before. She relished mind games over violence, preferred the covert cruelty of poison-dipped words masquerading as poetry. Innocent-looking moves on one side of the board to distract from the true gambit she was playing on the other.
Always chess, never checkers.
“I warned your father of your stubbornness, your obstinance. Even as a girl, I saw it, and Iwarnedhim.” Her mother shook her head, thick smoke billowing from her nostrils. “But he didn’t listen. He indulged you too much as a child, and now look where it’s gotten us.”
As Claryn collected herself, she slowly made her way back to the chair behind her desk and sat down. She pressed a button on her desk phone, and a moment later, Dorys’s voice crackled through the speaker.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Bring me some chamomile tea and two aspirin,” she said stiffly, barely looking at Quin as she added, “Two teas, I suppose.”
“Right away, ma’am,” the head housekeeper said.
Shell-shocked, Quin remained in her chair, hand still cupping her cheek. “I don’t like chamomile.”
Her mother ignored her, inhaling deeply through her nose, before exhaling slowly through pursed lips. Back in control, Claryn Duboi squared her shoulders and folded her hands demurely on her desk, pinning Quin to her chair with blood-red eyes.
She didn’t speak, and Quin had to fight the urge to physically curl into herself. Maybe she was stubborn and tenacious in many aspects of her life, but in relating to her mother, that had never been the case. She’d been taught to kowtow, to submit. Even now, she wanted to hug her knees to her chest and disappear.
The door of the office opened, and a short, squat Anura waddled in, carrying a tray. Quin didn’t recognize her, but since her mother cycled through her staff regularly—firing anyone in sight when she was in one of her moods simply for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time—this wasn’t surprising.
Lamplight shone off the Anura’s bald, mottled green head as she set the tray of tea on the desk. Normally, the staff waited to be dismissed, but this Anura immediately turned to leave.
“Thank you,” Quin said, when it was clear her mother would say nothing.
The Anura’s bulbous eyes glanced her way in surprise, though it quickly turned to distrust, and she sneered wordlessly as she waddled out of the office. Had she looked at Claryn that way, she would have been out of a job, but since Quin didn’t care, she took the rudeness in stride. Her mother treated the staff terribly, so their dislike was warranted.
As the door shut quietly behind the Anura, her mother took the aspirin and swallowed them dry. She stirred a drizzle ofhonylinto her cup before taking a sip and sighing.
“So,” she finally said, and Quin steeled herself for the next round.
The first match had gone to her, but only because she’d taken her mother off guard. Granted, the slap had upset Quin’s equilibrium, so perhaps it had been a stalemate. But her mother had regrouped and reset the board, and she was about to make her opening move.
“What has Waryn done to displease you so? Did he cheat on you with his secretary or something?”
White pawn to E4.
“No,” Quin said, reaching for the second cup of tea. She didn’t like chamomile, but it wasn’t actually about the tea, so she lifted the cup to her lips and took a disgusting sip. “He simply has the misfortune of being a man.”
