A dress box. When Marcus stoops to examine it, a card flutters out from beneath the ribbon and he snatches it up, examining it carefully before reluctantly handing it to me.
The note is typed in a flowery script on a single thick card.
Wear this to the Lunar Ball if you want to see her alive again.
I don’t have to guess who he means.
So, Trinity lives, even after the beatings, after the torture of being mated to repulsive alphas, those mating bites burned away by dark embers.
“It’s only a dress,” I say softly. I stoop beside Marcus and tug the ribbon loose, then slowly lift the lid from the box, revealing layers of shimmering pearl tissue paper.
“I’d feel better if you’d let me,” Marcus rumbles, and I nod.
He pulls the tissue from the box, sheet by glimmering sheet, until a beautiful, glittering gown the color of spring irises, covered from top to bottom in thousands of shimmering crystals, is revealed. He prods around in the box with his scribe and finally declares the dress free of hexes or anything untoward.
I pick up the box, shocked at its weight, and bring it inside, setting it down on the coffee table. When I lift the dress up, I realize why Rad sent it to me, why he picked this dress out of thousands.
The dress is collared.
All the crystal-encrusted silk chiffon falls from a collar made of heavy, cushion-cut amethysts, each as big as my thumbnail. Saints, the dress must have cost a fortune and it would be beautiful if not for everything it will represent when I’m forced to wear it in front of my peers and professors.
Ownership. Compliance.
The collar that will sit at the hollow of my throat, though it may be beautiful, will broadcast the one inescapable truth about my life: it isn’t my own.
The fine fabric, heavy with the weight of the crystals adorning it, will cling to my every curve, leaving most of my shoulders and back bare. Showing that I’m unbitten, unmated, but owned nevertheless.
“You’re not wearing that,” Marcus growls, but goes terrifyingly still and silent when I hand him the card.
“I have no choice.”
And perhaps I never have.
* * *
I expectthat Ian won’t be able to look at me during Introduction to Casting, but as he introduces the newest set of sigils we’re to cover, it seems he can look at no one but me.
His eyes are on me, wary, as I scribble down notes in my notebook. As he circles the room, watching as we cast the sigils for the first time. He looks ceaselessly, but says nothing.
* * *
It isn’tuntil I meet him for our private lesson that evening that he says more than a few words to me.
“We should work on your affinity training tonight,” he says with a grimace, and I don’t need an affinity to know his thoughts: regret.
I do what I did the first term at Fairhaven. I pretend to call my magic—this time my affinity—with all my strength and intention, but I do no more than pretend. Then it was to hide the devastating toll calling my magic took—the crippling headaches, the bloody noses, the lightheadedness as memories I didn’t understand invaded my mind.
But now I pretend so I don’t hear his thoughts. So I don’t have to feel his regret wash over me.
So I don’t drown in it.
Mai arrives halfway through our session, and we thankfully switch to that somehow hurts less: being ripped open by the thorns of an omega trap.
Ian stands across from me, scribe in hand, and mutters the words of power for the omega trap hex, tracing out the sigils with deadly precision.
The vines shoot up around me, thorns of dark magic piercing my skin. My blood flows freely, pain lighting up my nerves, but it’s so much better than feeling numb and scared.
I can’t control this pain, not like I could when I punched the stone wall in my shower until my knuckles bled, but I can control my reaction to it.
