The masks are off now.
They were shed in the car.
Mother looks out at the fog thickening on the road, and she does what we are not supposed to do—she talks about the things unsaid.
“Some men are born of discipline,” she tells me. “Their views of the world are strict, their values are rigid, their ambitions are steel. Dray is one of those men.”
I turn a faint, wet frown on her.
Tears and rain have mixed together on my cheeks, weighing down my lashes.
Mother’s cheek faces me. Glossed, satin, smooth. Not a drop of rain on her. Her inky eyes are aimed at the fog—as though she can see through it to the truth of the world, where all the answers lurk.
She shares those answers with me. “Loving a deadblood does not fit into the life he pictured for himself. It is a wrong brushstroke in the painting of his future—but it is there.”
‘Loving a deadblood.’
Her answers are skewed, wrong.
They are lies.
A sigh deflates me, exhausted, frankly over it all, and I speak forbidden truths, “Dray doesn’t love me. Dray wants to own me.”
Mother’s answer is silence.
Still, she doesn’t look at me. Just watches the fog.
“He’s always wanted to own me,” I say, bitter, my mouth twisting into something ugly. “Dray has tormented me for most of my life. He has locked me in closets for days, he has thrown food all over me in the mess hall, pushed me over in the corridors,frozenme in the cigar room—and all of this sounds so pathetic and petty and like it’s nothing, but it’s everything, because it’sall the time, and it means others can come after me, like Mildred Green, and it’s fucking relentless, and I can’t do it anymore, and now… Now you and Father and Oliver... you want me to spend the rest of my life with mybully.”
Mother flinches at the word.
Bully.
Simple, plain—but blunt.
Too blunt.
Not the kind of word thrown around aristos, elite circles. Not even in the rain, under a small bus shelter, with my mother.
“And for what?” My twisted face is angled at her unreadable look, the tears running fresh down my cheeks. “For alliance—an alliance that would stand firm without me?”
Mother turns to consider me, her inky stare running from my head down to my lap, then back up again.
There is nothing kind in her stare, the way she regards me, but nothing cruel, either.
Her mask has faded, melted away, the witch in the rain, and she bleeds an honest truth that shows me another side of my mother—one that stills me.
“You underestimate your power, Olivia. You underestimate the control of a wife over a husband who will always yearn for her.” Her slender hand reaches for my chin, then pinches it between her thumb and finger, locking me in place. “Yearning is desperation—and for you, that is power. I know this. Amelia knows this. Serena knows this. Do you never question Des and Isabella? An elite aristos male who married a whore?”
My brows raise.
Mother’s raw regard of Isabella startles me.
We don’t say things like that—well, actually, we do. We just word it differently.
My throat bobs with a thick swallow.
Unflinching, her stare bores into mine. “Do you not question your father, Hamish Craven of all men, meeting a gentry girl at school… and marrying her against the wishes of his family? That he went againstEthel—” She lets the name snap through me. “—for a gentry nobody?”
