My head is immobile, trapped in her tightly pinched grip, her unfriendly face mirroring mine.
“And of Harold Sinclair? He is displeased by this new arrangement between you and Dray—but he is silenced byAmelia.” Mother’s teeth are bared, the reveal of her rage at me, that I need to be told this, that I haven’t learned it on my own. “Amend your childish approach to Dray—and see the power you have in your hand, girl.His sanity.”
She chucks my chin out of her grip.
I recoil.
My wide stare is locked onto Mother.
And right in front of me, she changes.
She softens.
The rawness of her dark eyes and snarling teeth, it all fades into something lovely, a small smile, a loving look she lingers over me.
My bones tingle with ropes of ice.
Mother’s hand suddenly moves like silk, gliding for the wet strands sticking to my temples, and she peels them off my skin, delicately. “You should wear your hair up for New Year.”
My lashes flutter.
Stupid, I just blink at her.
Her smile lingers. “If you receive earrings, you can show them off.”
Mother’s hand lowers to my shoulder, then presses once, a not-so-gentle squeeze.
I steel myself against the bite of pain.
“Now, let us return home before we catch our deaths out here.”
3
My mother might be the most venomous snake of them all.
Never before have I seen that side of her, and I have seen so many sides, so many faces, so many masks over the years.
I have witnessed the cold steel shift in her when she’s challenged, especially among other aristos witches; the way she lifts her chin and her eyes darken into black holes when Father is curt with her; the clack of her nails when her own mother won’t conform to the ways of the aristos; even the silent snarls she reserves for Grandmother Ethel, mostly behind her back.
I have seen Mother chew up and spit out a hairdresser, a salon manager, my uncle, my father—anyone who crosses her.
I have even seen her react to Oliver’s childish antics, when on our eighth birthday, he tried to convince me I’m adopted, and she snapped—and she smacked him on the backside about a dozen times, and it frightened me so much that I was frozen in place for the whole thing.
But I’ve never seenthat.
The hollowness in how she looked at me, a disappointment that yawned on like an eternal chasm in her eyes, a coldness in her that—now having witnessed it—I figure is the reason she got to where she is.
Now, as she walks the corridors alongside me, a chaperone to my bedchamber, and Abigail is rushing ahead with my pillow and overnight bag, I can’t stop cutting my gaze aside to her.
What she told me, it wasn’t only to help me. It was to chide me.
Mother is disappointed in me.
Disappointed that I didn’t figure it all out on my own. That I will probably make a subpar elite aristos woman in these tricky games our lives revolve around.
She made sure to emphasise that, not only does Serena understand the game, but Mother did too, when she was just a gentry student at Bluestone.
It makes me wonder…
