It’s Oliver.
He’s a prick.
Dray’s question comes quiet, separated from the hissed argument ensuing on the other side of the cosy table, “Have you given any thought to your own?”
Beside me, Dray cuts his strawberry and cream-filled cannoli.
I suddenly want what he ordered.
My mouth waters at the fluffiness of it, then I blink back to the noise of the restaurant, of the hissed words on my left.
I look at Dray.
The question is light, polite. But it’s loaded.
His glacier stare is locked onto me.
“Not at all,” I say flatly.
He brings the fork to his pink lips, then bites the small piece of cream, strawberry and cannoli he cut for himself. “Do you plan on a last-minute rush?”
My fingers tighten around the stem of my fork. “I didn’t plan on getting married.”
He raises a brow, amused. “But I hear you have a suitor.”
It takes everything in me, everything, not to let a fright jolt my heart or my insides constrict or let a flutter of fear shutter my face.
I draw on every scrap and piece of a mask I can find within myself to simply stare at him, blank, the foolish deadblood who has no ideaheis the suitor.
Dray sits there, perfectly composed, the golden boy with the cruel eyes.
The man I’m supposed to marry.
The one who has made my life small and sharp and unbearable.
And I have to settle the rage that itches to flare up in me, like violent waves crashing against a cliff.
I shrug, a simple tug of a shoulder. “I’m sure someone will plan it.”
“You are so disinterested in your own wedding?”
“Have you met my mother? My grandmother? I won’t get a say on my underwear, let alone the wedding.”
Dray’s smile slides into place—and for a beat, it hooks me. The sincerity of it. The humour, the genuine humour, like what I said was actually funny.
I turn my flushed cheek to him.
The silence that follows is heavy, awkward.
Serena glances between us, a cold curiosity in her eyes.
Oliver catches my gaze, his face utterly unreadable, and still I’m stolen back to the corridor, to his words of warning…
Or advice.
Dray needs my attention.
Whether it’s favourable or miserable or loathing, he feeds off of it.
