Everyone keeps moving—laughing, studying—but I’m only pretending to keep up.
I find out I was right about the sports thing.
Oliver and Dray might have pulled back from their weekend sports, snow rugby and hockey, but neither of them has walked away from sparring.
Tuesdays and Fridays, they are gone for hours in the evening through to night, and they return with fresh cuts and bruises and stretched t-shirts that have been pulled to ruin.
This Friday is no different.
I somehow breathe easier with them gone.
And I’m easier roped into a party with Serena.
In the dorms, I fit into one of her slip dresses, but the academy is cold, so my flesh is quick to pebble as I shudder through the corridors with her.
She rambles on about my brother, his disinterest in the wedding arrangements, and I get the sense she’s chewing back words about my mother, because when she lets it slip that the calls are becoming an everyday bother, her face tightens and she silences herself.
I can’t keep the hurt off my face. “My mother calls you?”
Serena slides a curious look to me as we climb the atrium staircase to the upper levels.
The party is for half-breeds, hidden in an old classroom on the fifth floor of the academy, but that classroom has been gutted over the years and refurnished with armchairs and pool tables.
It’s not the best sort of walk for these shoes, strappy heels with the constant tickle of pinkish fluff strips.
“All the time,” Serena says, her inky hair roped down her back in a braid from a high-pinched ponytail, the sort of hairstyle I would need a professional to achieve. “I understand the stakes for her, and she thinks she’s helping, since my mother can’t,but I have my exam coming up, just like Oliver does, and it’s as though that doesn’t matter.”
Because she’s a woman.
The truth of it slants my glossed lips.
“It’s different for you,” Serena goes on, her silvery dress shimmering in the dusky light. “You don’t have a print, you don’t have the distraction of the exams, and as for your wedding, you won’t have to lift a finger between Ethel, your mother and…”
She trails off.
Her throat thickens, as though she traps words in there before they can spill onto her tongue.
In her rant, she forgot.
She forgot the secret.
My smile is bitter. “Amelia?”
Serena stills.
The heels of her python boots root to the floor, and she turns a slack look on me.
Not exactly surprised, but stunned—maybe that I say it out loud, maybe that I address it so openly.
“So you do know.” There’s a firmness in her tone, matching the steely look she runs me over with,studyingme. “I wasn’t sure if—”
“He isn’t exactly subtle.”
Serena hums a curt sound, then continues down the corridor. Her silence holds as we pass Dragana, doubled over in a doorway.
My face contorts as a heave pulses through her, and she sicks all over the door.
It’s only when the retching is far behind us, and we turn onto the final, dusty corridor, that Serena asks, with a bite, “And you are fine with this?”
