Serious money.
Landon throws his arm around my shoulders and tugs me into him. “Well if it isn’t the best friend I should have had for the past decade. Were you always this conniving?”
Yes.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve always known I belong with them—the Snakes. Even when it hollowed me out to know that.
Landon nuzzles into my wavy hair, disturbing the styling done for the party.
His affection is unwanted.
But the performance demands it.
We stick close to each other for the next hour or so, playing pool—after he shoves a half-breed out the way and resets the game—and drinking more than we should.
But then Teddy comes to whisper in his ear and, without a word, not even a goodbye, he’s gone.
The pair of them sneak off.
I doubt it’s to do good around the academy.
I wander from person to person, play some cards with Piper for a bit before darts with Serena and Asta, who just tolerates my presence now.
I end up stumbling for the doors around midnight, my bladder full and ready to burst.
Good thing there’s a bathroom just down the corridor—and I rush my scuttled steps all the way there.
I go uninterrupted, but as I come out of the bathroom and into the corridor, the sight of Eric halts me.
Quite obviously waiting for me, he leans against the wall, hands folded over his chest, and an anxious gleam in his honey eyes.
I sigh at the sight of him. “If Asta sees you talking to me—”
“She won’t.” He pushes from the wall with a single step. “She’s preoccupied.”
Last I saw, she was more than that. She wasabsorbedby the game of darts, took it to a whole new level of competitiveness against Sara Horvat, who beat her in the last round.
“She didn’t see me follow you out,” he adds, as though that’s meant to make me feel better, but it doesn’t sit right with me that he’s sneaking around chasing me through corridors, while his girlfriend, hisbetrothedis back at the party.
“I don’t need any drama,” I tell him. “I have enough of that, Eric. Asta’s already suspicious.”
A sudden surge of passion alights his eyes. He takes another step closer. “Do you know why she’s suspicious?”
“Yeah, people saw us in London, rumours went around, they reached her.”
Something stirs in his eyes, honey turned to the deeper, richer shades of caramel in the dim corridor lighting.
His lips part around words that don’t come, and for a beat, he just stares at me.
“She found out,” he starts, delicately, and runs his gaze over the arched door behind me, as though he’ll find the words he’s looking for in the grained wood, “that I, uh, I didn’t withdraw my offer on your contract.”
I give a faint nod.
Because, duh.
My father rejected the offer, all of them, when he accepted Dray’s.
No one stood a chance.
