My begging comes out in a whine, “Please, don’t.”
Face of stone, he turns his back on me.
He marches for the phone booths.
“Please, please, please!” I scramble around him, then shove my hands against his solid chest. “Please, I’ll tell him. Let me tell him, when the time is right.”
I block his path.
But that means I have a line of sight to the audience gathered some steps down the corridor.
Landon still has Asta by the middle.
Mildred lurks behind them with too much light in her eyes… aimed down at the newsletter in her hands.
Serena paces by the wall, worry chewing her cheeks, and she throws uneasy glances at Dray—
He advances.
Slow steps that gradually bring him closer to the flailing Asta, and his gaze is too calculating, too intense, too cutting that I force myself to look at Oliver.
“You’re such a fucking weirdo!” Asta shouts, but it’s guttural, it’s heaving with rage, and it booms down the corridor. “You’re just running around the academy, trying to buy people’s boyfriends? What the fuck is the matter with you, you freak?”
I turn a wild look on her. “I didn’t fucking buy it for him! It was an accident—” I swerve that plea back onto my brother, my hands slapping together in prayer.
But no words come.
Oliver’s face is purple.
Not red.
Purple.
He might just explode in a burst of curses.
“You want me to not tell Father that you spentfifty fucking grandon some gentry?”
“Seventy-five,” Landon grunts.
I flinch.
Oliver towers over me and shouts right in my face, “Seventy-five thousand pounds?”
“It was an accident,” I heave the plea, and press my hands together, as though to pray, to beg. “It was meant for him—” I throw a flailing gesture around his arm, right at the one who passes Asta, her wild advance halted by the firm grip Landon now keeps on her forearm, like she got loose for a second.
But no one is holding Dray back.
He moves for me.
His steps are calculated, but his rage is lashing inside of him, burning his eyes.
I stagger back, but my words don’t stop coming, even with his advance, “It was meant for him. I didn’t mean to—I don’t know how I mixed them up, but I did and…” I swallow back a lump in my throat, slick with unshed tears, “Please—oomph.”
The pleas are knocked right out of me.
Dray’s hand is a blur through the dimly lit air before it’s firm on my throat—and he smacks me into the wall, hard enough to gut me of breath.
My tear-stained lips part around nothing.
