Her shoulders tense and I hear the jolt through her back, like she spits out a curse before she turns her sheepish face around.
“You will join Mr Barlow and Miss Ström in the rink.” Master Milton commands, and Mildred’s scowl softens, she almost fucking smiles. “All of you, now!”
But no one moves yet.
Glances are flickered around, looks are shared, glowers connected—then Asta moves first.
She peels away from the wall and starts down the corridor. Landon follows her.
Dray turns a dark look on me—and I know that this isn’t over.
Oliver brushes past me, his shoulder too hard against mine.
Serena pauses to grab the crinkled newsletter before stalking for the staircase.
I follow her, quiet, my face throbbing.
23
Detention usually comes with a task, but I didn’t make the detour to check the list in the parlour and see what that task is, Witchdoctor Urma just dismissed us to the storage room.
My back slides down the wall, my shoulder down the wooden cupboard door, and I drop to the floor in the dusty room.
I cry.
I cry a lot—and for a long while.
Serena drags a chair out from under a stack of boxes, and they all come crashing down on the floor. She kicks them aside, plants herself on the chair, then smoothens out the newsletter.
She reads, sometimes aloud, mostly in silence.
“I guess he’s always been viciously obsessed with me.”
My face twists.
“He’s no different to the brat he was when we were kids. His tantrums were violent then, too.”
A sob catches in my throat with a hiccup.
It comes with aches and nausea.
“My father doesn’t care about Dray’s character, he doesn’t care what he’s done to me, because Dray is Dray Sinclair, so what does Olivia Craven matter?”
Dread is spilling through me, like icy waters creeping through the network of my veins. It all gathers in the worming of my gut, and I run my hands down my middle to hold my belly, as though to soothe it.
But there’s no soothing this.
This is catastrophic.
It’s everything I aimed for when I gave Courtney that interview, when I gave her the article that would end Dray’s chase of me.
But it stretches so much further than that.
And the trouble I have is more than this.
I face Asta, whose almost, maybe certain, fiancé I’ve tried to steal away.
I face Dray, who I’ve publicly humiliated in that article, who realises that I’ve been fucking Eric, not that the last one matters anymore.
