Phials pressed into a briefcase—that had three other samples in it already.
“Are you listening to me?” Serena chides, and it sounds so much like Mother that I swerve my panicked gaze to her—as though I’ll find Mother sitting in that chair. “If Master Milton called your father right after the fight, that would’ve been around one thirty, and if he leaves straight from Elcott Abbey, and there’s no traffic at the veils, then he’ll be here by four thirty. That’s less than two hours away.”
I blink at her.
The phial creaks in my firm grip, my hand fisting and fisting tighter the more rapid my heartbeat gets.
My icy panic fixates on the phial, on the memory of Witchdoctor Dolios pressing the samples into the foam slots in the sleek briefcase, where there were other samples already inside.
Serena throws me a weathered look before she pushes up from the chair. The old wood creaks under the shifted weight.
She advances on me, her snowboots thudding heavily on the rotted wooden floorboards. “How badly do you want out of this?”
My frown aimed up at her is stupid, dazed, and puffier than I care to see in a mirror. “Out of what?”
“Out of the engagement—”
I cut her off, “That won’t stand anymore.”
No way.
Dray will rip up that contract first chance he gets. He’ll probably steal Asta back as a fiancé and be done with me.
Good.
It’s what I want.
It’s the whole point.
But then Serena adds, “Only if it worked. If it didn’t, you’ll be paying for it longer than sanity allows.” She boots open the metal cabinet tucked beside the cupboard. “Dray will be fuming. There’s no doubt about that. But end the engagement? He might not be so hasty with that one. You underestimate him,” she adds and looks over her shoulder at me, arms buried inside the cabinet. “You underestimate how far he’ll go to win. And you just made this an interesting game.”
Blank.
That’s what I become.
Blankness on my face, in my stare, consuming my mind—and I just watch as she turns her cheek to me.
Serena continues to rummage through the cabinet. The clinking and thudding of jars being lifted, discarded, shoved aside, it’s a song that floods the storeroom, a background melody to her words.
“And say it does work, and Dray cuts you loose, what about your family? You know you won’t be allowed back to the academy. Maybe you like that, maybe you realise that it means you’ll be sequesteredindefinitely. You might be discarded altogether.”
My mother would never.
I know that.
But Father might push for my move to Grandmother Ethel’s… permanently.
Of all the fates I stare down, the part of each that hurts the most is to be pushed out of the home, out of the family.
My insides constrict, a pit of snakes.
I turn a dark look up at her, fringed with teary lashes. “Are you arriving at a point soon, or just twisting the knife?”
“I don’t know about you, but I am sure tired of it,” Serena says and, drawing back from the cabinet, she moves for me, a jar of white creamy liquid in her hand.
“Tired of what?”
She offers the jar to me. “For your face.”
