My bodyguard picked up her cane and handed it to me. I nodded to him in thanks and offered the cane back to the woman. “There you go. Do you need any assistance?”
“I swear I know you from somewhere!” The woman was yet to accept her cane. “I seen you before—Oh, sugar! You're that De Astor girl. I seen it in the papers.”
“Yes, I'm—”
“You're gonna be Soulless.”
My jaw clenched. “No…I’m not Soulless. I’m a good person.”
She snatched her cane off me and smacked it against my heel. “You're gonna be Soulless scum.”
I rubbed at the stinging on my heel and watched her hobble away, my stomach sinking.
“Can you help her to where she needs to go?” I asked my guard. “I'm finished here anyway.”
I slid into the backseat of the car.
“Where to?” my driver asked.
The piece of paper in my pocket burned my fingers. I scrunched it down. “Home.”
He took off through the mess of traffic. Sinking into the polished leather, I inhaled the clean scent, calmed the quiver in my limbs and phoned my brother.
“No,” was all I said.
Magnus was quiet on the other end.
I swallowed. “Maybe…maybe…I could go over to Japan…”
“You cannot,” he said.
I already knew this.
In three days I was turning twenty-five which meant all outside travel was restricted. If you had not connected to another person by twenty-five it meant you likely never would. Most people tried to flee overseas to escape judgment.
“Duckie, my darling,” Magnus’s voice skimmed over the other end. “I’ll fix this.”
Our parents died when I was a child and being much older than I, Magnus had managed our family estate, taking over my father’s political career, and raised me. He put Band-Aids over my scraped knees, lectured my tutors when I did not receive a fair mark on an exam and chained away masked men who climbed in through my bedroom at 2am.
My older brother was a constant warm blanket over my shoulders, hugging me away from the world.
But no person could escape judgement of being Soulless.
That judgement ended with a graveyard.
It was fair.
All Soulless people turned evil, it was best to nip them in the bud before the evil bloomed and weeded into the perfect garden of people with souls.
I needed to find someone here in Uandra.
I needed to find them in three days.
The gilded gates with my family name scrawled on top opened and the driver slipped down the driveway, pulling up just outside the manor’s entrance.
Cynthia stood over the tulips by the conservatory in her matching pressed powder blue set. The collar monogramed. Her white gloves virgin of dirt. The housekeeper planted tulips below her. Cynthia preferred being among the trimmed hedges than inside the manor haunted by my ancestors.
When she smiled at me it never reached her eyes. Instead, pain did. “You’re back early.”
