Thorin looked unimpressed. “Wrong character,” he said, and then he turned back to Perdita. “I’m sorry for interrupting… whatever this was. I just wanted to let you know that I have to head home now. My mom needs me to prepare dinner, and since my dad is, uh… sticking around here, I thought I should head off. I’ll call you with updates when things are calmer?”
Octavius looked at Perdita, reallylookedat her, and then at Bilbo. The intimacy in the way he spoke to her and in the way they held each other’s gazes.It couldn’t be that…
“Home?” Romeo questioned suddenly, disrupting Octavius’s thoughts about the possibility of his youngest sister secretly dating the son of their dead father’s rival. “I thought everyone had to stay here until the murderer had been arrested? I thought they were trying to keep this all from getting leaked?” Romeo continued.
Thorin grimaced, as if he felt guilty for whatever bad news he was about to deliver. “Well, it did get leaked. They put out a statement to the public about half an hour ago, and Chief Waxler just started letting people go around ten minutes ago. Anyone who is no longer considered a suspect.”
This fact was confirmed when the heirs went back downstairs and found that the crowd that had swarmed the drawing room and surrounding areas had drastically decreased from almost a hundred people to nearly half of that number. Though the tension in the room hadn’t dissipated—there was still a murderer on the loose, after all.
The siblings split up immediately, storming off into their own worlds. The fallout of the inheritance reading was far from over. Octavius felt relief spread through him. Things were still chaotic down here, but it at least was less so than it had been upstairs.
He stood now on the threshold of the drawing room. The Manor’s entryway was still enshrouded in police tape, but the glass had been cleaned up and the doors had been temporarily boarded up with wood. The guests that were allowed to leave the house were most likely having to exit through one of the side doors that the staff used, which had a path that led straight to the staff quarters.
A few paces away from him, there were several pissed-off adult guests having a heated conversation with two of the police officers.
“I want to call my lawyer,” a woman with an auburn updo and rectangular Velma-esque eyeglasses said. “I’m a highly regarded neonatal physician and I do not appreciate being held here and treated like a murder suspect!”
“Me neither! I have a firm to get back to. Clients that are waiting to hear from me before the end of the afternoon!” a suited man with a burly figure and a long beard exclaimed.
“I’m very sorry, Dr. Jassat and Mr. Khan—” the officer began.
“What about my son? He is traumatized!” the father of one of the prodigies declared. “He’s only eleven—you can’t possibly think he had anything to do with this. We thought he had been invited here because of his soccer skills, but now you’re exposing him to all kinds of ideas andpeople!”
Their angry voices began to mesh together into an unintelligible grumble as Octavius’s gaze shifted to the gardens beyond the French doors of the drawing room. He wondered if he could sneak away and pay a visit to the stables. He hadn’t seen the horses since he had left and suddenly missed their company. They reminded him of a simpler time without the secrets that he felt corrupting his soul. Perhaps seeing them would allow him to fool himself into believing he was younger again and life wasn’t so complicated.
A flash of red caught his attention briefly. It was Evie Gray walking past the French doors and settling down on a seat on one of the ottomans in the corner of the drawing room.Speaking of complicated…, he thought, as he watched her take out a red notebook from her back pocket and scribblesomething in its pages. His vision blurred, her bright cardigan and notebook melding into a violent splatter of red.
A scream, a thud, and so much blood…
He was pulled away suddenly from his spiraling thoughts when he felt several pairs of eyes on him. He turned and found a group of prodigies nearby watching him, giggling and whispering. Naturally, he ogled them back.
This made one girl with dark brown olive skin and a pixie cut step forward with an inviting smile. He glanced down at the name tag attached to her breast pocket. Marisol.
“Can I help you,Marisol?” he said, trying to sound neutral, but finding, as always, that his spirits were so easily raised by the trick of a beautiful face and a charming smile.
“Could I… ask a question?” Marisol said.
Octavius’s heart instantly stopped, dread building in his chest. But he kept his own smile in place. “Sure,” he replied, bracing himself for a potential question about his father.
“Is the white natural? We were wondering,” she said, looking up at the mass of tangled curls atop Octavius’s head. He relaxed a little, rubbing at his wrists like he was trying to undo the invisible handcuffs he felt encircling them.
Marisol was still inspecting his white hair like she wanted to reach out and touch it to test itsrealness.
He nodded. “Forsooth, milady,” he said with a grin. “It is.”
And he wasn’t lying, the white was natural… Mostly, anyway. At some point in his preadolescence, Octavius’s black hair had begun to turn white. It got so bad, his father had to call in the family physician, Dr. Benson, who’d examined him thoroughly and then determined that it was all just a side effect of extreme levels of stress. Marie Antoinette syndrome, it was called. Dr. Benson pointed out how odd it was because,What could an eight-year-old have to be this stressed about?
Octavius didn’t have the language to describe it then, but he did now.Whatcould an eight-year-old have to be this stressed about?Learning a new complicated musical piece each week; performing for thousands of strangers—adults, not peers; practicing his violin so much that blisters formed on all of his little fingers and weren’t able to heal, leaving his skin in a perpetual state of cracking and bleeding; how there was no rest,ever. He always had to be switched on, ready to please and perform for his audience.
Only a portion of his hair had turned white, but after a while he’d bleached the rest of his hair to match. He still dyed it regularly to maintain the stark color.
The girls were still looking at him with dreamy-eyed expressions as Marisol asked the question he suspected she’d been waiting to ask all along: “We also hear you can play Paganini’s Caprice 24 on the violin,” she said, as a way of asking if it was true.
Octavius flashed them a devilish smile he knew they’d enjoy, and he was right, as this incited more giggling from the small group. He’d almost forgotten he was in a room of geniuses, meaning a roomful of nerds. Of course this kind of thing was what got them all hot and bothered. And as always, he was more than happy to distract and entertain.
“I’m afraid that isn’t true,” he said, and the girls’ faces all dropped, revealing their disappointment.
“I can also play Paganini on the piano and the mandolin,” he added, his grin broadening as he widened his fake smile; his wrists still ached from the phantom pain of invisible metal cuffs. “Want to see?”
