I moved to the table and lifted the silver cloche, revealing the dinner beneath. My appetite had vanished, but I forced myself to eat anyway, because I was going to need my strength for what came next.
One month of training before the proving ritual. One month to work with Roman on finding Cal's killer. One month without Julian's overwhelming presence making it impossible to think straight. One month to figure out what the hell I was going to do about the undeniable pull between us; the thing I couldn't name, couldn't acknowledge, but couldn't seem to deny either.
I took a bite of salmon and tried not to think about the look on Julian's face when he left. Tried not to wonder if I'd just made a terrible mistake…
36
Violet
Four weeks had passedin a blur of intensive training and university coursework, and I was exhausted in ways I hadn't known were possible.
My days started at six in the morning with etiquette lessons. How to navigate high society events, which fork to use at a twelve-course dinner, how to make polite conversation with senators and foreign diplomats without saying anything of substance. Then came politics and current affairs, where I learned about lobbying, campaign finance, and how to identify which journalists could be trusted and which ones couldn't.
Afternoons were dedicated to my university classes, which I attended remotely from a private study room in the estate. Business economics, financial analysis, marketing strategy; subjects that felt almost quaint compared to what I was learning about the Club's real operations.
And through it all, there were the investigation sessions with Roman.
Only four of them in four weeks. It wasn't enough, and we both knew it.
We’d met up in my room each time, away from any surveillance, and compared notes on what we knew about Cal's death. I told him about the puncture mark the autopsy had noted, about the burner phone she'd been clutching, about her friends' recollections of that night. He told me more about the timeline, about where he'd been, about everyone he could remember seeing at the Halloween party.
But we kept hitting dead ends. No new leads, no breakthroughs, nothing that brought us any closer to understanding who killed my sister.
“We're missing something,” Roman had said during our last session, frustration evident in his voice. “There's a piece we're not seeing.”
I agreed, but I still had no idea what that piece might be.
The one bright spot in all of this was the weekly phone calls with my friends. Roman had kept his word, lending me his phone every Sunday evening so I could check in with Cherry, Jeremiah, Ginny, and Dylan.
The first call had been tense. They were all convinced I was being forced to say I was okay; that someone was holding a gun to my head. It had taken twenty minutes of increasingly specific personal references—inside jokes and embarrassing stories only we would know—before they finally believed I was really safe and choosing to stay.
“I think you might be a little insane,” Cherry had said, though her voice had been thick with relief. “But if you think this is the best way to find out what happened to Cal... we trust you.”
The subsequent calls had been easier. I couldn't tell them much, but I could hear about their lives, their classes, the mundane campus drama that felt like it belonged to a different world entirely.
Those talks were a lifeline, a way to pretend I still belonged to that world, even as it slipped further out of reach.
But the strangest thing about these four weeks, the thing I couldn't stop thinking about no matter how hard I tried, was Julian's absence.
I'd expected him to break his word. To show up at my door after a few days with some excuse about needing to check on my progress, or to appear during training sessions to observe, or to simply materialize in my room the way he had before, uninvited and overwhelming.
But he hadn't. I hadn't seen him; not even once. Hadn't heard his voice, hadn't felt his presence, hadn't received a single message or any indication that he was even visiting the estate.
He'd actually respected my wishes. Actually given me the space I'd demanded. And I didn't know what to make of that.
Was it genuine respect? Or was it just another form of manipulation; showing me he could be trusted, that he could change, making me lower my guard so he could…
No.
That was paranoid thinking. If Julian wanted to manipulate me, surely he'd choose a less obvious approach than simply giving me what I wanted.
But if it was genuine respect, if he reallyhadstayed away because I told him I needed space, then what did that mean? That he actually cared about what I wanted? That his feelings for me were real, not just obsession?
I didn't know, and not knowing was driving me crazy.
Almost as crazy as the dreams.
God, the dreams…
