Page 114 of Queen of Nothing

Her sharp chin is lifted, her glacier eyes switch between me, Mother and Amelia, and there’s something calculating about her gaze, like she’s figuring out her next move, or the new dynamics.

But she has a tell.

It’s the way she digs the nail of her middle finger into the pad of her thumb. Almost unnoticeable.

But Grandmother Ethel has a sensor built into her brain—and she turns a quiet, simmering glare on Asta.

Asta immediately stops.

She flexes her hand, then with a sharp look over at the men who are unmoving beside the stairs, she goes back inside.

Grandmother Ethel waits in the doorway.

Amelia and Mother only release me once we reach her.

And for a long moment, grandmother considers me, stopped on the step below her.

Grandmother Ethel does not give false smiles and reassuring words.

“You look pitiful, girl.” Her gloved grip creaks on the cane again. “That life has roughened your edges.”

I agree.

So I nod. Faint. Small.

But she notices.

And her sharp, hollow gaze burrows to mine.

“Well, girl? Was it worth all the trouble?”

Grandmother essentially points to the giant elephant in the room with the tip of her cane and calls it what it is, while everyone else ignores it.

She oversteps.

This is Father’s area.

But grandmother is who she is, and she will always be that.

My lips part—but I have no answer for her.

She knocks me off the shin with her cane. “We open our mouths to eat and speak, not to think.”

I clamp my mouth shut and, slightly, dip my head.

Grandmother’s presence in the doorway blocks all the traffic. Father, Oliver and Dray wait at the bottom of the three stone steps, silent and patient.

In the foyer, brushed over with the orange firelight and the glow from the iron chandelier above, Amelia and Mother wait.

Asta sticks to them like she’s glued to their shadows and doesn’t know what to do with herself.

But Grandmother has no immediate desire to move, not for anyone.

“Well,” she says, coldly, “you were missed by some.”

I smile, soft, and the words just whisper out of me before I can even accept them as some form of truth, “I missed you, too, Grandmother.”

And it’s the truth.