20

I run until I can’t anymore.

And when I slow to a heavy, jaded walk, bootsteps scuffing on the packed dirt and frosted ground, my breathing is hoarse. Ragged. It is sound .

“Huh.”

I test it. Test my voice, my vocal cords.

“Huh-huh.”

Faint, whispery, but there.

“ Beep-bop-boo, I-hate-you .”

It’s coming back to me.

I unscrew the bottle, and decide that, in the maze, this will be my companion.

How long I will be stuck in the maze for, I don’t know. Whenever I find enough courage to sneak back out and see if Dray and Oliver are still around.

That’s not yet. That’s not for a while.

So I pass the time with the golden tequila.

I throw back a few swigs, and the burn of it is cheap. A convulsion strikes my middle before a bubbly burp crawls up me.

I shudder it away, like an aftershock.

For a beat, I lift the bottle and eye it over.

All I see is one huge headache tomorrow if I keep drinking this poison. But tomorrow is Saturday, so I bring the cold rim to my mouth again.

I stagger through the stone maze. Debris lines the narrow, uneven trails, and I have no sense of the direction I am taking, I just walk and turn and wander and turn again.

Until I take the wrong corner and almost smack right into Asta and Eric.

I stagger back. The tequila sloshes in the bottle.

Perched on a ledge of stone, Asta turns her dark look on me. Eric is wedged between her spread legs—and I almost think, for a heartbeat there, I found them fucking.

Thankfully, her breeches are still on, and his dick is tucked away. But they were hot and heavy enough that his jacket is discarded, the collar of his sweater fisted in her grip, and both of their mouths swollen.

“What the fuck do you want?” Asta spits, a mixture of hateful venom and exhaustion. “Here to stalk us—or just Eric?”

My face heats.

I avoid his gaze, though I sense the unease in it.

He runs his hand over her arm and murmurs, a soft, gentle chide, “Asta.”

Ugh, the pity in that makes me want to smack his head into the rubble.

“I’m not stalking you,” I snap at her, though my vocal cords sound like they have been dragged over a grater. “I’m hiding from Dray. Obviously. I forgot you even existed.”

It’s the truth, really.

I’d forgotten all about this coupling since Serena burst my bubble.

Asta narrows her eyes at me. “Dray isn’t here.”

“He wasn’t,” I scoff, hoarse, then shove by her, “but he is now.”

I hear the faint murmur of Eric saying to her, “We should go.”

And it brings a frown to my face.

Is their relationship so secret?

It was secret enough that I knew nothing about it. But I am hardly in the know .

I doubt Dray would care very much who Asta is sleeping with. Not when he has Melody to straddle him, or—let’s be real—half of the female student body throwing themselves at him. The only ones who wouldn’t are the ones who want to preserve their image or the ones sharp enough to understand he would never marry outside of aristos.

Melody Green hasn’t figured that out yet.

There’s always someone who thinks in romance, not reality. I would feel sorry for her if I had any pity to spare outside of myself.

I don’t.

I’ve polished off a quarter of the bottle by the time I come to the centre of the maze. I know it’s the middle, because here, the ruins are cleared out around a squared patch of dirt, under which are the doors to the dungeons, caved in and buried in snow and debris.

I look around with a sigh heavy enough to puff out my cheeks. Paths fork in all directions, a half-dozen of them.

I pause.

It’s been the better part of an hour, now. Surely Oliver and Dray are gone from the party.

If they have games on in the morning, they will be gone now, tucked in bed, dreaming of killing kittens and puppies. I assume they dream of fucked up shit like that.

I turn back the way I came.

It’s a not straight line all the way back, and I realise I fucked up the moment the path splinters into three routes, and I can’t remember which one I came from.

Bottle loose in my grip, I flicker my hazy stare between them. For the life of me, I just cannot remember which one.

My mouth pushes into a pout of pure self-pity.

I loll my head back and look to the stars. Clouds wisp over them, but faint and fine, like a paintbrush strokes soft grey over a speckled ink canvas.

I find the moon. I find the North Star.

I go right.

And I drink the bottle empty.

Not a feat, since it was never full to begin with, but there was enough in it that, now staring at the gloss of the empty bottle, my mouth turns down with a frown.

I drop it to the hard, dried dirt. It bounces on landing before it knocks into a stone with a clatter.

I stagger onwards.

The paths I take now are random, no thought behind them, because I can’t even guess the right one to take.

My path is wrong.

I learn that when I stumble around the mouth of a clearing, like an old abbey has crumbled here within the ruins, and stones are still stacked in slanted pillars, and the debris is built up in a crescent wall—

And I see Landon.

My frown is as drunk as my milky vision.

Takes me a moment to realise that he slouches on a steady pile of rubble. His legs are spread, his eyes hooded, and—

The cloud starts to clear. My sight adjusts to the gleam of the moonlight that hardly washes over this little pocket of the maze.

And my jaw fucking drops.

Landon’s head lolls back with a moan.

A head bobs on his lap.

It takes me all of a second to realise who is sucking him off in the hidden shadows of the maze.

My hands flatten to my face, and I peer over my fingertips.

I force my boot to slide backwards, over the ground. Then again, and again, until I am out of sight and ear, and I don’t hear the moans that Landon lets build through him.

I drop my hands to my sides.

For a moment, I just stare ahead at the path.

Then, I loosen a heavy breath and the only thing on my mind is ‘ James ?’

Never thought I would see James on his knees sucking off a Snake. When did he even get to the party? I didn’t see him. Matter of fact, I don’t remember seeing either of them. Not once, not even walking down the trail to enter the maze of rubble and debris.

“Oh, shit,” I whisper to myself.

I scurry down the route for as long as it goes before another path cuts off, and I take the new one.

Only then do I feel safe enough, far out of the way of Landon and James, to climb a stack of rubble.

I look to the North Star, then to the moon…

I frown.

They weren’t where I left them.

They moved.

Not in the ‘the stars move and the earth moves’ kind of way. In the, ‘I fucked up’ kind of way.

And I did.

The tequila could have been spiked. The potions at the pong game could be blurring and twisting my brain. Or I’m getting to that point of drunk where the stars are smears across the sky, blended into a single brushstroke of gleaming white, and stirs of nausea are curling my toes.

I am lost.

I fumble down from the rubble and push on.

The substances have sure made the effort to knit into my very being. I’m trying my damn hardest to walk in a steady line, but mostly I use the crumbled walls as a crutch and stumble alongside them.

I manage a while of that, stumbling around the maze, before the sway of my surroundings finally stills me. I can feel my heartbeat in my brain, my actual fleshy brain, just pulsating and pulsating, thump, thump, thump —

A groan ribbons out of me.

Gonna be sick.

Leaning against a debris-wall, I slip down to the ground. Early dustings of ice are starting to grow over the hard, dried-out dirt.

Lazily, I trace my finger along the sheets of ice and write my initials. In the growing distance, I hear the faint echoes of shouts and cheers, laughter, a screech—and so I know the party isn’t too far away.

Still, I’m in no position to move. The mere thought of standing has those pulsations in my head suddenly thundering.

But even sitting down, the weeds seem to shudder and whisper, the stones seem to suck in on themselves, then bloat back out.

I blink a few times, but it does little.

“Olivia,” the voice floats out from the weeds, familiar and not unlike the ice that wears my initials.

I frown at the long, spidery plant killers, trying to focus on where the voice is coming from.

Are they whispering to me?

Are they enchanted?

“Olivia.”

No, it’s not the weeds.

I look to my right.

From the shadows of the long path, he walks towards me, as striking as ever.

My heart falls as I realise it’s Dray. For a beat there, I almost hoped it was Eric, coming to save me from the maze. But of course, it has to be Dray.

I doubt he’ll do much saving.

I frown up at him.

Under the pale moonlight, shadows cut beneath his sharp cheekbones and above his clenched jaw. His jaw always looks clenched, as though he’s permanently angry at the world. Maybe he is, I don’t know. Maybe he’s just angry when I’m around.

Dray stops at my side and looks down his nose at me with gleaming blue eyes, paler than the moon this night.

My heart aches a little at the sight of him, at my drunken mind pulling memories out from the dust.

“Serena said you ran off into the maze.”

In the distance, I hear someone break out into song, a solemn tale about a man who eats a hundred children. Her melancholic lullaby climbs through me, spidery fingers teetering over my bones.

I squint up at Dray. “Here to bury me in the rubble?”

He just stares down at me. “I came to find you. It’s easy to get lost in here.”

“Oh, because I’m so incompetent—” Before the last word even slips from my mouth, my body heaves and I barely twist around in time before sick slaps onto the packed-dirt.

Dray looks down at the droplets, splashed onto the toes of his Prada loafers. Brown upchucked tequila with a faint sickly scent of cheap liquor.

I make a face at it, then brace myself for the counterattack.

It doesn’t come.

Dray crouches down beside me.

He braces his forearms on his knees. “Or because this is a maze, and you are drunk.”

It takes me a moment to still the dizziness swaying through me.

I slump onto my side.

His eyes, like ice-blades, rinse me over. He loosens a soft sigh before he reaches out for my face.

I flinch at his touch.

But no pain nips at me.

Rather, the back of his hand glides from my sweaty forehead to the high bone of my cheek.

“Did you mean to aim for me?” he sighs, but there’s a nostalgic hint to his tone, one that has my tummy flipping and my heart shredding.

I burp in answer. Not like I meant to, I just parted my lips to speak, and it happened.

Hell, if my mother and father saw me now, I would be sent to live with Grandmother Ethel for the rest of the year.

That’s a spine-shuddering thought.

She would have me stand as stiff as a statue in the coldest room of the manor, a stack of tomes on my head, and recite the ancient bloodlines until my voice turns hoarse and I pass out.

Still, I would rather her be the one to find me in the maze.

Anyone but Dray. Even Grandmother Ethel.

Dray runs his fingertips down my cheek, as if stroking me, soothing me. A stoic mask is fitted perfectly onto his painfully beautiful face, the fullness of his pink lips, the pinched tip of his nose, the smooth beige of his complexion that darkens around his chiselled jaw.

“I don’t need you to help me,” I groan and tug away from his touch. I only manage to move an inch before a dizzy wave strike me down, and I roll onto my back. “Leave me alone.”

I gaze up at the stars, a smear that blurs the longer I look.

“Leave you out here?” The tender touch of his fingertips glides down the side of my neck. There, it lingers. Takes me a moment to think that he’s caressing the bruises he left on my flesh. “Prey for an aspirer.”

I scoff. My chest jolts, and the pain is instant.

I swallow back the singe of sick. “Your fiancé is with an aspirer right now. Shouldn’t you be rescuing her?”

“Asta is no one’s victim.”

My answer is soft, “I’m yours.”

A flash in his eyes. “Not tonight.”

Dray leans closer and slips his arm under me. The tug of his hold lifts my back from the ground.

A groan is my answer.

“Come on,” he murmurs. “You’ll freeze out here.”

I reluctantly sling my arm over his shoulder. He pulls me to my feet. Well, he pulls me up . Mostly, he’s supporting me.

Side-stepping my puddle of vomit, he leads me through the maze. I don’t know which way we’re going, but the air seems to get quieter the longer he drags me along with him.

My stomach runs cold and drops to my gut.

“I did get lost,” I say, staggering beside him. I can’t help but lean into him—he doesn’t complain.

“I know,” he says.

“Are you taking me to the party?” I try to untangle myself from him, but my boots slip on the ice.

I stagger back into a pile of stone and rock.

Dray snatches out for me before I can go tumbling over. He yanks me into him, then dips to hoist me over his shoulder.

The pressure on my middle is tight.

I face the ground.

The heels of his loafers cut into my line of sight with his steps through the maze. He really was at sparring club, then. He still wears his sweatpants, but the black material is speckled with blood at the ankles. Probably roundhouse kicked someone on the nose.

Prick.

I fist my hands in his textured sweater. The cashmere is so soft to the touch that my frozen raw hands slip as I try to push myself off his shoulder.

He huffs. “You’re only going to hurt yourself.”

I scowl at the moving ground. “Why are you helping me?”

“Why,” he echoes with a scoff. He even makes a scoff sound refined and elegant.

I feel like a muddy elephant slung over his shoulder.

“Consider yourself too valuable,” he says after a heartbeat. “I can hardly leave you out here, at the mercy of the elements and aspirers. You are still a Craven. I will honour my duty to our alliance.”

“Our alliance,” I parrot in a murmur.

He jerks his shoulder.

My middle bounces off the hard muscle.

And I’m sick all over the ground.

Still slung over his shoulder, I let the stream of sick pass, then it’s gone quickly because Dray doesn’t falter his pace.

“I’m not leaving you to pass out and freeze to death.” His voice is steel. “Now shut up before I change my mind.”

I do shut up.

Because what will I do, really, if he does dump me in the maze and abandon me?

He has my fate in his hands.

Still, I don’t stop wriggling.

No matter how hard I squirm or tug at his sweater, he carries me through the maze, then into the grounds around the cabin. Still, he doesn’t set me down—and I hear the murmurs.

I crane my neck to see the curious glances aimed at us.

Those glances are from the gentry, from the half-breeds, the made ones. Not the aristos.

Still as purple as a grape, she smiles in something of a farewell, slumped against my brother who’s arguing with Teddy trapped in the bubble. The longer I linger my stare over them, the better I understand—Teddy bounces the bubble directly above Oliver, and that’s one way to get a broken nose, leg, life, whatever he is keen to destroy, really.

Oliver doesn’t notice us, doesn’t look our way.

From the bottle loose in his grip, silver and cloudy, I’m guessing he’s not returning to the dorms anytime soon.

It brings the question to mind, as I suffer my humiliation thrown over Dray’s shoulder like a sack of grain. “Why are you even here? You have a game tomorrow.”

His voice is firm. Still simmering in annoyance. “Someone flooded the basements with deadly nightshade, so ice-hockey is cancelled. And the storm rolling in has cancelled snow-rugby.”

I grunt in answer.

I’m carried up the trail to the school.

Landon and James, as I look around, are nowhere in sight, and so I doubt they were at the party at all.

That image is seared into my mind forever.

I have so many questions.

I just don’t know if I can ask them.

James isn’t so open.

Landon will probably headbutt me or get Mildred to do it for him.

Part of me itches to ask Dray. Ask if he knows anything about it, Landon’s proclivity for men.

But I don’t.

He probably doesn’t know. And it might be best if it stays that way.

I don’t judge it—but the aristos do.

I keep Landon’s secret shut in my mouth.

Dray takes me through the corridors, all the way to the Living Quarter, and not once does he pause to readjust me on his shoulder or set me down, he just walks on like I weigh nothing more than a handful of feathers.

He takes me, not to the dorms, but to the cigar room, then dumps me on the plush, linen couch.

I land with a grunt.

My back crashes into the piled pillows.

But the impact jolts through me, spins my brain around in my head. It’s a scrambled, dizzied moment, and the room is bending around me.

The sick can’t be stopped.

It’s quick, it’s sudden, and eager to get out of me.

I have just a moment to push up from the pillows before it spews out of me.

Hands reach out to steady me. They are firm on my shoulders, but that doesn’t stop the sick from spilling down my front.

Dray drops onto the edge of the coffee table. His knees graze the cushioned seat of the couch.

“You have sick all over you,” he sighs.

“Fuck, really?” The sarcasm drips from my tone as it does my dazed sneer.

With a sigh, Dray leans over me and grips the hem of my top. He pulls it over my head.

I hear the slap of the material hit the rug.

My arms come around myself, a lame attempt to hide my bodice from his line of sight.

Dray doesn’t look. He’s drawn away from me and, reaching one hand back to the scruff of his neck, tugs off his sweater in one fluid move.

He hands it to me. “Put this on.”

“No,” I push at his hand. “Get off me.” And I feel like a witch stuck in a too-long ritual, just chanting the same words over and over.

He grunts, an annoyed sound, a crack in the mask, and grabs at me. He’s quick to shove the sleeves down my arms, then hook the collar around my head.

In two, three heartbeats, I’m in his sweater, glowering at him. “I’m going to my dorm room,” I mumble and, weakly, kick out at him. “Move.”

Dray shoots me a withering look before he sweeps his hand over the floorboards—and just like that, his makut conjures a bucket of soapy water and a washcloth.

He soaks the washcloth for a moment before he reaches for me. “With the state you are in, you’ll pass out before you make it there.” He brings the damp cloth to my chin and starts to wipe at the sick droplets. “Knowing your luck, Mildred will be the first to find you.”

“You don’t care,” I mutter and turn my cheek to him.

Dray just wipes at my cheek now, a slow, gentle run of the cloth over my skin, and I’m sure some of the makeup will be coming away. I probably look like a patchy, sickly racoon.

After a moment, I hear the faintness of his murmur, “Then why am I here?”

My lashes are heavy over my blurry sight, but I watch him.

He runs the cloth down the side of my neck before he turns and tosses it to the hearth. It lands in the simmering flames that heat me, that melt through the chill of the frost that was eating through me to the bone.

Dray reaches down for the bucket tucked between his legs. He tosses the water into a plant pot before he places it on my lap.

I watch him move for the pitcher and glasses on the sidetable. Fills me a generous serving of water, then he brings the glass to my mouth.

“Rinse,” he orders, firm.

I do.

He tips the glass, and the wave of fresh, icy water is smooth over my tongue. It rolls over the insides of my cheeks and burrows through my teeth.

I clamp my mouth around the water and, swish, swash, swish, swash , I spit it into the bucket.

He makes me do it again.

And again.

Then he yanks a blanket off the armchair and drapes it over me.

Mute, I watch him.

Too deep in the booze haze to have my mind sharp enough, to argue more than I already have.

So I slump on the stacked pillows as he drops onto the other end of the couch and pulls my feet onto his lap.

Weakly, I try to tug my feet back, but his hands clasp tight around my ankles.

“Lie down,” he tuts, an edge of annoyance to the look he lifts at me from beneath his long lashes. He holds my gaze as he tugs off my boots, then tosses them to the floor. “I can’t leave until you’re all sicked out.”

“Can’t you just makut me to sleep,” I moan and roll onto my side, eyes on the friendly bucket.

I catch his reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall.

Still, the milky blur clings to my sight, and I am seriously regretting the half-bottle of cheap ass tequila.

“So you can choke on your own sick?”

I watch him in the mirror. Watch how he peels off my socks, then discards them. How the shadows of the dim cigar room flicker over his face, darken the azurite hue of his eyes.

He is beautiful.

The pout of a full, lovely mouth, the tip of his nose, the warmth of his complexion, lashes I want to rip off his face and stick onto my own, and that chiselled cut just above his jawline, the one that darkens each time he clenches his jaw.

So beautiful.

But so, so ugly in the ways that matter.

Pretty packaging for a rotten soul.

Dray tugs the fleece blanket off the arm of the couch.

And since I found him in the mirror, he hasn’t looked away from me. Every movement, every action, he watches me, intently .

The simmer of his gaze is as heated as the hearth.

He drapes the second blanket over my legs with one hand. The other still pins, however loosely, my ankles to his lap.

My lashes lower. Not all the way closed, but it’s a fight to keep them open. I blink my weary gaze on the mirror.

Dray slouches against the arm of the couch, settled in, watching me. A frown comes and goes on his face, sometimes it’s a pinch of his brow, other times it’s a faint twist to his mouth.

His thoughts are spiralling, and I don’t where to.

I do know that his hands have slid from my ankles to my bare feet on his lap. The flesh must be cold to the touch, because he holds them, warms them with the heat of his palms. That explains the second blanket he pulled over me. The freezing temperature of the maze must have had an icier effect than I knew, than the tequila let me realise.

My lashes lower further.

I cling onto consciousness.

After a long beat of silence, Dray catches me off guard. His voice is a low murmur, tired and uncertain, “Do you like Eric Harling?”

I whisper, “No.”

Tonight, do I like Eric?

No. Not so much.

If I did, I wouldn’t tell Dray anything about it.

Either way, that answer was going to be a firm no, however drenched in fatigue.

I frown at the mirror. “Why?”

His head is lowered. Sawdust hair falls into his face. His gaze is lifted, burning from beneath long, dark lashes.

He considers me.

“Seemed you liked him on the old football pitch.” He shrugs nonchalantly, but there’s nothing casual in the burning blue of his eyes, like sapphire flames. “I was surprised at your… familiarity.”

There it is.

He really might have been the one to snitch on me to my father.

I lower my lashes on his reflection, the sway of his body. Though I’m sure that’s the drink and he’s not actually swaying.

“Eric’s one of the few who have always been nice to me.” Then, I add to explain away our familiarity , as he put it, “He tutors me.”

Even drunk, I’m careful what I say to him. Anything can be used as a weapon against me.

Dray nods, slow and thoughtful.

I doubt he knows I am watching him in the mirror. But he does apparently know that Eric is my tutor, because there’s not the slightest hint of surprise to flicker over his face.

He just does that faint nod.

And the silence creeps over us. To him, to how lounged he is on the couch, how serene he looks just watching me, that silence might feel like a blanket on a chilly day. To me, the silence is uneasy, it’s a pressure that weighs me down on the couch and I can’t writhe against it.

The niggle urges me to slip off the couch, to crawl into the girls’ dorms as fast as I can. Then Dray can’t reach me.

But that’s all the way through the door, down the hall, and onto the first step of the narrow staircase.

He’ll stroll and still catch up with me.

“I feel better,” I say. Sort of true, isn’t it? If I don’t move, I don’t sick up anymore. “I should go—”

“You’ll stay where you are.”

I turn a scowl on him, hair plastered to my cheeks.

Dray looks at me long and hard, like I’m the only person in the world and he can read my thoughts with good enough focus. But I’m the only person with him in this cigar room, and I’m suddenly aware of my vulnerability.

With his hands on my feet, he could firm his grip and twist the bones until they break. He could grab my ankles and yank me off the couch for me to knock my head on the coffee table.

He could do all sorts of things, even cut off my hair if I let this weight drag me down to sleep.

I huff and throw my head down. My lashes shut, tight.

No harm comes.

I melt into the couch.

Still, no harm comes.

Tension unwinds from my muscles.

Dray is silent. Steady breaths, his hands soft on my feet.

I drift.

His words are so soft that I barely hear them.

But I do hear them.

“I loved you.”

I slip away.