9

I’m grateful that we leave the village before the rush, the last hour the gondolas are on for the day.

If anyone misses that final gondola, then it’s an after-curfew infringement, driven back to the academy by security, and a good solid week in detention.

So I’m glad to be ahead of the rush, even if it’s Dray’s stare that ran me out of the village. It leaves an uneasy feeling in my gut—and another feeling I don’t care to acknowledge.

I say nothing about it. Not to Courtney who, as we climb into the gondola, decides that she is going to look for James in the infirmary, since he didn’t show in the village.

Courtney’s worry has her hands wringing on her lap the whole gondola ride. And when the carriage jolts to a loud, groaning halt at the station by the fields, she clammers out in a hurry.

I keep her pace through the halls and corridors.

But my mind won’t release Dray.

I need to soap up a rag and climb into my skull and scrub my brain clean. But even that won’t erase the memory seared into my mind. The diamond gleam of his eyes, a sharpness that sometimes pierces through the misty veil, the soft pink of his mouth brushing over another’s lips—but watching me.

I’m glad that I have to run to keep up with Courtney all the way to the infirmary, because it excuses the hot, ugly flush that burns my face.

Whatever that was with Dray, I don’t know. A mockery, of course. Some way to torment me, make me squirm—but why it has me so flushed, I would hate to know.

I do all that I can do, just push it with a surge of violence out of my thoughts.

My bootsteps come down on the floorboards extra hard, the thumping enough to knock the brass frames on the walls, to rattle the vases tucked against the wainscotting.

By the time we get to the infirmary, my hands are fisted and my chest is flushed. My boots stagger into a slowed pace.

I follow Courtney through the heavy wood doors, wide open, and one step into the infirmary, I notice that already most of the sickbeds are occupied. Some students are wrapped up in leafy casts, others wear the brownish gleam of a burning ointment over fresh wounds, but most have the black cast, the one for broken bones.

Guess there were more than just some accidents on the slopes today.

James is one of them, the black cast crew.

Halfway down the infirmary, he’s slumped on his pillow, his casted leg elevated by the attached white strings that unravel from the ceiling.

Courtney rushes to his side, all panic and fluster.

I wander over, not too fussed since the witchdoctor is ace at her job. She will have him healed in a couple of days. Broken bones only take two or three days to heal.

It’s really not that big of a deal.

Plus, bonus , James will love the chance to hide out from class. He’s a bit of a worm that way, always trying to fake some sickness or poorly state so he can hide out.

Courtney says he has mind worry. Anxiety. And not to feed into it. Yet, that’s exactly what she does.

She fusses, leaned over his bedside.

I perch myself on the foot of the narrow, wrought-iron bed. “I see your lesson went well.”

“Don’t tease him,” she chides with a narrowed look my way.

“She’s wrong anyway,” says James, a dreamy smile on his face. He’s been drinking too many painless brews. “It was going well until after the lesson.”

I lean onto my side, my elbow planted on the mattress, and I eye him up with a sudden brightness. “What happened?” My grin is crooked. “You tried to tackle the dangerous mountain on your own?”

He shrugs. “Everyone else was doing it.”

The scoff jolts my shoulders. “By everyone else , you mean the best skiers here, the ones who have been doing this since they were children?”

“Yeah, well,” he huffs and shoots a frown down at me, “it’s because of them I’m in here.” His dreamy look slips away to something tired and sad. “I was doing just fine—” I highly doubt that “—until the Snakes caught up with me. It was your brother who barged into me. I fell, and that’s how I broke my leg.”

I nod with a curt hum. “He’s an asshole,” is all I say. It’s true, but especially so when he’s around Dray.

But he wasn’t around Dray.

Now that I think on it, I didn’t see my brother around the village at all today. He’s on the ice-hockey team—and given my brother’s apparent sour mood on the slopes after the games, I can take a wild guess that maybe his team lost.

Best to stay out of his way, then.

He doesn’t need Dray around him today to be an ass. He’ll be a natural all on his own.

After a little while, I leave Courtney and James alone and head back to the dorms.

Diamonds haunt me through the corridors.

Eyes grazing over me, like a tender touch, brushing my clavicle, lingering on my lips, all the while he’s kissing Melody, kissing her mouth the way I once thought he might kiss mine, and has kissed so many others instead.

My cheeks swell with a huffed breath.

I run my hands down my face and ignore the slight ache that’s blooming. That horrid sensation that’s somewhere between arousal and do-I-need-to-pee ?

I won’t accept any other answer but the latter, and so I stop in at the toilets on the third floor before I head to the phone booths just down the way from the main atrium.

I call Mother, not for any other reason than lack of company.

With Courtney sticking to the infirmary, and no one else to entertain me in my spare weekend hours, I bother the one who can’t tell me to go away.

Mommy dearest.

I get a win out of the call. She agrees to send a replacement for my ruined uniform, the one stained with forever gum and butterscotch sauce, even though I have plenty of others with me that I can wear. Still, it’s nice to have more things than I need. It’s nice for all of a minute or two, then the pleasant feel of it vanishes, and I wonder what the point of this wealth is, of all this money at my fingertips if I can’t find anything meaningful about it.

Do the others feel this way?

Mother, Father, Harold and Amelia?

Do they realise how empty the money is, how cold to the touch gold becomes, until it loses all meaning?

No, I don’t think they do.

They hunt it, secure it, hoard it.

And gods forbid I say anything like this to anyone in my circles. I’ll be called a common krum and dismissed entirely. That’s best-case scenario.

“I’m about to leave with Amelia—Amelia says hello.” I know Mother is gearing up to kick me off the call. “Did I tell you about the spa that opened in Vienna’s First District? The potion drips there had my skin glowing for days.”

My mouth puckers with a pout. “Going back, then?”

“I’ll be in Vienna for business. Of course we might stop in for our reservation.”

I snap the knee of my tights. “What sort of business?”

“The committee is scouting locations for the Debutante Ball.”

Business .

A funny word, isn’t it?

It can mean ruling the world if you’re a certain man in the aristos, like my father. It can mean picking out a pretty backdrop for the daughter-selling season if you’re my mother.

“Ethel prefers Geneva,” Mother tuts, and I can faintly hear the clack of her freshly manicured nails tapping together, annoyed, “but it was done eleven years ago. That witch will never hear a word she doesn’t approve of.”

Grandmother Ethel—my father’s mother—is on The Imperial Committee of Europe, too. Most of the aristos women are, particularly the older ones.

One day, I might be on it.

I don’t look forward to the dull day I take up the reins of controlling other young futures, the day I become another warden.

“Your father wants a word. Bye, dear!”

My teeth bare in a grimace.

Before I can shout at Mother that I have to go, there’s no time to talk to Father, the shift happens, and I hear the gentle fall of his watch as he lifts the receiver to his ear.

“Olivia.” He sounds genuinely pleased to speak to me. Of course he is, I’m his favourite child. The most trouble, sure, but definitely his favourite. “How are you? How are your grades?”

I slump against the wooden wall of the booth.

The curtain is drawn, offering me a lick of privacy from anyone who walks down this corridor, but I want someone to steal me away from this call.

This is what I dread.

The inquisition.

The interrogation that will—and does—occur. He asks the same every time, starting with me, then to my grades, then to my blatant lack of extracurriculars.

Between the Snakes and senior workload, I’m having some trouble sparing the time on the monotony of more study.

I don’t care for the extra credit.

Not like I’ll ever need it.

Suitors are after my dowry, not my education.

Still, Father pesters me a while before he relents and releases me from the call. With a suggestion: take up one extracurricular.

And that is the price of calling home.

I’m saved by Mr Younge of all people. He interrupts Father with barely intelligible mentions of the car and a meeting.

Father’s quick off the call.

I sit in the booth a while longer than I should, what with the murmur of the queue down the corridor growing louder. Saturday evenings are prime phone time around here.

Finally, I shove out from the curtain and I’m barely two steps gone before a third-year rushes past me, tears in his eyes, and he runs into the booth.

I wander into the mess hall for dinner, then find my way heading back to the Living Quarter. My boots falter in the atrium, tempted to turn around and make my way to the infirmary. But it will be dull, there. I can just see it now, Courtney slumped in the armchair by James’s bedside, working through study books and assignments.

The thought has me rolling my eyes.

No matter how dull and lifeless my Saturday evening is, I can’t be bothered with that.

Besides, those two don’t always want me around. I sense that when James stops looking at me, and Courtney gets snappier than usual.

I think up ideas for the rest of my night as I head back to the Living Quarter. Maybe read a book, or start looking through the magazines I have piled under my bed for New Year gifts, or burrow into the blankets and go to sleep far too early.

It’s not like I can just plug in some earbuds and listen to music until it’s late enough to justify bedtime—MP3s don’t work here, like cell phones. Tech and signals, all out of whack.

I have a lonely, bored Saturday night ahead of me.

The grand parlour is a warm burst of energy.

If Saturday night was a room, it would be this one. A roaring fireplace, the strong fragrance of sweets and whiskies and sodas, vinyls turning on the record players running on magic and batteries, the clack from the pool table.

It’s a vibe—and I’m not invited.

Asta and Serena are tucked too close on the armchair, sharing a bottle of dom.

My jaw tenses as I make my way through the parlour—getting too close to Mildred on the couch.

I spare the three of them a sweeping glance. Safe, for the most part. No Dray or Oliver in sight.

I’m passing the nook of the couches and chairs the girls have commandeered when—

Maybe so safe after all.

“ Oliviaaa ,” Serena sings my name in something of a menacing tune.

It startles me enough that my steps falter.

I raise my brows at her, the lick of her wicked smile, the sparkle in her grey eyes, like the sun pushed up close to thick, misty clouds.

Serena doesn’t bother me.

She doesn’t go out of her way to make my life hell.

The surprise is striking enough to still me—and, like an idiot, I wait.

“Fuck, marry, kill.” Serena’s smile wraps around her teeth, and in this moment, one could probably convince me that she is part vampire.

Not that such a thing exists.

I scoff and wave my hand in a dismissive gesture. “Hard pass.”

I make to push into step, but before I can even turn back to face the archway across the grand parlour, Mildred has snuck off the arm of the couch.

Now, she stands in my way, beefy arms locked over her chest, and a dead-eyed stare spearing right through me.

“Oh, come on,” Serena drawls. “Mildred, there is no need for that. Olivia will play, won’t you?”

My jaw rolls, tight, then—as I drag my tongue over my teeth—I slide a narrowed look to Serena.

“Fuck, marry, kill,” she echoes. “Oliver.”

My face scrunches.

Ew .

Mildred jumps over the arm of the couch and lands with a hard thump. “Landon.”

Asta glances at me with so much disinterest that I feel it, the insignificance of my existence, the sudden shame that flushes my cheeks as though I am the one who intrudes on their space, their time.

She doesn’t add a name, she just sighs something soft and tired as she turns her cheek to me.

Serena decides, a name so obvious that I think she meant to include it from the start, “Dray.”

Easy.

“Kill Dray—” I start.

Mildred is quick to cut me off with a guffaw. “That means you have to kiss your brother or marry your brother.”

I make a face. “If I could finish?”

Serena wears a lovely painted smile as she lifts her hand and gently swirls it, a gesture to continue.

“Kill Dray, kill Oliver, kill Landon.”

Asta rolls her eyes. “You have to marry—”

“I would kill them all before I had to anything,” I say. “Gut them and sell their organs on the black market, use the money to flee.”

Serena’s smile lifts into a grin that looks like she might take a bite out of me. There’s a dazzling severity to her, a refined and polished demeanour that I have personally seen shed to the floor as she knocked Melody Green over the head with a candlestick, straight into unconsciousness.

Serena isn’t someone to fuck with.

That girl can fight, even if all one might see when they look at her are diamonds and pearls and silks. She’s got a mean bite.

A wolf in Versace.

It’s moments like this that the bite reveals itself, and it’s both alluring and unsettling. It’s… nostalgic.

“Join us,” she says, and I must have intrigued her enough with my answer. If she was testing to see if I have changed in all these years of distance, she is glad to see that I haven’t.

I make a face. “No, thanks, I think I’ll go eat glass instead.”

Asta folds her arms over her full chest. “So you would kill your own brother? Your twin?”

I arch a brow. “It leaves more for me.”

Oliver’s voice freezes me, “Never took you as the kill-for-inheritance type.”

I look over at the stairwell, the one that leads to the guy’s dorms.

There, my brother comes down the last steps. His tight smile is menacing and he flattens his hand on his chest. “I’ll start sleeping with one eye open.”

Behind him, in black sweatpants and a t-shirt, Dray comes down the stairs. His hands are fisted around a cigar case and a bottle of scotch.

His gaze is fast to pin me.

Diamond eyes, the sharpness of them scraping down me, his mouth hot on Melody’s—

I blink on the surged memory.

Then, not a heartbeat later, Landon is jogging down the stairs, his steps as booming as his annoying laughter. Dampness clings to his hair, remnants of a shower, and he shoulders past Dray.

I watch as he drops onto the couch with Mildred, the one pushed up against the wall, the one with a prime view of me, and yet he doesn’t even glance my way.

He’s too focused on the playing cards that he has started to shuffle on his lap.

My boot slides back, and I make to retreat, as I should.

But Serena isn’t so quick to let me go.

“If you join us for one drink,” she says and lifts her finger, a fresh manicure glossing under the dim, cosy lights, “and one game, no one will bother you tonight—or the rest of the weekend.”

It’s Saturday night. Not much weekend left.

Still, it’s the teeniest bit tempting.

Oliver throws himself over the spine of the couch. He slams down on the cushioned seat and kicks up his legs. His head lolls back and he looks at his betrothed.

“You make that promise for the rest of us?” he says. “That’s confident.”

My boot slides back again, and I hope to go unnoticed.

Asta catches the retreat.

Her gaze narrows on me… and yet she says nothing about it. Almost like she wants me to leave as much as I do.

“Or,” I start as Serena’s gaze finds me, “I could leave now and go unharmed.”

“I could chase you,” Mildred challenges, but then she turns back to Landon.

He flips over a playing card. She flips the next, and it’s an ace.

Landon curses and runs his hand through his curls. No interest in this tension whatsoever.

I can outrun Mildred.

I’m faster and more agile.

But if she does catch me, that’s a headbutt or a knockout punch. And there are no enchantments keeping her out of my dorm room. There’s no way to escape.

Not to mention that Dray is still standing. Beside the arm of the couch that Oliver lounges on, he leans his weight on the sidetable and watches me. An arm’s reach between us, he could snatch me by the arm before I could twist into a run.

And I am certain that’s why he still stands,

I slide my narrowed eyes to Serena. “What game?”

There’s a procession of shouts, from never have I ever to spin the bottle (I make a twisted face at that one). None of the options seem targeted on me, on making my life hell.

Asta has turned to Serena now, engrossed, suddenly, and she murmurs her barely audible suggestion, “Most likely.”

Oliver is uncorking a bottle of ice-cold vodka. He doesn’t look at me. I pray that he does, that he gives me a sign, gives me an out—but he doesn’t.

Serena and Dray watch me.

Those gazes keep me pinned in place.

“Strip poker,” Landon suggests, earning a few snickers from Mildred, but the joke dies too quickly when he flips another card—then his face contorts with a hiss.

Oliver scrunches his nose. “I’m not trying to see that.”

He shuts it down, fast.

Relief unribbons in my chest, a ball I didn’t realise had formed, and I loosen a slight breath.

Dray draws in my stare. He lifts his hand that grips the bottle neck and gestures to the linen armchair. Sit , he tells me with that one move. And it’s an agreement to Serena’s terms.

Play one round, I won’t be harmed.

But I will be if I make a run for it.

Dray says, “Truth or dare.”

I eye him closely. My boots are planted firm. “One round.”

“Two,” Serena counters.

“You said one.”

“I did say that. One round, one drink. Like old times.”

“We didn’t drink in old times,” I grumble and slip around the arm of the cushioned chair.

Slowly, I sink into it, my gaze swerving from Snake to Snake.

Dray moves around to sit on the couch, Oliver’s socked feet just some inches away from him. He hands over the cigars to my brother who sets them on the edge of the scratched coffee table.

Serena sets out crystal tumblers, little bigger than shot glasses. She places them in a circle on the blackwood coffee table, then takes the vodka bottle from Oliver.

Uneasiness has him, firm in its grip.

His mouth moves nervously, lips sucked in and rubbing over each other, a frown furrowing his brow. He stares at the coffee table, the scratches that smear the chipped wood surface.

“We all know the rules,” Asta starts, and cuts a glance at me. “If you lie, or don’t complete the dare, you will be poisoned with the sick draught.”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek.

I haven’t had a sick draught myself, but I have seen it.

First time was third year, and the coffees at the faculty table in the mess hall were contaminated. I have never seen a viler procession of vomit before in my life, just pure black tar projecting over tables. It didn’t stop for the better part of an hour, and I swear some teachers passed out from the convulsions.

Master Welham had black-stained teeth for a week.

I shudder at the memory.

Mildred finally pulls away from the couch and abandons the card game. She won. I know she won, because Landon hands over a rose-gold watch before he wanders, sulking, to the spot between Oliver on the couch and Serena on the armchair.

Landon drops onto the corner of the rug with a hard grunt, a scowl creasing his face.

I eye the watch that Mildred tugs onto her own wrist, and my mouth pinches as I guess the prestigious timepiece to be none other than a Patek Philippe. That’s a serious bet to place on some small, casual card game.

I doubt even Oliver would place such a massive bet on a small game. It’s not that he doesn’t have the money to spare, because he does, but rather that it’s too wasteful.

Oliver has been better taught the value of money than I. Woven into the threads of our futures, mine is spend it, his is to create it.

Landon seems to have learnt the lessons I have been taught. Too wasteful.

That is a problem.

There was a time the Barlows ran the tech world. But another witching family, the Garcias, rose up from the Americas in the early 2000s and stole the reins.

The Barlows could fall into upper gentry with just a couple of bad investments. Then Landon will be losing Tudor timepieces in silly card games.

“The glasses,” Serena says with a look up at me, luring in my attention, “will be the filter. It will only add the draught if it finds you are lying.”

I nod, a slight gesture, because I know that to be a warning. No harm will come to me if I play along.

Asta pushes up from Serena’s chair.

Together, they pour clear vodka into the glasses, then hand them out.

Dray sets down his scotch between his bare feet, then takes his offered glass. It’s filled to the brim, and some droplets spill down his hand. He leans closer and licks the clear trail away—and his eyes lift to me.

I blink, a flutter of my lashes, before I turn my hot cheek to him. A frown wrinkles my mouth as I snatch the glass from Asta, and a decent splash hits the thigh of my tights.

With a glance down, I see that the cream hem of my skirt has darkened with spilled drops. I swat at it.

I shift in the chair. But it doesn’t matter how I move, how I sit, how I lean my weight—I am not uncomfortable because of the chair, but rather the Snakes around me.

Everything about it feels unnatural.

Everyone has their glass of vodka when Serena sinks into her seat. She crosses her ankles and leans to the side, then aims her smile down at Landon slumped on the floor.

“Truth.” She ignites the game. “Or dare?”

Landon murmurs, “Dare.”

Serena’s smile fades a touch. “I dare you to kiss Olivia—for a full minute.”

My face falls.

Blood is quick to drain out of my head and pool to my churning stomach.

Landon doesn’t look too pleased about it, either.

His eyes roll back with a huff before he brings the rim of the glass to his mouth, then shots it back. He slams it down, hard, on the coffee table before he pushes up onto his feet.

My wide gaze cuts to my brother.

But Oliver isn’t looking at me.

Landon sidesteps along the edge of the coffee table, inching closer and closer to me, rigid on the armchair.

But I trace my brother’s steady stare to Dray Sinclair.

Looking up from beneath his lashes, the shadows of the grand parlour cast a menacing, mutinous look over him.

“You fucked up,” Landon says, and though he looks down at me, the deer-caught-in-a-scope, his words are for Serena. “You didn’t specify tongue.”

Serena’s face hardens. Her lashes lower over steel eyes, and I think fleetingly of drawn swords.

Landon moves for me.

I sink back into the armchair, eyes wide enough that they might just pop right out of my head. “Wait—”

“No.” Landon is quick to straddle me. His weight drops onto my lap, pinning me down, and his head cocks to the side. “I’ll give you a choice. Kiss, one minute, no tongue.” His cinnamon eyes darken to the deep shade of his complexion, shadows flickering over his stormy face. “Or I forfeit the dare—and I’ll make sure to get all that black vomit out, right here, on you.”

My brow furrows.

Hand too tight around the glass in my clammy grip, I am rigid, so rigid I could pull a muscle just sitting here.

Landon shrugs. “Either way, I’ll aim for your face.”

I don’t get the chance to answer.

I don’t get a moment more than a startled gasp as he swoops down for me.

His hand sweeps around to the nape of my neck where it holds, firm, and I’m fast suffocated.

His mouth is mushed against mine.

It would be a hard kiss if he didn’t have such cushioned lips. There’s no pain behind it.

Still, I’m rigid. And so is he.

There is no enjoyment in this for either of us—just the world’s longest fucking minute, and I feel Dray’s stare searing into my cheek the whole time, like an ice burn.

“Time,” Asta calls, her voice like chimes.

Landon tugs away from me.

Wide eyed, I watch him go, squeezing down the edge of the coffee table back to his moody, brooding spot on the floor.

As he drops his bum to the floor, he grunts the question at my brother. “Truth or dare?”

I wipe the back of my hand over my mouth.

Oliver has his knee hiked, his forearm rested on the bone of it, and his gaze is downcast to the embroidered rug. Detached or deep in thought, he downs the drink, then tosses the glass aside like it has wronged him.

I almost think he didn’t hear Landon, but then he murmurs, “Dare.”

My brow arches.

But Landon doesn’t seize the opportunity that I expected him to see it as.

He lolls his head back, annoyed, annoyed that he needs to put effort into his thought. Then his lashes flutter, as though struck by the best idea that has ever existed, and he pushes to sit upright.

His grin is lazy, but eyes are alight. “I dare you to get my watch back from Mildred and return it to me.”

A flicker of light passes over the green of Oliver’s eyes.

I recognise it as relief . But gods know why.

He turns his darkening look on Mildred.

She crosses her strong arms over her chest.

Trousered legs spread, boots firm on the rug, she leans back on the armchair and cocks her brow.

Try it.

That’s what I read on her.

But Oliver probably would.

I don’t think that is a wise take for her.

“I can take it by force,” he says, a challenge in his smile, a dangerous one, “or buy it for ten.”

“Ten?” she scoffs. “It’s word at least sixty.”

“Brand new,” he says with a shrug, “or vintage. But that is neither. The band is scratched, the face cracked at the rim. It’s worth forty at most.”

￡40,000 is still a hefty amount—particularly to a gentry, like Mildred Green. So I am not surprised by her response:

“Then pay me forty.”

“Twenty, and I won’t break your leg on the slopes next weekend,” he says with a smile.

Her eyes narrow, brown like her hair, tugged back into a plain, mid-scalp ponytail.

The pink of her tongue runs over her bottom lip, and she thinks, hard.

She takes a moment. Weighing up the money, weighing up the risk of a broken-then-healed leg before her next game, calculating.

And I am on the edge of my seat.

I forgot all of this.

What it’s like to be with them, with the Snakes, as though I belong. Sure, when we were children, this wasn’t exactly how we spent our time, drinking and gambling, but the dynamics are so close that I almost feel like a hand reaches through time and snatches me back to Serena’s tea parties and Landon’s vineyard chases and lounging around the stunning grounds at the Sinclairs estate.

“Fine.” Mildred tugs the watch off her wrist. The clasp rattles, in dire need of repair, of love and care. And like it’s a mid-tier brand, she tosses it away.

Oliver swipes it, then hands it back to Landon.

He is quick to fasten it onto his wrist.

Oliver turns his severe stare on Dray. “Truth,” he states the word with a slow enunciation, “or dare.”

Dray’s mouth pulls into a small smirk. The brightness of his eyes glitter in the dim light. But that edge of ice still cuts from him, icicles in his aura, the darkened dimple slashing along his cheek.

Everyone falls into silence.

I watch, we all do, as Dray drapes his arms over the spine and side of the couch, then sinks into the corner—and dead-stares my brother.

A standoff.

Not the kind between two friends having a little fun. Not a playful challenge. No, this is the side to their friendship that has blood spilled on the sparring mats, that breaks noses, that tackles in the corridors.

They can be punching each other bloody one minute, then the next, they are sharing a drink and cigar on the roof.

They act more like brothers than friends.

I can’t claim to have ever understood them.

Dray lifts the glass in a salute. The sawdust hues of his hair flicker with the movement that dances firelight off the crystal glass.

His pink lips move around the word, move as they did against Melody Green’s mouth, soft and tender—

“Dare.”

Dare ?

Again?

What the actual fuck is up with these people?

If I’m playing it safe, which I will, the obvious choice is truth. So one might think that they aren’t playing it safe, and yet I get this tense, sickly feeling in my stomach that they are.

I understand now.

They avoid truth, because the questions might be worse than the dares. There’s no lying to be tolerated in this game.

Yet, the dare hangs in the air.

Still, no one speaks. No one even shifts in their seat to make a rustling noise, or clears their throat, or sips their drink—nothing.

I’m sure that if I looked over my shoulder, I would see that nearby witches have fallen to a safe silence, too, loiter too close to the couches by the fireplace, gazes sliding over us.

“I dare you,” Oliver starts, and he doesn’t think slowly, he just considers his wording, “to act as though Olivia is not here—” His mouth spreads around his pearly white teeth, and it looks more of a threat than a grin. “—for two whole weeks.”

My heart slingshots.

My fingers tighten around my glass.

To keep the players to the dare, the sick draught will stick to the lining of the stomach. That’s why we drink it. It will hang around for two weeks—and if we go back on our dare, the sick will start.

I might just get two weeks, a whole fucking fortnight without so much as look from Dray. Because no one is picking the black vomit, not even Dray.

I dare a small smile.

I have to suck my lips inwards and bite down on them just to keep it at bay.

Then Dray turns a dark look on me.

His gaze runs me over, slow and careful, before he says, “And what of her round? She’s after me, and so I’m the one who’s to ask her which she’ll chose.”

“No, no,” Oliver still has that grin pinned to his face, that unsettling look. “She isn’t here,” he adds in a whisper.

My mind is whirling to catch up.

My brother is doing something, but what exactly, I don’t know. Is he fucking with Dray for the sake of it? That’s not unusual for them. Is he blocking him from whatever schemes he quickly conjured up for my round in this game? But if that’s what Oliver is doing, then the better question is why?

Oliver has never thrown a net of protection over me. Never gone out of his way to shield me from Dray.

I cut a glance to Serena.

Her eyes are alight, and she’s perched on the edge of her seat. She holds her shot glass, but her entire being is swallowed up by whatever is happening between Oliver and Dray.

Dray loosens a breath. A slight sound, reluctant, and his jaw clenches, tight. Beneath his t-shirt, the flex of his muscles tensing is a slight, unnoticeable thing to anyone not paying attention.

Then, he lifts his glass—and downs the draught-spiked vodka.

Oliver turns his sharp gaze on me. “What are you still doing here?”

My lips part around silence. I look probably like a gaping fish for a moment. “It’s my turn—”

“Not if you don’t exist to the player before you,” he says it as though I am five years old and thoroughly slow. “Fuck off.”

Don’t need telling twice.

I squirm out of my chair and drop the glass to the coffee table. It topples over and spills, but I don’t spare it a moment’s glance.

I get the hell out of the grand parlour.

And the Snakes keep their word.

I am allowed to leave.

There’s no attack to come.

No one follows.

I make it to the dorm room in one baffled piece.