if I moved it would tear the skin bloody. I slightly shook my head.
“I told you I didn’t share, Angel.” Using my lip, he jerked my head to the side, and bit my neck.
In front of everyone.
I cried out, my eyes slanting to the side, finding Grayson’s, as West sunk his teeth into my neck. The look in his eyes would haunt me, almost as much as what followed next.
The change.
He went from calm to animalistic in the blink of an eye. Grayson lunged for me, but a guard wrapped his arm around his neck, pulling him back to the floor.
West released my neck, and said low enough only I could hear. “Remember this moment the next time you think to find Grayson, Angel.” Then he stood up, addressing the room. “One to match the other I gave earlier. I think we’re all tired. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you tomorrow,” Arthur said, eyes still narrowed.
“Merry Christmas Eve,” Tansy said.
My jaw hit the ground. I always knew Tansy was horrible to servants, but I thought she had a small space in her wretched, rotten heart left for her children.
I couldn’t stay quiet. I knew the consequences if I spoke, but—
“You—” West slapped his hand over my mouth, muffling the word bitch.
Then West dragged me out of the room.
I struggled.
Grayson urged me with his eyes to stop fighting, but I couldn’t leave him—not like this.
I didn’t care about consequences, punishments, whatever the hell was going to happen to me.
So West wrapped his arms around my ribcage and lifted me off the floor, dragging me out of the room. My arms held uselessly and hopelessly out to Grayson.
Grayson’s eyes followed me as I left the room.
Strung between two guards, his arms pulled to their length, muscles, veins, viscera in stark relief. He looked like a king.
A fallen one.
And that’s the last I saw of him before I was dragged around the corner.
Fifteen
GRAY
I’m keeping a secret from my little wife.
What happened? What changed?
Questions burned in Story’s eyes, questions I wanted to answer. I didn’t know where to begin. The guards let me go with a shove, and my mother came to me, a tight smile on her face.
“Your wife is waiting for you by the Christmas tree.”
It wasn’t talked about that my guards were now used to keep me locked up, not safe. Because with a Crowne cold war, the battles were always hidden under layers of taffeta and silk, so you couldn’t see blood or motive.
I worked out my shoulder, stiff from being held to the floor. “You mean Lottie?”
Her brows drew. “Do you have another wife?”
Even if it was only in secret, even if only fate watched, Snitch was forever and always my real and true wife.
And now she was somewhere in this dark castle with a monster.
“Of course not,” I gritted.
She lingered, feathering the bruise purpling beneath my collar from the last time I ditched my guards and disregarded their silent threat.
“We don’t get to choose our roles, Grayson. We don’t get to audition; we’re cast in them from birth, and we play them until we die. This is the life you were given in exchange for the privilege you have.” She slowly lifted her eyes to mine. “So remember your role.”
“Or what?”
Still holding the fabric at my neck, my mother’s eyes shifted over my shoulder, the slightest crease in her brow. “What happens to the play when the main character decides not to show up?”
I followed her eyes, looking over my shoulder to see what had her brow furrowed. My grandfather, the puppet master himself, was waiting in the hall.
“Everyone else on the stage suffers,” she finished.
Her eyes lingered a moment on my grandfather. A hero for my sisters. A good man. A good father. Everything I hoped to become, every reason that Snitch sacrificed for me, ran through my mind like a freight as I saw something in my mother’s face I’d never seen before: humanity.
Fear.
It vanished as quickly as it came, and she stepped back, putting on her mask and going to him. The guards that had thrust me to the ground followed her. Her hand lightly brushed my grandfather’s shoulder as she walked by him, something whispered between them I couldn’t catch.
Then his eyes landed on mine.
“You didn’t bring your friends this time.” I noted the absence of his guards, the ones he used to teach me respect the first two weeks Story was gone.
“I’m here to talk.”
Sure.
He dragged his pointer finger along the underside of his