made her leave, because I heard the antique door creak shut.
The silence grew like a thick heat.
I stared at the table until my vision blurred.
Until knuckles glanced beneath my chin, and I found warm brown eyes. “Did you get enough to eat?”
My hand still throbbed from the thwacking I got during dinner. I barely touched my food. I craved suckers. French fries. Things he could never give me.
“Yes.”
West probed me, his brown eyes too sincere. He’d taken my locket, I reminded myself, and for all I knew he’d chucked it into the nearest marsh.
But I was curious why after a week he was suddenly here, and as silence continued to thicken, so did my nerves tangle.
“Miss me?” he asked, lips curved.
There was no right way to answer this. I wondered where West went during the week, briefly, but not enough to say the words aloud, worried I’d jinx it. Break my luck, and he’d come back more often.
“You must have more questions,” he said.
I was overflowing with them, but not enough to talk to West.
“In a few days you won’t have a voice, Angel. You might as well use it now.”
That hit me, as though someone cracked my ribs with a baseball bat. I met his eyes, and I swear I saw pity. I looked away, looked at the floor.
West stood up, clearing his throat. “I think you’re overdue for a tour, Angel.”
We walked outside among the gardens. These weren’t like Tansy Crowne’s measured grass and severed hedges; it was savage and green with overflowing wildflowers and stalks of grass blowing in the wind. Birds perched on crumbling cobblestone walls, their seraphic melodies like the dappled green and gold world around them.
“Some birds know up to two thousand songs,” West said.
I trailed my finger along the weathered and cracking stone, memories of my uncle overwhelming me. “My uncle used to tell me songbirds were the original poets. He would have loved it here—”
I broke off, hating myself for sharing the memory. When West ghosted me and I shared my first poems with my uncle, he’d started to encourage dreams I’d always considered fantasy. I remembered the words he’d said to me, the look in his eyes.
Hope.
I looked back, finding West was looking at me strangely. In his riding boots and pea coat, he looked like a rogue on the marshes. All he was missing was a cravat.
My brow furrowed. “Why do you care so much about my uncle?”
“I’m trying to win you back, Angel.”
I quickly shifted the conversation away from me, from anything personal. “What are you doing if you’re not here all day?”
“I’m still here. Working.”
“On what?”
He gave me a look. “Our happily ever after.” My gut churned. I couldn’t help the feeling that every time I spoke, no matter the subject, I was giving him what he wanted. I didn’t feel safe—at all.
He stepped toward me. “I think I’ve just had a breakthrough.”
I stepped behind the broken cobblestone wall, putting a barrier between us “And what did you find—”
West gripped my chin, dragging my neck over the wall, cutting me off. “When you’re alone with me, you can talk. Always. But when we are with company, you must never talk. Ever.” His grip bruised. “This is very important.”
His eyes traveled beyond me, where the du Lac servant with green eyes walked the fields. When she was gone, he let me go, spearing his pockets.
“What about…” I trailed off, taking my bottom lip between my teeth as the words those girls had spoken earlier spun in my mind.
Is it true you’re the Cinderella of Crowne Hall?
My—rather, our, all four of us—twisted little fairy had traveled the world.
“What about the paparazzi when I become your mistress? How are you going to explain that away?”
West straightened his shoulders. “What about the paparazzi?”
“The paparazzi will wonder. The world will wonder. I’m not just a nobody anymore.”
He laughed. “Any stories that got out about you, were only because I wanted them there.”
I opened and closed my mouth.
That couldn’t be true, could it?
“Even the one that got me attacked?”
Pain flickered across his eyes, almost making me think he was sorry, but it vanished in an instant.
“Yes.” His voice was stone. “Even that one.”
“You’re evil.”
His eyes flashed to mine, but he said nothing.
“You can’t silence the internet,” I gritted.
“Josephine used to be a famous model, she was on the cover of magazines, on runways, and at one point you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing her name. Josephine St. Germaine was going to be