Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,24

relationship and knowing you’d get kicked out of society. I admit it! But I also hate seeing people fight against what they want just because they think it’s improper or something. If you’ve already been making your own way in the world you might as well get all the love you want.”

“I didn’t think I wanted any love, particularly,” I said, plucking my lower lip. “I’ve been alone a while.”

“It always sneaks up on you,” Billie said. “When you least expect it. In that case, I’ll leave you to it. I think you should try for it and see how it goes.”

“Try for all four of them?”

“What do you think I’m talking about? But you have to take the bull by the horns. If you’re going to go for it, go for it, or you’ll make it weird.”

“Oh, I’ll make it weird?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be weird.” Billie shrugged. “You’re just too up the butt of your boarding school education. Now, you want to come check out the upstairs?”

“I’m not up any butts,” I said.

She let out a very loud laugh and I felt like she was going to squeeze her revenge out of me in a thousand tiny moments from this day forward.

Upstairs we had a lot of serious canopy beds. I’m talking beds with enough fabric to open up a fabric store. Not only that, one of the rooms had walls covered in the same fabric as the bed, a green and pink floral print. It was dizzying.

“If you say we need to preserve these walls, I’m going to bite you in your sleep,” Jake said, grinning at me.

“Nooo. You have my permission to tear those down immediately. In fact, I might just do it myself!”

“There’s our Hel,” he said.

Of course, there was a library, but a lot of it was cleared out. A desk with many drawers had been ransacked.

“That was me,” Jasper said. “I was looking for the diary Byron mentioned. No luck.” He started pushing the drawers back in now. A lot of them were being stubborn and he was cursing as he punched one into place. I think Jasper was just finding excuses not to walk too much. I was so pissed whenever I saw him limping, knowing my cousin did that to him and it was going to slow down our progress a lot. I wondered if he would be able to climb a ladder at all.

Fuck. We really did have a lot for three healthy people to do, since Billie admitted that she had no skills.

“This is the master,” Jake said. “Prepare yourself.” The halls upstairs had led us to three medium-sized bedrooms plus the library so far, but now we reached the largest bedroom.

This room was like a 70s boudoir designed by Louis the XIV, with gilt picture frames, gilt mirrors, gilt lamps with the most enormous 1970s lampshades I’d ever seen, and a gilt bed and dresser set. The whole thing was planted in a layer of thick gold carpeting and smelled like healing tonic for old people.

“Ewww,” I managed.

“But wait,” Jake said. “There’s more.” He jumped onto the bed belly first and the whole thing wobbled.

It was a water bed. Oh god.

“But then, the bathroom has never been updated since it was first installed,” Billie said. “Look at this! This is the craziest room I have ever seen.”

Considering that the rest of the house was already pretty crazy, I was wary of how much crazier it could get.

Obviously the home had been owned by wealthy people who were early on in the bathroom trend. I had never, ever seen a bathroom like this.

The shower was the sort of Victorian spa shower made from a metal frame that looked sort of like a torture device, encapsulating the victim in a cage with spray nozzles going all the way down from head to feet—a rib cage shower, as they are known for reasons that seem immediately obvious.

The bathtub wasn’t even clawfoot. It was tin, set in a wooden box of sorts that honestly reminded me of a coffin. And the wood was rotting badly around it, making it extra creepy. The tub matched wooden wainscoting that surrounded the entire large room, and it had also seen better days, as had the wooden floors.

The sink, chipped and cracked, had a painted bowl and candleholders to light the mirror, while the toilet was this scalloped porcelain art piece where the S-bend in the toilet actually had the shape of a fish, and