Maybe it was a warning that he, too, was unhinged, because of all the people to piss off, Grayson Crowne was the worst.
“What are you going to do to me?” I finally asked.
He tilted his head, lids heavy and bored. “Are you one of those chicks that gets off on punishment?”
I opened and closed my mouth before finally managing a very witty and eloquent: “I—huh?”
He took a step toward me, and I wanted to step back, but I was already flush against the window. “You must have heard what I do to the servants who make eye contact with me.”
I quickly looked at the floor, shock and fear fighting to pound the drum in my chest. Almost ten years I’d lived in Crowne Hall and I’d never once looked a Crowne in the eyes. What made me think I could look Gray in his?
He was the worst of them all.
The cruelest.
Maybe even more so than his mother, Tansy. One time a guard accidentally caught Gray’s eyes while saving him from a crazed fan. The next day he was just…gone. No one knows what happened to him, but people have theories. Some even think he was deported—even though he was a United States citizen.
Another torturous moment passed, and I knew he’d stepped even closer to me, because his bright-white sneakers came into view. Sneakers I knew cost more than a mortgage payment, that he would wear once then toss.
“Go get your shit out of whatever dark hole you’re living in,” he said.
Shocked, I snapped my head up, catching his eyes once again. He arched a dark-blond brow, and I quickly looked away.
What the hell is wrong with me?
“Why?” I finally squeaked.
Would I be like the guard? A ghost story the servants told each other?
When Gray finally spoke, every nightmare I imagined paled. “You’re coming to my wing.”
His wing? No one was allowed in his wing, not even maids or cooks or his freaking friends. It was the most heavily guarded place in this palace.
Remember to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
“I’m Ms. Abigail’s girl…” I finally managed. “I need to stay in the wing with the other girls.”
He grasped my chin, dragging my eyes to his. Another illicit icy-blue flash before I closed mine tight.
“Not anymore.”
Eyes closed, Gray was somehow more present. His soft touch and seductive scent heightened. Gray smelled expensive and unattainable, something someone like me shouldn’t be close enough to know, like touching the Mona Lisa.
“She’ll be mad,” I said with closed eyes.
His thumb dug into my chin. “I don’t give a fuck.”
Silence dug and scraped as I weighed my limited options.
Then his breath warmed my lips.
I stopped breathing. My lungs stopped working.
“We can just pretend this night never happened,” I attempted. “You pretend you didn’t hear me, and I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you.”
That was the absolute worst thing to say, I realized too late. We hadn’t acknowledged what I’d learned in the dark, and that had been my nebulous armor. But then I spoke, and his grasp on my chin turned vicious, deep, cutting.
“Should we?” he asked, so deathly calm and quiet. “I don’t know, Snitch. How the fuck am I going to pretend I didn’t hear your psychotic little love confession? Gonna have to start sleeping with one eye open now.”