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 jaw. “You’ve made another scene, two times tonight. For another man’s mistress, no less.”
I palmed my forehead, curled my fist, tried to think past the bright and blinding pain in the center of my forehead anytime that word was uttered.
His mistress.
His fucking mistress.
“Do you know the history of the Crowne-du Lac rivalry?” he asked lightly.
The rivalry between the Crownes and the du Lacs is so old it predates my grandfather and even his grandfather. I don’t know how it happened, or when it started.
“Just that it’s old,” I said.
“It began with a girl and a gold coin. The wrong girl.” He circled our room, fingering gilded antiques and cloth-covered oil paintings.
He turned to me. “I’m sure you know about the coins.”