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Eleri gave me a very worried look.
“It’s not hatred,” I said, shaking my head.
“I think it is,” said Eleri quietly, her forehead creasing. “I think he’s right.”
“It wasn’t as bad for you, Rohan,” said Sinclair. “I was the grandson of the Queen, and my mother presented. I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t present, because I knew if I didn’t, I could fade away. I’d still be at least a little interesting, but only as the sad and pitiable orphan of a tragic princess. But then, got my fucking knot, and here we are.”
He wasn’t wrong. His life had been harder than mine.
“They don’t hate you,” said Maguire. “We don’t hate you. It’s only… we feel as though you belong to us in this way, I guess. You’re our queens and kings and princes. So, I guess we feel like we have a right to you. To see you, to know about you, and to demand you behave in ways that please us. I’m realizing that’s not really fair, though. I actually hadn’t thought about how much it must suck to feel as if all these people think they have a stake in you. The pressure, the unfairness of it. To not belong to yourself. Fuck.”
“Why do you think we presented?” said Eleri to him. “Why us? Why did this happen?”
“It happened to me because of you,” said Maguire.
“That theory,” I said, “the one that the reporters were talking about at the press conference, something about environment?”
“Yeah,” said Sinclair. “I’ve read about it. You know, there are certain kinds of salamanders that can change from male to female if it’s necessary for the environment. For instance, if there aren’t enough females, some of the males will turn into females so that they can have baby salamanders. So, it’s not out of the range of possibility that it could be something like that. Maybe it’s got something to do with, I don’t know, a kind of suitability genetically for mating, and when two people who have that suitability for each other get close, it makes them present as either alphas or omegas. Since the aristocracy is sequestered, it would make sense that we rarely are in close proximity with anyone except each other, and that’s why it’s usually us who present.”
“When are you studying salamanders?” I said to Sinclair.
“I read shit,” said Sinclair. “I have a phone connected to the internet like everyone else. I know how to use a search engine.”
“That would make sense for Maguire, maybe,” said Eleri. “But not me. I didn’t present when I got close to Devlin for the first time. It was when I was in college.”
“Where’d you go to college?” said Sinclair.
“Lanbridge University,” said Eleri.
“In Walton?” said Sinclair. “Would have been what? Five or six years ago?”
“Four,” she said.
“I was there,” said Sinclair. “I used to go to parties in those dorms all the time. I had this guy I was messing around with who lived in Maltin Hall.”
Eleri’s lips parted. “I lived in Maltin Hall.”
Sinclair grinned at her. “Well, fuck, sparrow, I think you’re my fated mate, not Devlin’s.”
“She’s all of ours,” I countered. “We all belong together, and we all know it. But I don’t have the faintest idea how it’s ever going to work.”
18
eleri
WHEN I GOT back to the palace, Rohan said we should all go to find Devlin, so we went to his room.
But he wouldn’t open the door to us, and I said that maybe I should be the one who went in to talk to him, or maybe just me and Maguire.
Maguire, however, said he’d like to go home and grab a shower and get something to eat before he was due back to work his shift on my door for the evening, and we all agreed that he should go.
Sinclair left, saying very pointedly to me that he was going to go smoke a cigarette, as if he expected me to tell him something different. I just shrugged at him. I did think he should quit smoking, but I wasn’t going to ask him to just up and do it because I told him to.
Rohan tried with me to get Devlin to open the door for a while longer and when that didn’t work, he left me to it.
I pressed my fingers against Devlin’s door. “It’s only me now,” I said. “Let me in.”
“Eleri, please, it doesn’t change anything. I said I need space, and I can’t help but feel as if none of you are listening to me.”
