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“Yeah.” She still stared at him, looking for a seam of where the illusion met his real face. She wouldn’t find one. “Magic. Got it. Hey, is that Byron’s guy?” she asked, looking beyond me to where the path snaked between Everard Tower and the laboratory. I spotted who she meant instantly—a tall guy our age dressed in fitted trousers and a white shirt with a narrow tie, his sandy hair swept back from his deeply tanned face and an expression of anxiety tightening his features. Yeah, I knew that feeling.
“That’s him!” I confirmed, grinning. Honey hadn’t met Gustin, Byron’s boyfriend yet, but now was the perfect chance. As little as I liked being social and talking to new people, Gustin was one of us by extension of Byron, so I had to make an effort.
Miz held out his hand—calloused and deep gold compared to his usual soft, pale hand—when I took a step, and I answered his plea, or command, and slid mine into it as we crossed the light-strung field.
“Hey, Gustin!” I called, and smiled when he turned, recognising the dread in his body language. “I don’t know if you remember me, we met once. This is Honey, we’re Byron’s friends. Is he coming tonight?”
He’d been absent more and more, and increasingly hard to track down, but I couldn’t blame him for spending all his time with Gustin. The man was elegant and pretty and seemed really sweet.
His soft green eyes narrowed with confusion when we reached him. “Byron…?”
“Yeah,” Honey said with sly glee, “you know, your boyfriend.”
Gustin blinked, and then blinked again, looking from me to Honey to Miz. “I know who you mean, but he’s not my boyfriend. I barely know him. Maybe you’ve confused me with someone else?”
My world, previously turning on its axis, screeched to a halt. “Yeah, maybe,” I heard myself saying. I nodded when he excused himself politely, clearly uncomfortable.
“Maybe it was a different guy,” Honey suggested, her voice brittle. “There’s an endless supply of pretty men at Ford.”
“He pointed Gustin out to me, and addressed him by name,” I replied, my voice strangely dull. “He said he’s shy, and that’s why he didn’t want to spend time with us. Because he had anxiety.”
Honey didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could say.
“It’s clever if you think about it,” I said bitterly, holding onto Miz like a raft in a storm. “I’d empathise with anyone who had anxiety, so I’d give them space. And if he chose someone shy as his fake boyfriend, he’d always have an explanation why they weren’t spending time with us.”
“And the fake boyfriend would give him a cover when he disappeared for long periods of time,” Miz pointed out, his mouth pressed into a thin line.
Honey’s shell shocked expression morphed into understanding and disbelief. “He lied to us.”
It wasn’t just me he’d lied to—he’d given Gustin as an excuse when he left Honey and I at breakfast, at dinner, during study sessions. My stomach knotted.
“But why would he lie?” she asked, her hands crumpling the fine silk of her dress.
My heart hurt. “There are so many reasons, but one really obvious one.” Miz pulled me against his side, his arm around me. “He wasn’t there that night we got cursed, or there’d be a mark—his hair colour different, his behaviour changing—but Nightmare got to him. She must have.”
It was the only thing that made sense.
“What if…?” Honey began, chewing her bottom lip. “The Assassin…”
“No,” I argued instantly. “No.”
Byron wasn’t the one who tormented me with texts and threats, who I chased across campus that night, who’d been seen by multiple people stalking the grounds of Ford with blood dripping from a knife. The same days people were killed.
That wasn’t Byron.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CAT
Idon’t know how we got through the introductions and into the auction. I blinked and I had a catalogue in my hand, and Alastor was standing proud and smug on the stage that’d been built at the far end of the marquee, guests murmuring as he announced the auction for a signed Lakers jersey. I hadn’t bid on anything and I didn’t plan to. I was counting down the minutes until I could run home to Lawrence Hall as soon as possible. Or I’d beg Miz to take me to the castle, where I could hide behind the shields and cry my heart out.
My best friend had lied to me. He didn’t have a boyfriend. He’d been absent so often it was strange. And there was a cloaked madman stalking the grounds of Ford, threatening and killing people. I didn’t want to connect the dots, but I couldn’t help it. Honey’s words burrowed deep into my brain.
She stood on the stage beside Alastor now, handing him items to display with a smile fixed on her face, the curve of her cheeks visibly strained. They’d already raised a hundred thousand pounds with three lots, and satisfaction radiated from Alastor as he presented items like a king looking down on his lowly subjects. I hated him.
No matter what I thought about Byron, and even if I’d seen him slip something under my door—if he was the Assassin—I knew it was Alastor calling me, texting me threats, grating my nerves to shreds. The messages echoed his threats from the graveyard, when he threw me up against the mausoleum.
Miz snagged a flute of champagne from a roving waiter and handed it to me, tucking me tighter into his side. “Tor should be here soon.”
