No, no, she couldn’t leave it like this. Embry’s legs automatically started moving in the same direction, her ridiculous heels slowing her progression into a decent run.
Hitting her stride, she called out. “Oakley, wait—”
A warm hand caught her upper arm and all her momentum with it.
“Let her go, Woodcross.”
Rye.
“No, I have to—”
“You have to let her be. She doesn’t want to hear from you right now.”
Embry read his face, as stern as a tidal wave. “But I have to explain. That’s not—I didn’t do any of that.”
“But you did do that.”
“What?! No, I didn’t.” Embry looked wildly around for confirmation that Rye had lost his grip on reality along with her chance to snag Oakley. But Balthazar was walking away, not looking at her. In fact, he was holding himself so rigidly opposite them that Embry realized he was purposefully not watching.
He was embarrassed. For her. By her.
Pangs of shame tore through her gut. Embry tried to rip herself away from Rye but instead made the mistake of meeting his full-on disappointment. She had to defend herself.
“She’s got it all wrong!”
“She doesn’t, Em. She doesn’t. You did help her, yes. But what you just said right now, and how you tore her down, on the biggest night of her life so far? That’s not something a friend would do. Not a new friend, not an old friend. What you said was badly, badly done, and right now there’s no coming back from that.”
To Embry’s horror, tears were spiking in the corners of her eyes.
Rye’s admonishment hurt more than Oakley’s. More than Balthazar’s embarrassment. More than losing the crown.
Her voice shook, his words about Merle coming home to roost, rearranged on her lips. “I made it all about me…”
There was no I-told-you-so. Instead, Rye dragged a hand down his jaw and drew in a deep breath. “I think it would be best if you called it a night. I can walk you to the dorm—”
Embry wrested her arm away, stumbled back three steps, and caught her balance, stubbornly refusing to take Rye’s hands as he thrust them out to help steady her. She shook her head, wordsballing in her throat with a rising sob. Her gathering tears were seconds away from falling. Her lips were trembling as she grimaced hard to keep that sob from escaping.
She couldn’t let Rye see her like this. He knew her best, which made this hurt the worst.
Embry shook her head again, pressing her hands into the air between them, keeping Rye from seeing her pain at close range. Then she started moving away from him, the same way Oakley had gone but to a totally different destination. “Em?” Rye called at her back.
She couldn’t tell if he was moving to follow her, no sounds coming over the pounding of blood in her ears. “Take Daddy home.”
And then, with a heaving sob, Embry Woodcross ran for the spires of Raven’s Head.
The dorm. Her bed. The dark. Away, away, away.
CHAPTER 13
BY MORNING’S FIRST LIGHT
EMBRY DIDN’T SLEEP A WINK THAT NIGHT.
Or she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t knocked herself out with a heavy-duty sleep potion. Embry didn’t prefer to use magic like that because it was akin to dosing with triple-strength NyQuil, but she couldn’t just lie there and let Oakley’s wordsandRye’s admonishment circle like vultures in her brain until dawn.
Therefore, she woke ten hours later, feeling as if she’d been hit by the same train that had mutilated Rye’s Doc Martens from the night before. Which made her think of Rye’s abject disappointment, which led to a fresh ball of emotion to gather in her windpipe as new tears pressed the corners of her bleary vision.
“Ugh,” she moaned, and forced herself into the en suite bathroom for a cold shower.
