Page 85 of The Bargain

Desdemona’s shoulders are rounded, her entire posture relaxed. Her laughter is bright and almost boyish—she sounds exactly like her father when she laughs. And she looks fucking happy.

I’ve never realised, until this very moment, that I’ve never actually seen Desdemona happy.

“Anyway—then Zach had the audacity of telling me my own fiancée once broke up our engagement out of pride,” Séverin Montcroix is saying, gesturing dramatically. “This coming from the guy who was so proud he had to propose to the love of his life just to win some stupid academic prize that nobody even cares about except for like ten people in Oxford!”

“Which he didn’t win, as a matter of fact,” Theodora, Zachary’s wife in question, pipes up.

She has pale hair cut to her shoulders, and the same swan-like grace as her son Blaise. Her husband throws her a scandalised look.

“If anything, that makes my cause more noble: you’re the one who accepted my proposal to secure the victory. Therein lies the proof of which of us was most calculated.”

“This isn’t debate club, Uncle Zach,” Desdemona points out as he hands her a cup of cocoa. “I don’t think your old techniques are going to work here.”

“The thing is that those old techniques never worked,” Séverin pipes in, dumping pancakes into a platter from which everyone is helping themselves. “He spent his entire time in Spearcrest—seven years, mind you!—trying to get her to date him, all to no avail.”

Dimitri’s dad, handing me a bottle of water from the fridge, adds: “At least I never had to fish his engagement ring out of the dirt.”

Everyone laughs—there’s a story there that they all clearly know—but I can’t stop watching Desdemona. Her flushed cheeks and bright eyes, her beaming smile, the way Dimitri’s dad drops a kiss on top of her head when he walks past, the way her crazy aunt Willow, when she finally emerges into the kitchen, makes a beeline towards her and wraps her tattooed arms around her, the way Desdemona giggles at something Willow says when she hugs her back.

There’s a sensation like an arrow piercing through my chest, and I turn suddenly, unable to watch for one moment longer. The twins immediately look disappointed and Dimitri, who’s been piling food onto a plate for me, gives me a quizzical look. I shrug and swallow, choking out a quick explanation.

“Gonna grab a shower.”

Dimitri nods. “Don’t take long. Your food will go cold.”

Luckily for me, that only makes me feel worse.

“Fuck fuck fuck.”

By the time I reach the landing, my heart is beating so fast I’m half afraid it’s about to give in. I clutch my chest and shake my head, swallowing hard. I feel dizzy and nauseous, like the world’s axis has irrevocably shifted, like everything is wrong and the universe is hurtling into annihilation at terminal velocity.

“Fuck.”

I shouldn’t have come here, it was a terrible idea. This whole fucking plan, this doomed bargain—it was all a fucking terrible idea. All these people in that kitchen downstairs, they’re not faceless, sneering caricatures—names to add to my Rolodex, as Desdemona put it. They’re real people, and worse than that, they’re Desdemona’s family, who fucking adore her, because—why wouldn’t they? How could anyone not love this girl?

The girl I took advantage of. The girl I forced to kneel on my bedroom floor to make her pick up her own money, satisfying my own pride by making her crawl in the pit of her own shame and despair. The girl who was ready to open her legs for me just to protect her siblings.

“Fuuuck.”

I slump forward into a wall, knocking my head into the wooden panel of a door. This place is so huge, I have no idea how to get back to my room, but I’m alone anyway, alone in this corridor that smells like perfume and old wood, with the painted faces of Blaise’s ancestors gazing down at me from their family portrait.

Desdemona looked so happy—so happy. I didn’t know she was even capable of looking like that. All of a sudden, I’m reminded, with a painful, acute awareness, that she’s so young, too young to bear the burdens she’s been carrying on her shoulders. Too young to be forced to make deals with the likes of me.

And she’s brought me here, in the place where she feels safest, in the nest of people she loves.

I feel like a traitor, an impostor.

Worst, and most pathetic of all—I feel sad.

You can’t miss what you never had, and that’s how I’ve always felt about family.

But now, I see what I could have had if the great hand that decided the outcome of my life had rolled better dice before I was born. Had my luck been better, I could’ve known mornings like this, in a bustling kitchen that smells like caramelised sugar and hot coffee, full of people that I loved and that loved me, for no reason at all other than just belonging to them.

“Fuck.”

This time, the word comes out of my lips in a whisper, a hoarse sigh. What the fuck am I doing here? I’m supposed to be on my way up, climbing as high as I can while I can, climbing so far up that I could never again be knocked down. So what am I doing, setting myself up for the fall?

The irony doesn’t escape me that I was the one to force rule number five onto Desdemona. In my arrogance and pride, I created the rule out of amusement, daring her to break it. Instead, I jinxed myself, daring fate itself not to punish my hubris.