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“Are you…all right, Harlow?” he asked, like the question wasn’t customary for him. Which it wasn’t.
I forced a smile for him, the one I’d always worn for him. “I’m fine,” I answered as I tucked into lunch. “Why do you ask?”
He shrugged as he, too, ate. “I just want to make sure my little princess is happy. I’m sure I can have Apollo get you a bigger diamond.”
I had to laugh, or I might cry. That Dad actually thought that could be the most pressing issue at the moment. What I wouldn’t give to change the men in my life. Show them there was another way from the one their fathers told them it had to be. That we women weren’t as vapid and useless as the previous generation told them we were.
“No. I love it. But thank you,” was all I said to him.
He gave a curt little nod, but I could tell he was happy.
I just wished I could be as well.
My parents left the next day and I wished I cared more, but Valen was gone and I didn’t know when he was coming back this time.
Chapter Thirteen
I felt like I lost a lot of myself over the next week. At least the person I’d spent the last few months fighting to become. Back was my mask. The pastels and the pearls. The demure smile and the forced cheerfulness.
And there was no space for Apollo to notice because he was clearly worried about Valen, which only served for me to layer the mask on thicker because I couldn’t be worried about Valenandmy future at the same time.
Valen wasn’t mine to worry about.
My future was all I had.
Apollo was my future and he needed me.
“I need to go to him,” Apollo said fiercely, on the phone to someone as he paced yet again. “You don’t tell me what to do, Gage.” Apollo’s voice was iced venom. “You will know your place, or it would be my pleasure to remind you with whatever force necessary.”
There was a part of me, who still lived outside the mask, that thought it would be nice if Apollo’s ruthlessness would come out for me like that. It sounded like he’d go to the end of the universe for Valen and kill everything and anything in his path if he had to. Anything to bring Valen back safely.
I loved that Apollo cared that much about something, but I’d be lying to myself if I said I didn’t wish that, for once, that something was me.
The Kincaids weren’t helping. There had been no sign, that I’d seen, of Valen. But Kane and Neo made appearances. A little more bruised and battered each time. And each time, Kane’s eyes stayed on me longer, like the worse things got for them the more he looked at me for…what? Comfort? Relief? I didn’t know what he wanted, and I didn’t care. All I cared about was that Neo never left his side while the two were there.
While Apollo was busy threatening Gage’s manhood, I slipped out of his room and took up my usual random wandering around the estate to try to just get a moment’s peace where I wasn’t pretending. Where I could be sad or lonely or angry or scared, and it didn’t matter because there was no one to judge me.
Florence was coming for the Callahan’s New Year’s party, but it was the soonest she could get to me, and I didn’t want her to feel guilty for that, so I kept from her exactly how bad my mood was getting. There would be time enough for me to sob into her lap. There was nothing she could do yet so I wouldn’t worry her unnecessarily.
Pretending, though, was harder than it used to be. Back when I knew there was no way out of my cage, that was just what life was and I didn’t know any other way. I saw other people have a different life, but it would never be mine. Now I’d tasted freedom and my heart railed against the bars. It crashed. It threw itself against them in the hopes that we could find another way out.
By the day before New Year’s Eve, I felt bruised and broken on the inside and looked the perfect porcelain trophy wife on the outside. When I deigned to be with others. With Apollo and Archer busy with whatever shitstorm was raging with Vinnie Rossano and the Kincaids, I withdrew entirely.
I was slipping through the servants’ passages, hoping to avoid…well, anyone.
Before my mum had left, she’d made Frenella promise that she would get as many wedding details out of me as she could before I went back to school, and Frenella had been making good on that promise. I’d only just escaped a particularly cheerful session that morning that I hoped was Frenella trying to offset my moodiness of late.
It wasn’t any different really than the previous five years, though. Our mums had been excited about the wedding in lieu of anyone else being excited about it. Because, after all,someonehad to be excited about it. What did make it different now, and exceptionally irritating, was that Apollo was just as excited and used that as an excuse to not worry about Valen.
He was chaffing at the bit, going on about how we could get married as soon as school finished. And I had to smile and nod and hope to all that was holy that Apollo and I would have the time to actually have a serious discussion about the whole thing before we found ourselves down the aisle already. Actually, we’d had the time. If anything, Apollo had been making sure he made at least an hour a day for me. So, time wasn’t the issue. It was a significant lack of balls on my part that was the issue.
Suffice to say, my head was a literal mindfuck. Whenever I was alone, it was a frantic mess of bullshit, and I couldn’t sort anything from the noise. So, to say I wasn’t watching where I was going that day would have been an understatement; I was just trusting my feet to take me along the roads that they’d been taking me for so many years.
I felt a hand on my shoulder roughly and fear pool deep in the bottom of my spine. I was shoved back into the wall and blinked at the sudden pain in the back of my head.
“Little princess,” came a voice that made my skin crawl.
I swallowed. “Kane.”
