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“Alright.” I stand up, full of grim resignation. “We’ll just have to do the best we can. I’ll call and tell her.”
“No.” Iakov stands and plucks the battered black denim jacket that hangs on the back of his door. He pulls his phone out of one pocket and hands it to me. “Put her number in there,” he says. “I’ll sort it out.”
I take his phone and raise my eyebrows at him. “Are you sure? She’s not going to take it lying down.”
“What is she going to do?” Iakov asks. “Beat me up?”
I save Zaro’s number in his phone and hand it back to him. “She’s a Blackwood. She fights with her words, not with her fists.”
“Hm,” Iakov says, tossing his phone onto his desk, where it lands with a clatter. “Better if she can fight with both. Maybe I’ll teach her.”
I open my mouth to tell him that sounds like a terrible idea, but an image flashes into my mind. My little sister, Zaro with the long curls and doe eyes, being clumsily seduced by that disgusting creep at Sainte-Agnès. My stomach clenches with hatred so visceral it makes my skin crawl.
If I ever met that man, I know for a fact I would rather fight him with my fists than with my words.
And one day, Zaro will feel exactly the same way.
I smile at Iakov. “Maybe you should.”
Chapter 19
Thrown Gauntlet
Zachary
WithZarosettledinand only one day left before my final school year begins with a vengeance, I have only one thing left on my mind.
I haven’t seen Theodora since the end of last year—a party in the empty study room which devolved into chaos and from which Theodora disappeared all too fast—and we haven’t spoken since then either.
Last year, in a rare moment of peace and camaraderie, Theodora and I exchanged phone numbers. She never texted me, and I fought long and hard with my pride over whether or not I should text her first.
I did, in the end.
Right in the middle of the holiday, tormented by loneliness and frustration. I tapped on her profile picture: a slightly blurry photograph of a swan in a sparkling lake.
The white feathers remind me of Theodora’s angel wings that time in the forest, the sight of her white skirts floating through the trees as I chased her like a lascivious god chasing a gorgeous nymph.
The instinct that made me follow her into the trees then is the instinct that pushed me to tap on her profile picture in the middle of the holiday. What I truly craved, at that moment, was to see her face. To devour the sight of her like a delicacy: the pretty eyes, the graceful features, the lovely bones underneath the silk skin.
What I did, at that moment, was text her. A short, harmless, cautious text that did nothing to convey the turmoil of desire and longing lashing like ocean waves in a night storm.
It was a risky move, that text, and I held my breath as I sent it. I felt as though I had lain my head upon the wooden block, hoping that the beautiful executioner would lay down her axe and grant me a caress.
My beautiful executioner did nothing; I never received a reply.
So the day before school starts, I make my way to the library, right to the top floor. I approach Theodora’s usual desk, and my heart sinks.
It’s empty.
I sit for a while, thumbing through the pages of Descartes’sMeditations, but I skim the lines without registering them. The thin pages of my paperback turn in my fingers, the whisper of paper like tiny sighs.
My gaze finds the line, “Is there anything more intimate or more internal than pain?”
Descartes seems to be mocking me with that sentence; I close the book with a sigh.
Stuffing the book back into my pocket, I stand and glare at the vacant space where Theodora should be. Why is she not here? Does she not have work she should be doing, books she should be reading? A volume of poetry to pore over or a literary villain to romanticise?
When the sun drops beyond the reach of the cupola, plunging the interior of the library into sudden dusk, I accept defeat and leave.
