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I try to hand him my phone and he puts his palms up as if in surrender. “Nah, man. I’m not getting involved.”
I feel like we’re in fucking prep school again, and I’m playing go between with a friend and his formal date. But now the friend is me, and I need Bennet to tell this woman I’ve hardly ever spoken to that I don’t want to date her, let alone marry her.
The “she” we’re referring to is Rosaline Hathaway, but she could be anyone. She has ceased to have a meaning, a face, or a personality in my mind. The list of attributes my father listed off for me earlier have blended into white noise in the face of my life sentence, where she is both cellmate and jailer.
There’s currently a small, black-velvet box burning a hole in my pocket at this exact moment. After golf, my father upheld his promise to facilitate a visit with my mother. Since Marcia’s death, Mom has been hovering just on the edge of sanity, but today was a relatively good day. The visit was almost pleasant. That is, until she handed me my grandmother’s wedding ring. I don’t give a shit about jewelry, or the sentimentality of the ring, but Idoknow that Rosaline Hathaway will wear it over my dead, rotting, maggot-infested corpse.
I have never in my life had problems with women until this moment, and it’s high up on the list of most embarrassing and most uncomfortable things I’ve ever dealt with. The fact that my damn parents are involved adds insult to injury.
“I’ll do it,” Pierce offers from the driver’s seat. “Let me see.”
“No,” I snap. Partly because he’s driving and partly because he’ll probably tell her I want ten children or some shit. “Fuck off.”
Pierce Avon has been my friend since prep school. He’s one of the only few who stuck around after Marcia disappeared and I didn’t feel like dealing with anyone or anything. He’s a dick, but he’s a loyal dick.
My phone chimes again and I put it on silent, shoving it as far into my pocket as it will go. Rosaline is likely to be at the party tonight, anyway. I don’t know why she won’t leave me the fuck alone beforehand.
“Cheer up, man.” Pierce turns up the music, and tries to get me to react. “This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Your family is telling you to go fuck an objectively hot woman,or else.That’s the stuff of 80s porn.”
“Why 80s?” Bennet asks.
“When it had a plot.”
I glare at them in the rearview mirror. It honestly sounds less like porn to me and more like the plot of a Bronte novel, but Bennet and Pierce are finance guys, and not really into literature. “They’re not forcing me to do anything. Nothing has happened yet.”
“Your phone blowing up says otherwise.”
“She’s just…”Fucking insane. “Trying to get clarification on some shit.”
“I don’t understand what the issue is,” Pierce says over the music. “You used to fuck Rose back in the day…why not now?”
And there it is. He’s pointed out the proverbial elephant. The thing everyone is thinking but hasn’t dared to bring up to me for fear of having their balls ripped off and shoved down their throats. I growl, low in the back of my throat, a dark cloud settling over my mood.
“I know. What you’re essentially saying is I’ve already seen all there is to see.”
“Took a vacation, but didn’t decide to move there?” Bennet supplies.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Effectively.”
It’s not that I hate Rose. I don’t care about her enough to hate her, which I know she is well aware of. We haven’t dated—if you could call what we did dating—since we were eighteen. As far as I knew, she was dating someone else, and I really couldn’t care less. I thought our indifference to each other was mutual, in the same way that our relationship was mutually understood to be more about appearances than anything else.
Except the way she’s been blowing up my phone for the last twenty-four hours has me slightly nervous.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say tonelessly. “I’m not marrying her. We’ll fix it.”
I’m determined to make this go away. So determined, I put aside everything I’ve ever said about how much I hate the Order, how I don’t like parties I am not personally throwing, and how I refuse to put on suits to please other people, and agreed to go to the fucking Founders day gala. With the Capulet’s hosting, there’s every chance that Tyberius will try to punch me for simply being there, and then I’ll be free of this entire situation.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
The Capulet mansion, like most of the houses in the area, is set so far back from the road, it’s invisible from the street. The area is wooded, and the driveway twists through the trees, like its own private road. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is a security measure, or hazing for newcomers who are unfamiliar with how to navigate this sort of driveway in the dark. I don’t blink an eye as Pierce speeds around every curve at 50MPH.
The house emerges out of the darkness, a Neo-gothic brick monstrosity with ivy crawling up the face. A garden wraps around, and a dozen or more cars are parked around the fountain that sits adjacent to the front door.
Pierce parks his Mercedes S Class between a Tesla and a BMW M6, and we walk up to the front door, its wood inlaid with a steel honeycomb.
“I already regret this,” I say to no one in particular.
Pierce laughs, like I’m joking, but Bennet’s silence tells me he’s on the same page.
