Page 111 of Prince of Masks
Dray considers me, from the toes of my boots, up the bare flesh of my legs, then over the fit of my white sweater. “Where is your jacket?”
A simple question.
A loaded one.
“Didn’t bring one,” I say and, finally, meet his piercing, steady gaze.
My cheeks crisp instantly; that awful tingly sensation of an ugly, raw crimson crawling over my cold face.
Dray just stares at me, and it isn’t kind, it is as loaded and calculative as his rotten soul is. “In the middle of December, you chose to not bring a coat to London?”
The mist of winter glistens the contour of his nose.
I watch a raindrop—the premature kind that comes before the storm cloud—fall from his hair to his temple.
“I forgot.”
Head tilted, his lashes lower—and it gives the effect of looking at me from beneath his lashes, a blue smoulder.
Dray reaches for the collar of his own coat. Long, woollen and black. He shrugs it off in a single move, then steps towards me.
Instinct has my boot sliding back, as though to step away from him. But the heel of my shoe knocks into some bags behind me—and I am trapped in the confines of a crowded queue.
Oliver lands his attention on me just as Dray sweeps his coat over my shoulders. “What did you do today?”
I spare him a fleeting glance before I look back at Dray, who fixes the coat on me, then takes a step back.
“I went to the museum.”
“With who?”
I frown at my brother. “No one.”
His face is stone. “You went alone?”
“I always do,” I murmur. “And for the first time in ten years, you want to question it.”
Oliver’s lashes lower.
His suspicions are solid enough that, no matter what I say, he will take this information to Father.
And Father will know it was planned, since I asked him for my free schedule, and he turned his cheek to me.
So that’s that.
I’m fucked.
Dray says nothing, surprisingly, and he sidesteps to move behind me. I’m trapped between them, the stone-faced Snakes, as our turn for the veil comes.
Dray joins us in our car back to Elcott Abbey, and so I know Oliver called him to meet in the city after I turned his company down.
The rest of the Sinclairs are there already by the time we’re back. And all hopes of a scalding bath are brushed aside, because I don’t manage to get out of the company for a few hours.
20
There is little I hate more than being woken up too early in the morning, but it is worse with an imp crouched over me in bed, its bony hands gripped onto my shoulders, giving me a solid rattle.
The imp croons over me, the tip of its pointed nose pressing into mine, “Witchdoctor here.”
