Page 27 of Prince of Masks
I need to pad my lie.
I told Father I was heading into the city for one thing: New Year shopping. It would be strange if I came home with nothing.
Especially now that he’ll have the account request from the crypts in his emails. And that won’t go well for me. But I can use it, all the boutique bags I return with will be my buffer.
Oh, I simply had the idea to stop into the library and see if I could replace the book Mother borrowed—something like that. Keep it casual. That’s how I usually get away with small slights; fake it, pretend to be as naïve as a butterfly.
I don’t know if butterflies are naïve, it’s just something Nonna says, and her mother once said.
The Vacheron Constantin boutique is my first stop.
The timepieces are the most extraordinary of any in creation; they are hand crafted works of art.
Oliver is something of a collector when it comes to timepieces—and since, back at the academy when he gave me the magazine and bargained gift ideas—only one timepiece was circled a dozen times with a dozen exclamation marks next to it, I decide to concede.
Vacheron Constantin it is.
Dray’s gift will be of the same expense, the same prestige. I can pick out something for him in here, and that way I don’t need to really think about it, or him, a moment longer than absolutelynecessary. Not like I can just send him a cast of my middle finger and call it a day.
No, Dray is a diamond gift.
That’s how I think about it, in tiers.
The Sinclairs as a unit are a gift that Mother will take care of on behalf of our family, but Dray—being my peer, my age and of our closest allies—is to receive a diamond-tier gift from me (Oliver, too).
Serena is silver, not a friend of mine, not a bestie, and not a direct ally, but rather my brother’s betrothed.
Courtney and James are copper. Friends, and no matter what they might mean to me, even if I loved them to the afterlife and back, around the universe and back again, they are made ones, they are commoners, and so they are copper gifts.
It isn’t my choice—it is just the way it is.
I wander into the boutique, the waxy paper of a coffee cup in one hand, and I march right for the glass casings.
An attendant is quick to appear on the other side.
He asks me the usual, how I am today, what I am looking for—but I ignore the questions and set down the coffee.
I unfurl the rolled magazine, the same one that Oliver gave to me at Bluestone.
It curls open to the page with a single watch against a black backdrop, a faint mist like a sprayed fragrance, and the slightest glaze of glossed magazine pages.
I hand it off to the attendant. “This one.”
He takes one look at it before his eyes light up, glittering lights of the whopper sale coming his way—and he sets aside the magazine.
It goes ignored beside my coffee cup that the attendant spares only a small glare before draping a velvet cover over the glass casing.
I wait as he stalks off, swift footed, for the backroom—where I imagine the vault is hidden away. And I imagine correct, as he returns with a set of three solid wood boxes, polished and clasped with solid gold latches.
He sets each one down on the velvet drape, soft.
A small key touches to the locks; he turns them, gentle, then lifts the glossy wooden lids of the three boxes.
A trio of watches glisten up at me.
One gold, one steel, one platinum.
Oliver circled the gold watch in the magazine, his favourite colour. Probably because he’s an alchemist. Gold is his thing.
