Page 30 of Prince of Masks
Stone.
I leave him behind.
He doesn’t follow me inside.
Two servants rush by me on the stairs and I know they are going to gather my bags from the car; another holds open the front door for me.
I scramble through the foyer, hands fisted at my sides, my face hot with a flush.
The imps I pass on the way—those grumbling little beasts with ghastly translucent skin so dull that it’s grey, and not a strand of hair on them, and no clothes to shield their ugliness—don’t bat an eye as I pass them. They just carry on brushing the carpets into dustpans.
The cerulean walls of the Blue Wing border my power-walk all the way to the double doors. One is parted from the frame, ajar, and through the gap I hear the faint clacking of a keyboard.
Father is on the laptop.
He will have seen the email. No doubt about it.
I hesitate at the door, the toes of my canvas shoes just out of reach of the wedge of light spilling over the floorboards.
I take the moment, a beat to steel myself.
My chest swells with a steadying breath, in and out, before I flex my fists at my sides.
I reach up my hand for the slick door—then chatter my nails on the wood.
Father recognises my knock, fingernails jittering, and calls out, not too kindly, “Come in, Olivia.”
That simply spoken order tells me too much. There’s a distance of frost in his tone, that not-yet-thawed anger he maintains from when I was at Bluestone and he called to chew me out about being drunk at a party on the grounds of the academy.
I slip through the crack in the doorway.
The weight of my legs aches to drag me back out into the corridor, but I force my way through the urge to retreat; I approach the desk.
He looks up at me as I sink into the leather armchair, the same one I was slumped in for Witchdoctor Dolios to take my blood, the one I suspect Mother had reupholstered since she clearly didn’t have it destroyed.
“You were gone a while,” he says as he pops the lid back onto his fountain pen, then sets it aside. There’s no pitch to his tone. No lift in his smile. No light in his eyes.
My mouth flattens into a slanted line. “I was shopping.”
Father considers me for a beat before he reclines in his button tufted chair.
“Is it about the spending?” I grimace at my splurge. “It’s all gifts for the New Year,” I start, but Father shakes his head, and that silences me.
His hands come together and fingers thread. “I received a request from the crypts of the British Library.”
It’s as bad as I expected then.
I don’t really know why I dread this as much as I do. Me being a deadblood has never been an off-limit topic at home. It’s not a hush-hush thing. Just… accepted.
But after Mother stole that book, and I realised that there really isn’t much to read on my kind, it piqued my interest enough to fool me into thinking I could just get some books from a library.
I could apologise.
But then, that is premature. Technically, I haven’t broken any rules. Father has never told me to not read into what I am.
It’s a strange thing.
Strange enough that it grips me.
