Page 89 of Prince of Masks
But none of that happens.
Dray just nods a slight, thoughtful gesture.
“There isn’t much,” he says, and moves for the doors. “I collected only four over the years. Most of what I could find werementionsof the handicap, a sentence, a paragraph, but it is difficult to source entire chapters or full literatures on the subject.”
I blink at him, stunned.
A heartbeat pulses.
I blink, again.
Dray, in answer, arches a questioning brow at me.
My mind tangles with the confessions, how easily he tells me that he has personally collected the literature, that he has four in there, and that he doesn’t seem at all as pissed as Father was when he learned I was inquiring after deadblood literature at the crypts.
“Can…” Instinct draws my weight back onto one boot, as though I can create enough distance should he change his mind and swipe at me. “May I see them?”
He lifts a shoulder, unfazed, then grabs the handle and pushes open the old, solid wood door.
The faintest creak comes from the hinges.
Dray leads the way into the library, and I rush to shadow him.
I’m convinced he doesn’t care whether I read these books or not. He just isn’t bothered…
So whatever reasons my parents have to block this information from me, Dray doesn’t share those reasons—or he isn’t aware of them.
It’s a lengthy walk across the library; he leads me to the reading table tucked at the back of the first floor.
“In the black cabinet.”
He gestures over my head to the hutch, whose shelves through glass doors are scattered with uneven book sizes and mismatched colours.
“I haven’t decided on the best way to catalogue them yet,” he says.
The doors creak as I tug them open.
I arch my neck and look up at the twelve shelves, narrow and sturdy. I scan the spines.
Most of these books are nothing to do with me, my people, my kind—then I spot them, seven shelves up, on the left.
All four books stacked together.
I drag them off the shelf and into my arms, then grimace at their wobbling weight.
I glance over my shoulder.
Dray has perched himself on the corner of the reading desk, his thighs spread, one hand pressed into the muddy smears of his trouser leg, and his eyes on me, gleaming, intent, always intent.
I slam the books down beside him.
He brings his chin to his shoulder to watch as I sift through them, scanning the introduction pages one at a time.
The largest one, the tome, isn’t much. If anything. A mere chapter in the histories of elite bloodlines.
I push it aside.
The smallest, the little pocketbook, as cute as it is, it’s merely a list of every deadblood on record to have ever existed, even the ones abandoned, killed and discarded as newborns.
