Page 55 of Sold Rejected Mate
“Who wants a glass? Valerie, I’ll give you the first pour!”
“Oh!” Valerie reaches out and puts her hand over her glass, but it’s too late—Dad has already started to pour, and the wine splashes out over her fingers and onto the fine white lace doily in the center of the table.
“Oh!” Mom exclaims, leaping up. “The lace! Pat—”
She starts to call for the housekeeper, then seems to remember it’s Sunday and there’s nobody around to take the lace away, treat it, and keep it from staining.
“Oh, well,” my mother says, laughing brittlely as Valerie uses her napkin to sop up the wine, apologizing. “Not like that, lace was my favorite.”
“Here,” Valerie says, standing. “I worked for a hotel once. I know we can get this out if we work quick—”
“Don’t,” my father says, his hand reaching out, and I bristle when it gets close to Valerie’s hand as she reaches for the lace. “Don’t worry,” he amends, meeting my eye. “It’s alright, Valerie. You’re our guest, not our handmaid.”
I’m itching to stand up, to leave, to defend Valerie. But it’s not like they’re insulting her—they haven’t said anything directly malicious. That’s how it always is with them. I’ll have to apologize to her in the car, make a plan to avoid these dinners in the future.
But for right now, I settle on reaching under the table, finding her hand, and lacing our fingers together. Valerie squeezes it, glancing at me, her face likeWhat the hell?.
I squeeze it back, hoping she can read my face, too. Because it saysI’m counting down the seconds until we’re home.
Chapter 27 - Valerie
As Lachlan, Caspian, and his parents make small talk, I can’t stop thinking about Aurela. Apparently, she’s not feeling well and is just in her room upstairs. But from what Lachlan has told me, that’s where she spends most of her time. And yet, none of the people sitting around this table—with the exception of Lachlan—seem to care. Her own mother just accepts that as a fact, allows her daughter to hole up like that.
Is it from shame and guilt over the fires? Over the fact that of the five of us girls, Aurela was one whose name was never connected back to it, her parents swooping in and making sure not a soul in Silverville ever found out about it?
I don’t think Lachlan even knows his sister was there that day. Did Phina tell Xeran about it?
“So, Valerie,” Shae, Lachlan’s mother, says, turning her gaze to me with sharp precision. “I can’t imagine your hair grows green like that.” She stops to laugh at her own joke. “So, what natural color are you hiding under all that dye?”
“Black,” I say, glancing at Lachlan, hoping for some validation that this entire conversation has been weird and uncomfortable. My fingers are tinged purple from the wine incident, and the lace sits in the center of the table like a murder scene.
I shouldn’t have put my hand over the glass, but what else was I supposed to do? Shout out to them that I’m pregnant and can’t have wine?
Lachlan looks annoyed, frustrated, and fed up, which he honestly seemed to carryintothe dinner. On the car ride over, his temper was short, and he kept asking if we should stop or ifI was sure I was feeling better. Because we could turn around if I wanted to.
“Black,” Shae murmurs, nodding, her gaze falling to her food. “How pretty.”
Before I can examine that, Frederick jumps in, “So, what brought you back to town, Valerie?”
I take a tiny, careful bite of salmon, buying time. The truth—that I was kidnapped and nearly trafficked just to sell back my debt to the local gang—probably isn’t the right choice, so I land on, “Just circumstances. Sometimes life has a way of bringing you full circle.”
“You went to school with Lachlan,” Shae says. “So, were you here for that horrible fire? That awful business with those girls and their…activities? Very tragic, really. All that destruction.”
I stare at her. Does she know who I really am? Is this some kind of sick, backwards way of telling me she knows? Or is she really just making conversation? Talking about what happened as though her daughter wasn’t one of those girls doing those activities?
In fact, Aurela might have been the one to start up our little group. She was friends with Tara first. By the time I joined, Phina was already coming to their meetings, showing us what she could do with her magic.
Aurela and Tara were always going head-to-head, the strongest casters in our group. Tara getting a rise out of Aurela, pushing her to do more. Once, the five of us snuck out to Fogue Lake, and Tara dared Aurela to call the fish to her.
And they came. Every fish in the lake, swimming over to us. At first, it was cute, until they started to pile atop oneanother, some of them getting pushed out of the water, flopping and suffocating.
“Send them back,” Tara had said, looking between Aurela and the fish. “Put them back!”
“I don’t know how,” Aurela said, transfixed by the sight of them.
The four of us had to use our magic together to try and push them all back out into the water, but it was too late.
The next morning, theFR Timesheadline was about fishermen discovering swaths of dead fish just floating along the surface of the water. After that, there were rumors that the lake might have been struck by lightning, and that’s what killed all those fish.
