Page 74 of Daughter Of The Ninth Line
He wouldn’t have done it, would he?
No, it had to be someone else. It didn’t matter, though. I’d take my gift and return to my dormitory, where things were silent and made sense. Stuffing the chocolates into my coat pocket, I stood.
“Let’s go, Braxus,” I murmured, as I tried to emulate the enigmatic First Line Heir, walking like I didn’t give a fuck that everyone was staring at me as I left the food hall.
chapter forty-six
Vox
“Do you have a brain tumor?”
Shay’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. “Excuse me?”
She was staring at me, like she could see inside my skull. “I’m trying to find an explanation why you’re acting like… this.” She waved a hand, indicating my entire body. Rolling my eyes, I continued up the stairs to my room.
If I thought that would stop my cousin from following me, I was sadly mistaken. She trudged up the stairs behind me to my dorm room, though calling the Dome something as mundane as a dorm room was a serious injustice to the magic and architecture that had gone into creating the giant glass half-sphere that made up the walls and ceiling of my bedroom.
Sighing, I turned toward her. “I’m not sure what you’re even talking about, Shay.” In this room, with my cousin, I could shed the ego that I had to wear like a constant heavy cloak.
“I saw you give the girl from the Ninth Line chocolate. You couldn’t drag your eyes from her the whole time we were in the food hall. She wasn’t especially pretty, or magical, or anything that I can tell would attract the spare Heir of the whole country. She’s not even your normal type.”
I didn’t really have a type, unless my type was available and willing to keep our trysts casual. If I was honest, I had no answer for Shay. I’d noticed the girl in the courtyard when she stopped to talk to Jackus, who’d been suspended as a warning to the new conscripts not to fuck with the First Line.
Someone from the Eighth Line stealing from my dorm was unacceptable, but killing someone so far below me was almost considered unsporting at Boellium. Jackus would get my leniency once, and after that, he’d be hanging by his intestines rather than threads of air. He was lucky it was me he’d tried to steal from and not my brother, who would have killed him, college rules be damned.
The girl was dirty and skinny, yet somehow braver than most of the other conscripts who entered through the gates of Boellium. I wondered if Jackus’s answer had been something different, whether she’d have helped him. If she’d have gone againstme,in the defence of a stranger. There was something about her that spoke to my soul, an airy concept that I hadn’t believed until I saw her today.
When she’d walked into the food hall with a bandage on her head and Hayle Taeme by her side, my interest had been drawn, whether I wanted it to be or not. I hadn’t been alone; every person in the room had turned to watch them. She’d skittered away from Taeme like she couldn’t escape fast enough, but seemed happy to be trailed by those untreated furs he called companions.
That should have been the end of my interest. Anyone with a connection to the Third Line was an automatic threat. But when I’d seen her stare at those chocolates, her face twisted with both longing and guilt, that had pulled at a muscle in my body that I’d long thought calcified.
No one except Shay would have been able to pick up the residual energy of me bundling something as small as thosechocolates across the room, high over everyone’s heads until they landed in front of the girl from the Ninth. Obviously, I’d kind of hoped Shay had also been oblivious.
Still, I had to maintain my nonchalance. “I think she’s kind of pretty, and it's been a while since we’ve had any new blood here worthy of sticking my dick in. You’re overthinking it, Shay.” I paused. “She was with Taeme, though, so find out more about her. I want to know their connection.”
Giving me a droll look that said she wasn’t going to just let it go, she turned and perched on the edge of my couch. “Whatever you say, Vox.” She cleared her throat. “Your mother reached out to me with another suitable pairing today. Ephily’s brother, Caden.”
I screwed up my nose. Ephily was a persistent annoyance who’d warmed my bed once or twice and now had visions of being Queen of Ebrus. Like that would ever happen. Caden was worse, by all accounts. A social climber who would kiss your ass, then stab you in the back.
“Did you tell her that I need you here, unwed and not burdened down by some barely connected halfwit for at least another year?”
I was hoping that by then either I’d have a solution, or my mother would have moved on to trying to marry off my brother rather than me and Shay. Perhaps if Mother acknowledged that Shay wasn’t going to be interested in anymalesuitors and tried to marry her off to Ephily instead of her brother, she’d have better success.
But the First Line was nothing if not closed-minded and hellbent on using the women of our Line to spread both our control and genetics.
“Did I suggest that reproducing with Caden would weaken the intellectual integrity of the First Line? Yes. Your mother isn’t nearly as terrifying as the Baron.”
Nearly aswere the prudent words there, because whilst my mother wasn’t as violent in her retribution, she was still powerful in her magic and prone to forcing people to her will, whether they liked it or not.
“How’d she take that?”
Shay shrugged, and while she pretended as if she didn’t care, I knew it played on her mind. “She agreed in the end. She suggested that they got their dim-wittedness from their mother. No love lost there.”
The backstabbing and rivalries among the Court in Fortaare was legendary. “Another reprieve then?”
Sighing, Shay stood. “For now. I better head to bed.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Night, Vox.”
I lifted my chin, my smile coming easily for her. I hated that I couldn’t save her from her fate, any more than I could save myself from mine. “Night.”
