Even with my sunglasses as a barrier between us, I have to look away for a moment to steady myself. Bolan is an asshole. Bolan is always an asshole. But putting me in this position — whether or not he knows he’s done it — just reinforces all of that. I either have to tell Adeline about Rian, or I have to lie by omission. “Everything with Bolan is … difficult.”
Adeline snorts playfully. “How is that any different than it’s ever been?”
I look back at her, suppressing a sigh. “It isn’t.”
She grimaces, then wipes her already dry hands on the front of her jeans. “Take your walk. We’ll talk more over breakfast.”
A slight reprieve is generous of her. Also, out of character. Adeline never relented when we were younger. Not that it was ever me on the wrong end of one of her disapproving looks or biting chastisements or ‘no dessert’ punishments. I’m fairly certain that Armin sometimes broke little rules — doing things like tracking mud through the house — because he loved being treated the same as Bolan and his sisters.
I, of course, wasn’t ever going to jeopardize a single dessert.
“The pond is pure swamp,” Adeline says, proving yet again that she has some level of psychic ability. Or maybe she’s justthat good at reading me. “Come grab some wellies from the mudroom.” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, simply sending Roz a look over my shoulder, then striding back into the house.
“Want me to wait here?” Roz asks quietly. “You’d know … wouldn’t you? If anyone but the Yates family members were on the property?”
Stepping back to the car to retrieve my backpack and Armin’s urn within it, I don’t answer for a moment, rolling the implications of that statement around in my head. Loosening the rigid hold on my power hasn’t gone unnoticed by Roz. And why would it? She’s a combat mage deemed powerful enough to protect one of the direct heirs to the realm.
The sole heir now, marked by my purple-hued eyes. And also by decree of my father.
“I could check in,” Roz adds to fill the silence. “Greg is pissed we ditched him a second time, and that Lord Savoy has multiple errands in London in multiple unsecured locations. Plus they’ve never worked together.”
Settling the backpack across my shoulders, I take the intended rebuke, not reminding Roz that I could have left her to run around after Sully instead of Greg. Or that both Sully and I could have just gone off on our own, sans guards altogether.
Roz grimaces at my silence, which feels like its own sort of chastisement. The trust and respect between us is necessary for our relationship to function, but we can’t be friends. No matter what I might want. I’m also not really Roz’s employer. She’s assigned to protect me, but she has no authority over what I do. Or who I choose to spend time with.
Instead of apologizing for overstepping, which in turn would force me to apologize for there even being anything to overstep, she finally says, “Plus, Raoul is insisting on hourly proof-of-life updates.”
I laugh quietly, hoping she’s exaggerating. Otherwise, she really isn’t getting any sleep. “I’m just going to walk down to the pond. And yes, alone. With the way the property slopes, you should be able to see me from the back patio. Though I might walk a little farther through the wooded area …”
Roz struggles to not look completely put out. Or maybe she’s just uncomfortable with … me? With the shifting in my relationships and my position? She referenced my ability to know if anyone was nearby. I never thought that the potential of what I can do, what I can destroy, might worry my guards. Mostly because I’ve kept it all so tightly tamped down for so long.
Grinning playfully — because I can’t focus on another set of potential problems right now — I tug my phone out of my pocket and wave it at her. “You’ve got me tracked every minute of every day.”
“It’s not like that,” Roz grumbles.
I laugh. Then I head into the house to grab some boots.
The Yates country home— an odd name, because the family doesn’t have a city home — didn’t originally include the section of property that contains the pond, replete with duck house and a multitude of ducks, or the wooded hectarage that spreads out beyond the three-level red-brick house. Three levels if you count the attic, anyway. Those sections of property had been sold off years before the current generation of the Yates family settled here. As far as Bolan understood, his mother repurchased those sections after his father’s death. She also paid off the remainingmortgage on the house with the money from her husband’s royal guard life insurance.
Tuition funds were set aside for Bolan and his sister Olivia as well. Bolan was immediately enrolled in the Prague Phrontistery, joining Armin and me in our first year there. The deliberate intent to pair Bolan and Armin, whose life Bolan’s father had died protecting, was now obvious from my adult perspective. But not much thought about by my seven-year-old self.
Olivia, more commonly known as Livi, is three years older than Bolan. She was already an accomplished dancer at age twelve when their father died. She enrolled in a private, extremely competitive conservatory instead of the Phrontistery. Now a lauded ballet dancer, Livi lives at home between performances, her studio tucked away on the western edge of the property.
The two much younger half-siblings, Sophia and Emily, use their father’s surname, Harris, not Yates. Age twelve and fourteen, the sisters currently attend a local school. I’m not certain their father and Adeline were ever formally married, or even mated in the shifter way through exchanged bites. As far as I know, they haven’t been romantically involved since the girls were quite young. David Harris was never a prominent figure in Bolan’s life, and therefore not in Armin’s or my life either, though they got along well enough. Bolan’s father, James— the father he shares with Rian— had been dead for over five years before Emily was even conceived.
All of that ancient history flits through my mind as I wander down toward the pond, wellies squelching in the wet grass and Armin’s marble urn weighing down the backpack on my shoulders. I pause near the water’s edge, scanning the long reeds, still thick and green along the circumference, for swans or ducks but seeing none.
I can feel the house at my back. Or perhaps that’s Adeline’s and Roz’s gazes resting upon me? Either way, it’s … slightly … disturbing. More an itch than anything nefarious, but it keeps me moving. I skirt around the pond toward the wooded area, the reeds snagging in my duster as I traverse a narrow foot-worn path. We paddled around the pond in an old rowboat when we were younger, though the wooden boat launch we also used for sunbathing has been removed for the winter. Or maybe removed altogether, along with the boat.
I haven’t been here for longer than a quick visit in years. Bolan moved out when he left school, taking early graduation to focus on his music.
I should be focusing my thoughts on Armin. On why I felt the need to leave a piece of him here, one of the places he knew only pure happiness. Adeline did her best to treat us the same as her own children, and Bolan — even when he was Oliver — always outright refused to use our titles or treat us any differently than anyone else.
When Bolan wasn’t being epically charming to everyone, he was a complete asshole. There was no in-between. Offish. Angry. Dismissive.
Except … not to me.
He and Armin fought. But like brothers, it always seemed to me.
