I glance at the doors. My breath is held, waiting for Eric to rush through them and hurry over to the stage. But he doesn’t turn up. And Dray steps in front of me, making a public announcement without words, a declaration that he’s pursuing me. I cast my gaze down at the floor.
It’s done. It’s over.
Especially when he turns his wrist to show me the purple ribbon tied there, and his smirk is as cold as it is wicked.
My heart drops to my stomach. Game over. I look up at him and I see the one who locked me in a closet, threw me into the bath, knocked me over in the halls, made my life a living hell.
But I might as well be wearing a veil right now.
Dray and I are engaged.
Chapter 16
I won’t marry him.
I refuse. So, after the dance, I drag Serena to the bathroom with me. Once I make sure we’re alone in the washroom, I grab onto her arms and stare her dead in the eyes.
“You still want to do this?” I ask.
Her eyes light up like stars. “You mean you’ll come with me?”
I nod, my grip tight on her arms. “Tonight. It has to be tonight, after the ball. Everyone will be exhausted.”
She practically bounces on her heels. “Yes! Yes! Tonight will work. Oh, Olivia, thank you!”
Serena pulls me into her arms and squeezes me tight. I untangle myself fast. “We’ll meet in the foyer at, say, an hour before sunrise?”
She shakes her head, a small smile on her lips. “I was leaving tonight anyway. I have a plan. Meet in the sunroom, not in the foyer. And make it at four in the morning. That way, all the servants will be asleep, too.”
I eye her skeptically. “What’s your plan?”
Her smile spreads into a grin. “I was hoping you would come with me. I prepared, just in case. But trust me, the sunroom at the back of the gardens. Bring only things you can carry.”
I nod, and the door swings open. Melody and her clique slip into the bathroom. She throws a dark, narrowed look my way.
I smile at her. She might just get Dray in the end. Because I sure as hell am not having him.
If running away from this life is the only way to escape him, then that’s what I have to do. My father can’t force me into this relationship and claim he cares about me. My mother is doing nothing to stop it. And even Brad isn’t there for me to rely on.
Marrying Dray means so much more than politics. It means I’m alone in a world that already shuns me.
So, I’ll go to the world where I’m wanted, or at least accepted. I’ll live as a krum. Because I’m like them, anyway.
My heart feels heavy. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s like a doorstopper in my chest, drooping all the way down to my gut where it hangs heavy. It aches. It hurts. But I don’t have another way out of this life.
I must leave.
Serena comes through. As I slip into the sunroom, carrying only one duffel bag over my shoulder, she pushes from the table she was waiting by, and her grin is bright and full of hope.
“I commissioned these,” she tells me, and peels open her handbag to show me inside. Passports and a load of krum money. “I’ve been working on them for weeks.”
Weeks. I think back to Bluestone, when she talked to me at the half-breed party, when she spoke of her dreams for another life. She must have been planning the escape since then. And she planned to take me with her.
She zips up her bag. “It took me a few tries, but this … this is as good as counterfeits get.”
I hope her impressions talent is as good as she says.
“I brought jewels,” I tell her. My bag is weighed down by them. “We can sell them for more money.”
We’ve lived luxurious lives. We’ve been raised in comfort and style. This is the only way we know how to live, so it’s the life I want to keep on living, even if it’s in another world. A world that glitters against the night sky.
“We need to make it to that town,” she says. “We get there, take my father’s boat from the harbour, and move along the coastline to the next town.”
“Then what?”
“Get a ride to the airport.” Her mouth flattens into a thin line, as if the reality of truly leaving everything and everyone behind is only just starting to sink in. “Fly out of Europe. The farther away from our families we are, the safer we are.”
“Where do you want to go?”
Her smile is sad. “Wherever the first flight takes us.”
*
The building is too crowded for my liking. But it’s exciting.
An airport, a free sense that invades the air. A taste of what I’ve longed for my whole life.
Serena and I stand by the wide and long windows that line the wall. We watch these enormous planes lift up from the ground as if they weigh less than a feather, and they take off into the air with a rushing speed.
I can’t stop the flutters from attacking my stomach.
A voice calls from a speaker, announcing the final boarding call for our flight—to New Zealand.
Serena takes my hand. “Are you sure you want to do this? Once we’re on that plane, there’s no going back.”
I exhale shakily, my eyes still fixed on the plane outside. The one that’s boarding. Our way out of here.
“I don’t want to go back,” I whisper.
“Good.” Serena squeezes my hand. “We’re never going back.”
I nod, her promise echoing through my soul. "We’re never going back."
END OF BOOK 2
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Bluestone Elites (A Paranormal Bully Academy Romance) Page 9
