by Emma Savant
“You must promise me never to see her again,” he said.
That was going too far. I folded my arms.
“We’re just friends,” I said. “She’s nice. Maybe I have vampire fans who’d be happy to see me with her.”
“You must promise me never to see her again,” he repeated, this time more loudly. He tapped his fingers angrily against his leg, his emotions seeming to build. I didn’t want them to burst.
“Fine,” I said. “I won’t.”
“Promise.”
“I promise. I won’t see her anymore.”
“Give me your phone.”
Instinctively, I edged away from him until my body was almost pressed against the door. He lunged for me, and his arms closed around my body. I felt his hand scrabbling for my pockets, brushing against my butt and digging into my thighs.
“Get off!” I shouted, shoving him away from me. He was heavy and grasping, and I kicked and shoved until I felt the air between us.
“Fine,” I shouted. “Titania, fine, fine. Here.”
I pulled my phone out of my back jeans pocket and threw it at him. He held his hand over and unlocked the phone with a silent charm, and then his greedy fingers swiped across the screen. I saw my messaging app open, and his eyes narrowed as he saw the names.
Dad.
Dad.
Calista.
My vocal coach.
Briana.
Dad.
He opened the conversations one at a time and his eyes skimmed down them. My stomach felt like jelly with the relief that I’d deleted my messages. My conversations with Dad were ordinary and uninteresting, peppered with his approval and my insistence that August was doing great things for my career. I’d scheduled a fitting with Calista and thanked my vocal coach for the new breathing exercises, and the conversation from Briana was nothing more than her going on about her new retail job and me telling her it sounded great.
He scrolled clear until the end of the messages, but there was nothing there that could incriminate me, and my friends knew better than to text me now.
My gratitude for their foresight and silence was bottomless.
When he was satisfied, August went to my contacts. Serena was there. He deleted her, then handed the phone back to me.
“I think that will make things easier for you,” he said, almost kindly.
I put the phone back in my pocket. It felt soiled from his touch. I curled up against the door and we rode the rest of the way home in silence while I counted fire hydrants and August smiled as though he’d won.
Chapter 28
The small magic mirror on the vanity table rang out three light, crystalline chimes. My hand twitched on my lap.
“Do you need to get that?” Calista said. She leaned back and inspected her handiwork. My eyeliner was, I was sure, as perfect as a doll’s.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Just my friend angsting about her job. It can wait.”
“I remember those days. I worked so many awful gigs before August finally found me.” Calista tilted my chin up with her hand and held out a mascara wand. “Let’s give this a try. Just got a crate of samples in from Diamond Dust Cosmetics and this mascara is supposed to make your eye color pop.”
She brushed it on, while I avoided flinching. She leaned back, made a face, and waved a hand to remove it.
“Too much pop,” she said. She replaced the mascara with an old standby, then pronounced me done. I waited until she’d left the room to give me privacy for my warmups before I flipped the mirror over.
A message from Serena hovered on the silver surface like an etching, visible only when I tilted the mirror just right: All in position. Down to you now.
I shook the mirror and the words dissolved.
The words were a lifeline—the tiniest of tethers keeping me from being swept away. Briana had smuggled me the mirror when I’d gone “clothes shopping” at the boutique where she now worked, and Serena was the only one who could send messages through it.
My phone buzzed.
Sadie: Excited to see you perform tonight! Break a leg! <3
Translation: Knock August dead.
I was so sick of these cryptic messages. Every conversation I had with my trusted inner circle these days sounded light, and none of it was.
From Briana, “I’m working 2-8 today and you should totally stop by! There’s some adorable stuff here you might want” meant “Meet me at work; I have something to give you.”
From Sadie, “Ugh, my creepy ex is driving me crazy. Give me space, you know?” meant “Are you okay?”
From Serena, silence could have meant anything until I had the mirror.
And from Clarence, there was nothing. I couldn’t risk August knowing about our relationship. I couldn’t risk anything that might make August suspicious about tonight.
Tonight.
One hour.
I thought I might throw up.
The palatial theater Clarence had rented for the event wasn’t big enough. I could practically feel August roaming the halls outside my dressing room, hovering backstage, keeping close to me in every way he could. I wanted to run, and I wanted to hide. The idea of the safe house hovered just outside my reach, attainable and yet impossible if I wanted to take him down and stop this from happening to anyone else.
I stood and stared at myself in the large vanity mirror and ran through my warmups. All the la-la-las and ha-ha-has in the world weren’t enough to drown out the screaming in my head.
I couldn’t wait to get onstage and let all this emotion out.
The door opened, and I felt him before I saw him in the way my body seemed to cave in on itself. I couldn’t get the end of my exercise to leave my throat.
“Hey,” I said. I turned to face him. He stood back, eyes raking up and down me, appraising me.
“Eyeliner’s a bit heavy,” he said.
“Calista thought it would read better from the stage,” I said.
He pondered this, then nodded. I couldn’t stand being so close to him. I wished he would leave—leave my dressing room, leave my career, leave my life.
I would give him one chance to get out, and myself one chance to not have to go through with our plans. I silently begged him to take it and let me escape.
“August,” I said, tentatively. “Are you going to be influencing my audience tonight?”
His eyes narrowed. I bit my tongue slightly and then stopped; I couldn’t do anything to mess with my voice, but I was crawling around inside my skin.
“I do what’s best for both of us,” August said.
“We talked about you influencing me and my audiences,” I said.
My voice was tiny, and for all my training and experiences screaming my soul out to audiences of thousands, I couldn’t make it any louder.
“We talked about you doing as you’re told,” he said.
I felt the wave of his magic crashing against my aura, stronger than he’d ever attempted before. I breathed through it, and then let my face relax into a smile.
It felt wrong to smile. If I pretended to go along with this, would it actually give him a way in?
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you for always having my best interests in mind.”
“I do, Dior,” he said. The wave of magic didn’t abate; if anything, it grew stronger. “I know you don’t believe that. You fight me more than any other client I’ve ever had. But I hope you know that I only do what’s right for you and right for your career.”
He reached out and touched my face. I couldn’t stop myself from pulling back. He leaned in closer and grabbed my face until I was sure he was leaving fingerprints on my jaw.
“Let me make something very clear for you, Dior,” he said. His voice was low and menacing, and his eyes were darker than I’d ever seen them. “If you do anything to get in my way, I will drag you down with me. Your career is tied to me. Your father is tied to me. And who will ever want to be with a girl who’s been dragged through the tabloid
s the way you’ll be? Journalists can be vicious.”
The door opened suddenly and Starling came in. His eyes shifted from August’s hand on my face, then to me, then to August.
August didn’t let go. He knew he had us all. Whatever Starling thought, he was as tightly spun in August’s web as any of us. It didn’t make me any less angry at him for telling August I’d been meeting with Serena, but it made it easier to know where to rightly place the blame.
“I came to review the choreography changes we made yesterday,” Starling said.
“Dior remembers,” August said, not taking his eyes off me. I nodded against the pressure of his hand around my jaw.
Starling opened his mouth, but, for the first time since I’d met him, he seemed speechless. I looked away. I couldn’t stand to watch him watch me.
“I know the steps,” I said.
Starling backed silently out of the room. August continued to hold me for a long moment, and then he let go with such force that I tripped backward and almost fell.
I hunched over, silently gathering up spells to fight him if he touched me again. Could I grab my wand in time to cast them? Could I hit him hard enough to get away if my magic wasn’t enough?
“You do as you’re told, Dior,” he said. “You go out there and you perform for me, and you keep out of the business side of things. You’re the artist. Be the artist. Don’t be the pain in my ass.”
“I understand,” I said.
My heart raced like it was running away and might drag me behind it. I wished it would.
It didn’t matter what I did tonight. August was right: He had an empire of people all under his control. No measly illumination spell would be enough to break his hold on them. That would take trained Glimmers, dozens of them, all working to cut his ties one by one—and that would happen only if everything went flawlessly tonight—and only if we managed to somehow get proof of his wrongdoing to the Waterfall Palace before he had a chance to fight back—and that was assuming he didn’t have them under his control, too.
Serena had said her contacts weren’t willing to listen to her. Maybe they didn’t want to. Maybe August had already gotten to them and turned them into puppets or made them think he was an infallible god.
Sweat beaded under my arms and on my forehead. My skin as clammy as if I had the flu, and my heart vibrated with anxiety. It felt like I was on the verge of a heart attack, and I couldn’t breathe.
I couldn’t get away from him. Nothing I did tonight would be enough. We were nothing against the silent armies he had marshaled against us.
“Do your best tonight,” August said. “It’s not a large performance, but it’s an important one. There’s more Glimmering royalty in the crowd than just that that prince, and he won’t be the most influential person in the room.”
We both knew who the most influential person in the room was, and I hated him for it.
“We’re all counting on you,” he said.
“I won’t disappoint you.”
He looked intensely at me as though searching for the lie, but I’d grown so used to lying to him that perhaps he took my lying face for my normal expression.
August smoothed his lapel and glanced at himself in the mirror. He was gorgeous, as always—the kind of man who’d take your breath away if you were expecting anyone less magnificent.
I remembered first seeing him across that diner what seemed like years ago. I’d been dazzled then, not just by his beautiful face or smooth demeanor, but by the incredible possibilities he carried with him. I wished I could go back to my past self and drag her from that diner. Better yet, I wished I could go back and stop August from ever entering the room in the first place.
He gave me one final look, a warning and a judgment, and left the room. I waited until his steps had disappeared down the hallway before I let myself sink onto the chair in front of the mirror.
He was serious. I’d never seen him this serious.
If I went through with our plan tonight and let Serena broadcast his wrongdoing to the world—or at least to the people in our world who mattered—I would be ruined. Even if they weren’t under his control, they could never act fast enough to protect me from him. August’s web was enormous, and everyone in it would turn on me.
My career would be ruined.
I thought about my dad, about Starling, about everyone in the world I considered a friend aside from the small circle I was daring to trust tonight. And after tonight, how could I think even they’d be safe?
It was more than my career that would be destroyed tonight.
It was my life.
Chapter 29
I couldn’t stop shaking. I was always so strong onstage, projecting an image Siren Song magazine had called “radiant and Amazonian.” I wasn’t onstage now, though. I was still in my dressing room, and the thought of walking out there to a cheering crowd made my stomach heave.
The dressing room door opened. I looked at it, quickly, but got distracted by the framed picture of a vase of lilacs on the wall. I looked at the door again, but my eyes slid to the finishing around the door frame. The paint was white and slightly chipped up in one corner.
Clarence shimmered into view, and my eyes slowly focused on him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Strongest glamour I had.”
I dove for him and his arms went around me, as strong as I wished I could be and as warm as I was cold. I buried my face in his shirt. God, he smelled incredible, and familiar, and safe.
I felt myself begin to collapse and forced back the tears. I didn’t have time to fix this mascara, and the tears of a faerie could eat through all but the most enchanted makeup.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” I said. “Clarence, I don’t know what to do.”
He just held me. I hugged him and he squeezed me until I could barely breathe. I didn’t want to breathe. I wanted to disappear.
“What happened?” he said, after a while. “Is everything okay?”
“Nothing’s okay,” I said. I took slow, steadying breaths, inhaling his scent. The breaths ended up being neither slow nor steadying, but he rubbed my back in slow circles while I tried to calm down.
When I could speak, I told him everything that had just happened. He grew stiff when I told him how August had grabbed me, and I could feel the anger radiating off him, but he stayed calm.
I was glad. I couldn’t handle anyone else coming unhinged right now. I was unhinged enough for the entire world.
“I’m ruined,” I said. “If I don’t do this, I’m his forever.”
“Your contract will end,” he said.
“He’ll make me sign another one. He can’t control me, but he already controls my dad. What if he makes him hurt himself?”
“So take August down.”
“It will destroy me,” I said. “It’s not just the singing. The singing is everything, this is my life—but what will I do if it doesn’t work tonight? Or if it does work and the Waterfall Palace doesn’t act quickly enough to stop him from—”
The thought that had been tugging at the back of my mind finally broke free of the bonds I was trying to put on it.
“God, Clarence, what if he kills me?”
Clarence pulled me closer, which didn’t seem possible. I waited for him to tell me that I was being ridiculous and irrational.
“I’ll protect you,” he said. “Not just me; I know I’m not that good. But I have guards, and I can hire more people. I’ll keep you safe.”
“How do you know you can trust them?” I said, pulling away to look up at his face. “How can you really know? I thought Starling was safe. I thought my dad would be safe. Titania, Clarence, I’m taking a risk just trusting you and Serena and Briana and Sadie. Do you know how many people that is to trust?”
I could feel my voice rising. Clarence pulled me back to him and my heart hammered like the wings of a panicked bird against its cage. He kissed the top of my head and held his lips against my hair for a long moment.
“I’m so scared,” I said.
“I know,” he said. He pulled back and held me by the shoulders. When August had grabbed my shoulders, it had felt dangerous and violating. When Clarence did it, he was holding me up.
“Dior, I love you,” he said. “I love the hell out of you. And you know whether you should do this tonight. If not, okay. We’ll go hide and we’ll find another way to keep you safe from him.”
“But Serena—”
“You don’t owe Serena anything.”
I thought about it. I could escape. I could run away. It felt like fresh air.
“And if you want to go through with it tonight, I’ll be right there behind you,” he said. “I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”
“So what do I do?”
“I can’t decide that,” he said. “Just know that I’m with you no matter what.”
I was silent a long moment. A clock on the wall ticked through the seconds. I had to go onstage within minutes, or I had to run.
I couldn’t decide.
“What’s going to keep you safest this time next year?” Clarence said.
“What?”
“What can you live with next summer?” he said. “Whatever decision you make tonight is going to affect you a long time from tonight.”
If I ran away, a year from now I would be away from August. I would be hiding from him, but I would be away. If I stayed—
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight.”
“Then imagine it’s the worst-case scenario either way. Which one can you live with?”
I thought, and then, to my own surprise, I laughed.
“That’s a very English way to approach it,” I said. “To just assume everything is terrible.”
“We’re experiencing multicultural strengths right now,” he said. “Perhaps someday you can write an essay about this moment if you decide to go to university.”
I rested my face against his soft button-up shirt and thought.
If I ran away, I would always feel like I was in hiding. August would always be a threat hovering just out of reach, and I would always be waiting for him to find me and for this nightmare to start over again. If I stayed, I didn’t know what would happen.
