Jaya kept her expression congenial, though every facial muscle hurt with the effort. “May I join you there at your table?”
Grey shrugged. Jaya waited for a more polite invitation, but there was none forthcoming.
“Thank you,” Jaya managed to say warmly as she picked up her backpack and went to sit by him. There was something secretive about Grey Emerson. But it wasn’t just about what he’d done to the Raos recently. The way he held his body, just slightly angled away. His strangely intense reaction to her pendant. The way his eyes studied her from behind a wall of wariness and, dare she say, fear… There was something very odd happening here. Jaya had to force her shoulders to relax once she was seated. Her arms had goose bumps, as if her body knew she was sitting next to a scorpion. Smiling, she turned to face him. “It was really nice of you to stand up for that other boy yesterday. In the library, I mean.”
Grey waved a big hand—paw might be a more suitable term—and looked away. “I don’t condone bullying,” he said shortly, as though he didn’t want to talk about it.
That’s ironic, considering what you did to my sister, Jaya wanted to bite back. Instead of speaking her mind, though, she leaned toward him and spoke quietly, like she was telling him a secret. “I still think it was really brave.”
Grey glanced at her, a little surprised, as if he wasn’t used to people noticing his nicer qualities. Probably because he didn’t have too many. After a pause, he asked, “Don’t you have a little sister?”
Jaya stared at him for a moment. He was toying with her, of this she was sure. Her nails suddenly wanted to be embedded in his skin. “Yes, I do,” she said carefully. “Isha. She’s in the sophomore dining hall with her friends.”
He grunted in response. It would be hard drawing him out, Jaya could already see. “Why do you ask?” she managed to say in a light, offhanded way.
“Leo mentioned it.”
Right. Leo had “mentioned it.” As if Grey Emerson wasn’t keenly aware of everything the Raos were doing. He was good, she had to admit. But she was better.
Jaya said in a lilting voice, “Oh, Leo, of course! Your friends were so kind when Isha and I met them earlier. I’ve been warned that there’d be all kinds of cliques and people waiting to stab you in the back with their heirloom swords at St. Rosetta’s.” She trilled a laugh. “That’s why I’m so glad I have someone like you—and your friends—to show me the ropes. I hope we have some electives together.”
Grey narrowed his eyes, as if he were trying to see through her facade. Jaya held steady. He couldn’t know she knew. She needed to play things just right. For good measure, she put her chin in her hands and batted her eyes at him a little.
Finally, he ran a jerky hand through his hair, as if her incessant flirting was flustering him, and said, in a low voice, “I have archery first period.”
“Me too!” Jaya widened her eyes in mock surprise. “But I don’t know the first thing about archery. I’m a little worried about that class.” She crinkled her nose, partly to play the role of innocent ingenue and partly because it rankled her to lie about this. She was actually an incredible archer. Grey Emerson, on the other hand, was probably terrible. Just look at those gigantic hands. As if they could handle a bow and arrow with the gentle finesse the instruments demanded. But there was no point complaining now. She’d known the price when she’d enrolled in his archery class. “Can I sit with you?”
It hadn’t been hard to find out what classes Grey had. One phone call from Jaya in her dorm room, pretending to be the Duke of Westborough’s secretary to the administrative staff at St. Rosetta’s was all it had taken. She’d requested that the family’s dear friend, Jaya Rao, be placed in all the same classes as Grey Emerson, and since she’d been able to give them all of her identifying information, it had been rather simple.
“Sure,” Grey said gruffly, after a pause, looking up at Jaya from under his eyelashes. His blue eyes lit briefly on her rose necklace and then flitted away.
Jaya touched him lightly on his bare forearm. Wow. She hadn’t realized it was possible to have such a muscular forearm. “Thank you! That’s so nice. I’ll feel so much better having someone to guide me.”
Grey lifted his arm from under her hand to scratch at his chest, so her fingers were left suspended in midair. He couldn’t even conceal his dislike of the Rao family to endure some light flirting. No matter. She’d wear him down eventually. She had lots of practice being nice to people she hated and who hated her, thanks to her royal training. “Here’s my schedule,” she said, pulling it out of her backpack and setting it on the table between them. “I wonder if we have any other classes together.”
Jaya watched his eyes run down the piece of paper. “Huh. We’ll be together the entire semester. Every class.” He said it abruptly and kind of shiftily, as if he couldn’t quite make her out. “What’s your deal?” he asked after a pause.
Jaya raised her eyebrows. “I beg your pardon? My deal?”
He waved a hand impatiently. “Raos don’t like Emersons. Emersons hate Raos. So why are you being so nice? What’s your angle?”
Wasn’t he about fifty years too young to be so cynical about life? Jaya smiled her best and brightest smile. “I told you, Lord Northcliffe. I think forgiveness could begin with us.” Good work, Jaya. She should write self-help books and travel the world healing nations.
He crossed his arms, his biceps bulging. His overall expression told her he didn’t quite believe her. But his eyes held hers just a little too long, and Jaya knew she’d played her first move well. He could be hooked, even if there was a caginess about him she’d have to work on.
Jaya kept smiling as they talked, hoping he wouldn’t see the angry outbursts she was swallowing quicker than the scalding coffee she’d poured herself. She willed him to be hypnotized by her smile, her brown eyes, her easy banter.
The rose pendant glittered at her throat in the rising sunlight, throwing red embers of light across Grey Emerson’s skin.
Grey
There was something about the way she was leaning in to him, her smile just a touch too wide, her eyes just a bit too… blinky.
Grey was used to girls flirting with him. He didn’t know what it was—his brooding, dark demeanor, perhaps, or maybe the way he was always just a little too tall and a little too broad for any space he occupied. Or maybe it was just the title of nobility he carried. Whatever the case, he cycled through the same steps with nearly every new girl who walked through the gilded double doors of St. Rosetta’s:
Girl: Flirt
Grey: Pretend to not notice
Girl: Touch Grey
Grey: Cough and step aside, just a bit too far for her fingers to easily brush him
Girl: Smile
Grey: Glare
The only exception to that cycle so far had been Daphne Elizabeth, who was now one of his self-proclaimed “friends,” along with Leo and Rahul. Instead of telling him all the ways in which he could screw himself, DE had latched on to him freshman year, convinced that he needed someone to take care of him. He found her annoying and tolerable in equal parts, though he’d never tell her about the tolerable part. When she’d made it clear she would rather read War and Peace a thousand times over than date him, he’d relaxed and let her talk to him. Sometimes.
Yeah, new girls flirting with him was normal. But something about Jaya Rao struck him as very slightly off. It was like she was playing a part, not truly flirting because she found him attractive. And then there was the fact that she had transferred in this late into her high school career, little sister in tow. Lastly, there was the matter of the necklace. Why did she have a ruby pendant shaped like a rose that her father had gotten in Dubai, of all places? Given the story of the stolen ruby and the curse her family had placed on his, that was too big a coincidence. A Rao so willing to befriend an Emerson would be rare enough. But a Rao wearing a ruby rose pendant, being overfriendly and registered for the same classes as him? Something was definitely not
right.
Grey studied her, but didn’t see guilt or sadistic smugness. Just some B-grade flirting. His eyes dropped to the pendant again—and he froze. “A ruby’s missing,” he said, his voice sounding faint and wooden even to his own ears.
The words of the curse sizzled in his brain.
As the glass rose dims,
So the hope of redemption
Eighteen years, one by one,
Until what’s left is none.
Each ruby on Jaya’s pendant represented a petal of the red rose. Was this what the curse had meant all along? Eighteen petals, falling?
Jaya, unaware of the frantic pounding of his pulse, glanced down. “Yes, I know; it went missing yesterday. I’ll have to get it replaced soon.”
“How many rubies are there?” Grey asked, his voice weird and wooden again.
“Eighteen,” Jaya said. “Well, seventeen now, I suppose.”
Eighteen. Just like the curse. And once they’d all fallen… Grey would die. Just as his father had always said. Here it was, the countdown, right in front of his eyes. After all these years, it was real. The curse was real. Grey felt his face pale.
“Are you all right?” Jaya asked.
Grey couldn’t even bring himself to nod.
Jaya
There was something about Grey’s expression that reminded her of a person in shock. She’d once seen a picture of a survivor of a horrible car crash, and they’d had the same wide eyes, the slightly sallow face, the expression like they couldn’t quite believe this was reality.
Why did he care so much about whether or not she lost a ruby, anyway? She’d expected him to be a lot more focused on Isha or the Raos’ disgrace, even in a circumspect manner. But Grey Emerson seemed strangely obsessed with her pendant.
“Good morning, royals and noble-type people!”
Grey and Jaya looked up at the same time to see Daphne Elizabeth flitting toward them. Leo and Rahul followed behind at a statelier pace.
“Hello, Daphne Elizabeth,” Jaya said, smiling her best royal smile. Other students were beginning to filter in, and she had to raise her voice to be heard.
“How are you this morning?”
“Fan-freaking-tastic,” Daphne Elizabeth replied, grinning. She turned to Grey and studied him for a moment. “What’s your problem?”
“Nothing.” Abruptly, he pushed his chair back and staggered off.
Daphne Elizabeth looked after him. Jaya watched him get swallowed by the growing numbers of hungry seniors, then turned back to his friends. “I’m not sure what happened… I hope I haven’t offended him in any way.”
Leo and Rahul turned to follow him.
“Well,” Daphne Elizabeth said, blinking and smiling at Jaya even though Jaya could see she was worried about Grey. “I’m starving. Wanna grab some breakfast? The from-scratch buttermilk waffles are to die for.”
“Certainly.” Jaya tossed a glance over her shoulder as they walked. Leo and Rahul had joined Grey over by the coffee and tea counter. None of them were actually ordering anything, though. Their heads were bent together, and they were deep in conversation.
Interesting.
Very interesting, indeed.
CHAPTER 6
Grey
Jaya’s pendant losing a ruby was bringing everything that was wrong with his life, with him, into sharp focus. But he couldn’t speak to anyone about it. Leo, Rahul, and DE didn’t know anything about the curse—or how Grey had murdered his own mother. No one would understand that. It was just one more way he was different from the rest of the student population at St. Rosetta’s. Actually, make that the rest of the human population, period.
Now Grey shrugged off their concerned questions and kept his back turned to them. “I’m fine. I just want some coffee. Okay? Go back to the table.” He reached for the silver cafetière and poured himself a mug of black coffee.
Leo folded his arms across his chest. “C’est des conneries.”
“Leo thinks what you just said, in an attempt to placate us, is bullshit,” Rahul provided.
Grey kept his back turned. “Yeah. I got it. Thanks.”
“So are you going to be honest with us now?” Leo inquired, his eyebrow arched.
Grey gulped down his coffee and set the mug down. “No,” he said, looking back toward Jaya, graceful hands crossed on the table as she listened to whatever DE was saying. “I’m not.”
What he was thinking but didn’t say was that being alone all these years might as well be a death sentence. His family was thousands of miles away. He had people, who, for some reason, kept trying to be a part of his life, but he kept them at a distance too. He didn’t know how to be close with people. Being kept apart from his family because of what he’d done to his mother had taught him that he was toxic. Inherently damaged.
So maybe the curse was meant to kill him on his eighteenth birthday, but in many ways, Grey felt like his life had already ended. In so many ways, he’d already experienced a kind of death: the death of himself. The death of whatever he might once have had inside him, the freedom to be kind, the freedom to be a friend, the freedom to love with abandon and without fear. In so many ways—with every single passing day that he lived like this, keeping everyone at bay, going days without saying a single word to another soul—Grey didn’t really count himself as one of the living. In so many ways, he was fully and without question, the beast his father said he was.
He heard Leo sigh and mutter something in French, and after a moment both he and Rahul walked off back to their table. They’d given up on him.
Grey’s eyes stole across the large hall to Jaya again, to the pendant he saw faintly twinkling at him in the light, as if it were able to read the tenor of his thoughts. If he stole it, perhaps returned it to its rightful place in the temple in Mysuru, would it keep the curse at bay? Or had the ending to his story already been written, long before he was born?
Jaya
They’d just gotten their waffles—blueberry for Daphne Elizabeth, strawberries and cream for Jaya—when she saw them. Caterina and Alaric.
Daphne Elizabeth had been in the middle of telling her about the annual fall trip to Aspen, when everyone in their class went shopping together. Apparently, last year Alaric had face-planted in the snow on the way back to the bus, and his dad had sued the city unsuccessfully. This year Alaric’s dad had reserved a company to come out the day of the trip and shovel all the snow within fifty feet of anywhere Alaric might go. Basically the whole town.
“Alaric’s dad is just so over-the-top protective,” Daphne Elizabeth said, sighing. “Must be nice to have parents who actually give a shit,” she added quietly.
Jaya made the appropriate sympathetic noises, though her eyes surreptitiously followed the couple. Daphne Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them yet, and she wanted to keep it that way for as long as possible.
Caterina and Alaric wore the same school uniform as everyone else, but somehow they looked like they could be strolling down a red carpet instead of walking inside a dining hall full of loud teenagers. Caterina’s hair was done perfectly in those same cascading waves as the first time Jaya had seen her. A diamond-studded clip held back the front of her hair, and her makeup was still just as flawless, though she’d toned it down for school. Short of hiring a makeup artist to camp out with her in her dorm room, Jaya could never manage such perfection with her makeup.
Not a hair was out of place on Alaric’s head either. He wore a big Gucci watch, and his skin was tanned like he’d spent his summer at some posh seaside resort, probably in France, because that’s where people like Alaric and Caterina usually went. Appa thought France was full of rude, stuck-up people, but Jaya secretly loved it. When she and Isha had gone to boarding school in Amsterdam for a year, she’d sneaked away with friends on a mini-vacation to Paris and her parents had never been the wiser. Of course, that was before she realized how irresponsible that was for the first child of a royal family. She’d never do something like that now.
&n
bsp; Daphne Elizabeth’s words petered out as she noticed the happy couple too. Well, Caterina was happy, anyway. Alaric appeared too smug to be “happy,” in the strictest sense of the word.
“Oh,” Daphne Elizabeth breathed as Caterina and Alaric walked past and stopped by a table to speak with a few people. It sounded like a little moan of pain. Though he couldn’t possibly have heard her over the din of chattering first-day seniors in the dining hall, Alaric glanced at her, his gaze stuttering just a moment before it moved slickly away.
Jaya put a hand on Daphne Elizabeth’s arm and led her back to their table. The boys were already back, with bagels and fruit. Grey was brooding over a cup of coffee. Black, of course, to match his bitter personality. “I’m sorry,” Jaya said to Daphne Elizabeth, because she didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s not your fault,” Daphne Elizabeth said, setting her plate down with a bang.
Leo raised his eyebrows. “What’s going on?”
Jaya shot a glance at Daphne Elizabeth, who waved a hand. “He knows. They all do.”
“Oh.” Leo sat back and popped half of an entire bagel into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. It was like watching a magic trick. “A-la-dick?”
“That is not his name,” Daphne Elizabeth hissed. Then, looking over her shoulder, she added, “And oh my God, could you please come up with a less obvious code word?”
Leo held up his hands in surrender. “You told her?” he asked Daphne Elizabeth.
She blew her red bangs out of her eyes. “Jaya kind of saw. I didn’t have a choice.”
“You shouldn’t worry. I’m an excellent secret-keeper,” Jaya said, and at that, Grey gave her a look. She was about to say something when he spoke, interrupting her train of thought.
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