Page 47 of Red Masquerade

And I had only just gotten Adam back.

But was he mine to have?

“Are you?”

I thought about it for a moment. No, I was not excited, but how to tell her that? She would just scold me and move on like I hadn’t said a thing. “I’m sure he’s pleasant,” I said, if only to placate her, though I worried he was anything but, if he was friends with Lucas.

Mother ran her fingers over another bolt and hummed, pleased.

“I think this blue will do nicely,” she decided, motioning the dressmaker over. “It’ll do well to highlight your features when he comes.”

When he comes.

Highsmith was on his way over, my mother and Lucas seemingly decided on the matter. No other bachelors were presented to me. Lucas had decided before he’d even returned home. It made me think it was some scheme he had concocted months ago, whispering in Mother’s ear that it was time for me to be wed off.

Lord Wright Highsmith.

I guess it was what I had wanted—Flora and I would both have a British beau to whisk us away somewhere, except Dixon was mad about her, and I knew she felt the same, even if they hadn’t quite had that conversation yet.

A bolt of fear stabbed through me. Would I ever see her again? If Lucas got his way and I married, dragged to the other side of the world, would Flora and I ever visit each other? Write letters?

She was like a sister, atruesister, to me, and without her near, I’d have no one in my circle. No one onmy side.

The dressmaker took the bolt of fabric from Mother and smiled at me, bowing her head like we were royals. She already had my measurements, since we came often enough. Mother patted my arm as they decided on what style—conservative, of course—and when it should be ready.

One week. It was a rush order, but Mother would hand over the large sum to make it happen. One week, and Lord Highsmith would make his way into my life. One week, and my fate would no longer be my own.

That evening, I sat up in bed, facing the window, warm embers burning in the fireplace. I held the rose in my hand, twisting the stem in my fingers. I had snipped off the thorns, but couldn’t part with them, and they were at the bottom of the small vase I kept the bloom in. Every time I pressed upon the stem with the pad of my finger, the spot where I was pricked, I felt a sore reminder shoot up my hand, the spot still tender, a reminder of the flower’s sender.

It was a welcome pain. Like the ache from the passion of a lover.

Curled up in bed, cradling the rose to my chest, careful not to crush the delicate petals, I played through that first real outing that Adam and I had—how he’d been waiting for me, eager, staring up at the house like he knew exactly where I was inside—and every other encounter. The secret nights in the garden just below my window, when he’d scaled the brick and iron wall, throwing a rock at my window like he was Romeo, summoning me to him. The love we’d shared in the garden, the ways we dared to show each other, when damnation was just an opened door away. But it didn’t stop us, and at the time, we felt inevitable.

His love was inevitable. And I wondered, as I drifted off to sleep, was our wrenching apart—his death—inevitable, too? Or had he taken hold of Fate and refused his thread to be cut?

When I awoke to the soft gray morning light, the rose lay on the pillow, right next to my head, so it was the first thing I saw. The petals unblemished, as though it were just cut from the bush.

Sixteen

Icouldn’t stay away for long, and though I kicked myself the entire drive to the church-turned-mansion near the Sound, there was a thrill growing in my stomach that I could not ignore. I was walking directly into the monster’s den.

Flora convinced me to bring her. Maybe it was a mistake to tell her that I was thinking of returning—and I didn’t want to know if she made good on her promise from the other evening—but she arrived at my family’s house with her usual chipper smile, and a promise to Mother, whose unbelieving and unapproving brow rose ever higher, to return me by midnight.

I was surprised Mother let me go at all. Though, surely, if Lucas had been in the room and not out on an errand, I’d no doubt be prohibited from leaving the house again after that “stunt” I pulled at lunch.

Flora’s driver dropped us at the top of the drive, past all the parked roadsters gleaming in the moonlight, right before the path to the house. Her driver was ever discreet, and even if he wasn’t, her parents seemed not to worry about their daughter in the way that my mother did.

She gripped my hand and grinned, pulling me from the car. “It’s time!”

“For what?” I asked, feeling my short heels sink slightly into the grass.

She gave me an assured look. “To figure all this out.”

Apprehension still boiled within me, warning bells chiming loud in my ears.You shouldn’t be here.

As we passed the gates, starting up the grand steps to the massive front door, the hair raised on the back of my neck, a phantom finger tracing its way down my spine. Everything told me to turn around—did I really want to see the bloodletting again? I surely did not want Flora to see it, didn’t want to have to explain it to her. As though I could, or even knew what was truly happening. But maybe I worried for nothing, because she had come on her own a few days prior, and who knew what she’d seen.

She left Dixon behind again tonight. As she readied me in my room, setting my curls and applying my rouge, she avoided all my questions about him, her only tell the twitching of her right eye.