Page 3

Chapter 3

Fantasia

T he car we take to my new house- a car purchased for our use by Achilles, driving to the house Achilles has chosen for me- will be far too small with Piers inside of it. I keep my stare glued to my own window, not actually seeing the alien world passing outside, but I can feel him across from me. I can feel his eyes on me. My skin tingles so hard I want to start scratching at it to erase the feeling.

No. What I want is a drink. I’d give anything for a drink right now.

Raleigh might as well be the dark side of the moon to me. London is a monstrous, sprawling beast. Somehow though, it still managed to be suffocatingly claustrophobic to me. I didn’t often get to leave Wesley Hall to immerse myself in it, but whenever I did, I found myself completely overwhelmed by its sounds, its narrow streets, its endless movement. Eventually, I stopped leaving the Hall entirely for a number of reasons. One of them was avoiding the city outside the estate.

To reach the house my brother has bought for me, on the other hand, we don’t even enter the city of Raleigh, but drive around it at an alarming speed down the wrong side of an enormous, ugly, cracked highway. On either side of the highway, my view is blocked by tall, spindly trees, also ugly.

Everything is ugly here, washed out by the light of a glaring sun sitting in a too large sky.

“It’s so sunny,” Piers remarks. He sounds pleased. In awe, even. I grimace, whether he can see it or not.

It takes twenty minutes to get where we’re going, a quiet suburban neighborhood filled with trees. Lavish houses sit behind wrought iron gates, half hidden at the ends of long driveways that wind off into their own private groves. The house we arrive at is entirely invisible from the street, which immediately makes me like it more. I’d wondered about privacy now that I’d be living amongst strangers, and while I can’t escape my two guardians- or Piers, apparently- at least I won’t have people able to see into my windows from the gate.

At the top of the drive, my new home is revealed. I suppose it’s beautiful, in a quaint way. Nothing compared to Wesley Hall’s sprawling, manicured lawns and hedges, and its ancient Jacobean edifice. This house is three stories and covered in lightless windows and warm brown shingles.

No glow spills from the curtains, no silhouette moves beyond the glass. “Why is there no one to greet us at the door?” I ask, as we round the house and park outside a three car garage. “Is there no housekeeper?”

“I believe the housekeeper will be along at the end of the week, ma’am,” Barnes says. “Until then, we can order in.”

Cooking is the job of the cookstaff, not the housekeeper. But he doesn’t know that. And then I realize what he means. One housekeeper to see to all the needs of the house. It’s not all that large, but still, if Achilles thinks I’m going to be able to operate a vacuum cleaner-

“Will they also be tending to the landscaping and cleaning?” I ask. “Or will that be your job?”

Barnes turns off the car, but seems unfazed by my irritation. “There’s a cleaning service and gardening service that will visit the property twice a month.”

Twice a month ?! And in the meantime, what? I have to sit in my own filth and watch the hedges explode-

“Don’t worry, my lady ,” Piers says to my right. I spare him only a glance, just long enough to see his crooked grin. “I can teach you how to wash your own dishes.”

I open my own door with a jerk and get out, slamming it in my wake. Piers is already out on his side, and he beats me to the boot of the car. Before I can stop him, he takes my carry-on in hand.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demand.

Piers pretends to struggle with my bag before swinging it up to sit on his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and taking his own duffle in his other hand. I ignore the way that makes all the muscles in his arms flex. “I’m helping you unpack, remember?” he says, like I’m dim for asking.

“You’re not coming inside. You’ve seen the house, now call yourself a cab and go.”

“And let you dislocate your shoulder trying to get this thing upstairs?” Piers asks. “I don’t think so, love.”

Love. I resist the urge to clamp my hands over his mouth to keep from saying that word again. “Go. Away . Piers.”

He leans in, mouth quirking. “ No .” Then he steps past me toward the front of the house. My bodyguards hesitate, before grabbing their own bags and following after him.

For a moment, I stand outside alone, staring at the tall trees that surround me, too close, and the side of the house, looking down at me with large dark eyes. My throat is too tight, my breaths too short. If I go inside, I’m accepting my new life, the script I’ve been given by my brother-

No, it’s too late for that now. I accepted his terms when I stepped onto the plane without a fight. Maybe I'd accepted them even earlier- when I hesitated at my window during the chaos at Wesley Hall, failing to make the jump that might have ended it all. At that moment, my life stopped being my own.

Now, I’m forced to live it.

Inside, I’m a little relieved to find the house already furnished, and very tastefully decorated in sage greens, grayish white, and cream. Now that my bodyguards have turned on the lights, I can admire the airiness of the place. It lacks Wesley Hall’s grandeur, of course, but it’s… not unpleasant.

I peek into each of the downstairs rooms, finding a large common space, a kitchen with a massive island and bar- no proper dining room- a den that could be used as a private study, and doors that lead to the backyard and the garage. I don’t see Piers, but I hear him and my bodyguards moving around upstairs.

Unable to stall any longer, I return to the foyer and trudge up to the second floor.

There are three bedrooms in this house, not including the den, and all of them are spacious and filled with large windows. I find mine, the most sprawling of the bunch, to the right of the stairs. Piers is already inside, with my bag set on the bed. To my horror, he’s unzipping it like he’s going to unpack my toiletries for me.

“Will you leave me alone?!” I demand, yanking my bag closed.

“You’ve been hunting me like a dog for the past year, and now that I’m here you want nothing to do with me,” Piers quips. “Will you ever make up your mind?”

I bite the insides of my lips hard, wanting to shout a thousand things but giving up before any of them have left my mouth. Instead, I turn away, aiming for the door. If I stop acknowledging him, maybe he’ll get bored enough to finally leave. Before I make it to the hall, though, Piers stops me with another question.

“What did I do to make you want me dead so badly?”

My heart ducks painfully in my chest, and I whip around to face him. Piers’s dark green eyes see too much, and I quickly turn away again, unable to meet them.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I tell him flatly, and I’m not lying. I’m no longer head of the Warwicks or the lady of Wesley Hall. Everything I was trying to hold onto has been stripped from me. Whatever I wanted then is pointless to me now.

I see Piers move in my periphery, but I refuse to look his way. He walks right past me, so close I can smell his skin. The door to my bedroom closes. For a moment, I think he’s finally left me alone, put off by my refusal to answer a question he’s well within his rights to ask.

I raise my head- and Piers’s face is mere inches from mine.

“I say it does,” he says, taking a step forward. I stumble back, and he comes after me. When my back hits the wall, his body traps me like iron bars, closing in, leaving no room to escape. “We were friends once.”

Once.

I was a child when Piers came to Wesley Hall, impressionable but painfully shy. He was barely a man, a boorish orphan plucked from obscurity by distant members of my Warwick family. Despite the difference in our ages, and the fact that my brother was even older than both of us, the three of us became friends almost immediately. Piers had a boyish charm to him that, I’m ashamed to say now, instantly enchanted me. He’d play pranks on older members of the Warwick family, steal sweets from the kitchen for me, and even lure wild animals into the house to play with. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to play .

“Were we?” I whisper, my voice quivering.

That changed when we got older. Once I hit puberty, Piers stopped being just a friend to me. He became… well, he became everything. What had once been innocent between us became magical. Charged. Sitting on his bed and talking late into the night felt like more than just a conversation. Every smile was the promise of a kiss, even though he never touched me. For a long time, I was sure he didn’t think of me in the same way, that these were just girlish fantasies about a boy I’d grown up knowing.

Then, three months before everything went wrong, I ran into him in the library. I was 21 at the time, lost in my books for hours, missing lunch and almost teatime completely. I’d finally torn myself away from my book and stood to leave when Piers came around a bookshelf and crashed right into me.

His arms came around me, keeping me from falling, and I clung to him in response. Our bodies were brought flush. My face tilted up to meet his, and I felt his breath on my lips. He pulled back, but he lingered first.

He lingered for several seconds, for an eternity that helped me memorize the moment in every detail and replay it in every one of my dreams.

And then, mere months later, my father named Piers his heir instead of me. Marcus Warwick would rather a man who wasn’t even a blood member of the Warwick family be its next ruler than hand it down to his own daughter. That left me with a choice to make.

Lose everything I’d ever known, everything I’d been raised to possess, or kill the man I loved.

The past and the future layer over each other, making my vision fuzzy and my thoughts into clouds, returning me to that fateful moment in the library. If we had kissed then, if we had done more, would I have made a different choice?

Piers leans into me now, his breath brushing over my cheeks. His fingers trace my chin, and despite the feather soft touch, I jump. When his thumb touches my bottom lip, I let them part. His other hand cups the back of my neck, so warm that it turns my spine to liquid.

Lips brush my temple, sending prickles across my hairline as he murmurs, “Maybe we were something else too.”

I suck in a breath and let my eyes roll closed. His mouth moves over my forehead, his fingertips running down my neck. Can he feel how hard and fast my heart is beating? I swallow and his lips curve in a smile against my brow.

This is better than any of my dreams ever were. It’s even better than my most lucid withdrawal hallucinations. Still, when was the last time I could trust my own mind? I saw a different version of Piers in the airport just this morning after all, seconds before the shootout.

What makes me sure that this moment is any more concrete?

“Are you real?” I whisper, not daring to open my eyes. “Or am I still coming down?”

If I open my eyes, will Piers be gone? I’m afraid to find out now.

There’s a horrible silence, and I flinch and open my eyes, expecting to actually be alone in my room. But Piers is still there, still so close, his green eyes a little wide.

“What?” he asks, sounding startled. I feel the puff of air on my lips, but it still seems surreal.

I can’t think of what to respond with, and when I stay silent, he leans back, taking his warmth with him. I almost lean after him, but he’s already walking toward the door. It closes too loudly behind him, and leaves me in silence.