Page 56

Some style editor may show up to do a profile of the happy couple—they're still calling us Alvalin in the press, gross —and we'll have to pretend that this is just my office, and not where I live, now.

Letting my eyes drift across the spines of the books, it dawns on me that there are some titles there that hadn't been in the bags I'd brought here.

I slide off the bed to my knees, crawling over.

My textbooks, my thesis notes binder, my much- abused copy of the nightmare that is The Canterbury Tales in Olde English, it's all fucking there.

It's all the shit from my apartment.

Someone has moved me in.

I can see it, now, the places where someone has tried to integrate my shoddy student shit into the decor.

A film poster on the back of the door that once hung in my living room.

The discontinued Beanevolence mug that was in my desk drawer, now holding expensive wooden-handled pens on the top of the dresser.

My piece-of-shit-laptop resting on a sleek mahogany desk.

I feel…

Violated.

Like I'm a new rescue cat they need to introduce to a house, so they've taken something familiar—the equivalent of an old tee-shirt—and jammed it into my cage.

I feel…

Nothing.

The next morning, I can hear people moving around below me in the house.

I don't get out of bed.

See? Easy choice.

Because… what's the point?

The world is going to keep going on around me, no matter what I say, or what I want, or what I fight for. This is it. This is my reality. For the rest of my life. Forever.

I don't matter.

I will never matter again.

My phone is filled with messages I don't want to deal with, so I turn it off, bury my head under the pillow, and close my eyes.

I can't say I properly sleep. Time passes, I doze, nothing changes.

The room stays dark, because I'd drawn the heavy hunter-green velvet curtains.

My stomach rumbles, but I ignore it. My bladder complains, so I shuffle to the ensuite with my eyes closed, and then go right back to the bed.

Someone knocks.

"Colin," Dav calls through the door. "Are you awake, darling? No one has seen you yet this morning. Aren't you hungry?"

I stare at the ceiling. Take a deep breath. Let it out again. It only bubbles and shakes a little.

Doesn't matter.

So what.

"Love?"

I don't answer.

"Okay, then. You just rest. I'll come back at dinner."

He comes back, but I still don't want to see him any more than I did at lunch.

It's his house. He has the key to this room. He can get in if he wants.

Clearly he doesn't want to.

I can't tell if I'm angry or relieved. If he wants something, he should come in and take it, right?

If I have to be here, the least he could do is want me.

On the other hand, as long as he stays on one side of the locked door, I can live on this one, in my fragile and illusionary bubble of agency.

Ha! Everything under this roof belongs to him, including this room. Including me.

Loathing myself, loathing him, I pull the covers over my head, ignore my belly, and close my eyes.

It's very early morning when I get up again, full of jumping, prickling energy. When I throw back the curtains, the sky is bright with the kind of starscape you don't get in the city.

It's romantic.

It's hateful.

I yank the curtains shut, pace the room, clenching and unclenching my fists, trying to decide if I would feel better if I punched something. No, I'd just hurt my hand. What if I screamed? No, that would make people come running. I hate feeling impotent and useless.

Filled with… with so much I can't do anything with. Anxious energy, fury, and… and… dreams, and hopes, and potential and—and—I fist my hands in my hair, jump up and down on the spot, try to get this frog-hooked-up-to-a-battery feeling out from under my skin. I drop to the floor and do as many push-ups as I can manage, until I’m wet with sweat.

It doesn't do anything for the anger, but at least I don't feel like a lit stick of dynamite anymore.

The tight, hard feeling of wanting to scream presses against the hollow of my throat, and when I go into the bathroom to shower, it comes out as a hot, disgusting spew of vomit.

I choke, and cough, and make the quietest noises of hurt and frustration that can be disguised by the running water, and kick the tile wall, and then, then…

All the fight in me evaporates. It feels like a herculean effort to even turn off the water and pull a towel down from the rack. I wrap it around my hips, not bothering to dry my hair, not caring.

Doesn't matter.

Who's gonna see me anyway?

Nobody, that's who.

The next time he knocks and wakes me, he says: "Pedra's dropped off a copy of her research. It explains so much. There's something about symbiotic biology and side-by-side evolution. I don't understand all of it, Mine Own. I need you to explain it to me. Please. I want to understand it."

I'm not hungry. I'm starving. I want him to go away. I miss him. I'm sick of sleeping. I'm exhausted. He waits for me to say something.

"I've called Dr. Chen," he adds. "She's going to call you. Please pick up?"

I haven't turned on my phone in days.

"You can't stay in here forever," Sarah says, barging in to throw open the curtains, letting in the sun.

I hiss at her like a movie vampire. "Just watch."

"I am." She picks up a pair of jeans I'd thrown against the wall days and days ago, and stuffs them into the tasteful laundry basket by the wardrobe. "It's pathetic."

I snort. "Easy for you to say. You're here by choice."

"Oh, am I?" She sits on the hunter-green velvet armchair in the corner of the room.

"The Applebys are legacy hoard. I've never known anything else.

When I went away to school, I made the conscious choice to pick something that would be useful for Master Tudor.

I'm as happily employed here as I would be anywhere else.

" She shrugs. "And here I get room and board taken care of.

We have a cute little house out the back of the vineyard. "

"But—" I bolt upright, not giving a shit about my greasy hair or week-old beard. "But you're a thing . You're owned. Your kids, too!"

"So is every single human being on this planet. The only difference is that we know it."

She means dragons, and the way they've divvied up every person on earth, but my brain flashes to minimum-wage workers living at the poverty line, and the way capitalism has endangered lives as well as the environment. Sarah is more right than she’s saying.

"I wish I could go back to ignorant bliss."

"To be frank? I kind of wish you could, too," she huffs. I gawp at her. "You're being a massive pain in the ass. The cleaners are stressed out, Cook is beside herself, and I've never seen the boss so—"

"Oh, of course!" I interrupt. "Yes, he's having a hard time. The boss is so inconvenienced! Dav, Dav, Dav is clearly the only person whose feelings matter here!" I throw my arms and let them drop on the covers with a feeble, impotent fwump .

Yes, I am being childish.

No, I don't care.

Sarah lets that hang between us. Then she asks, softly: "And you think that yours don’t? You’re his Favorite."

"Again, back to the part where I belong to him!"

"There's a lot that's not ideal…" she starts, and then stops, rubbing her fingertips on her palms, contemplative.

"Someone else more or less rules your life, that's true.

But you have options. Your opinions matter.

Dragons are happiest when they're surrounded by their greatest treasures, when those treasures are happy in turn.

It's not… master and slave. This isn't America. "

"Africans were enslaved in Canada, too."

Sarah quirks a smirk at me. "And Master Tudor helped enslaved mothers smuggle their babies onto British ships so they’d be raised free."

"Oh, he… he never told me that," I admit softly.

"There's a lot you don't know yet." She huffs out a sigh. "Our relationship is more like family, like I’m working for my uncle's business."

"But the kids—"

"Can be anything they want," Sarah says firmly.

"Whatever it is they want to do, Master Tudor will make space. He'll make up jobs here if he has to—or he'll help them find something off the estate. And I never have to worry whether they’ll ever go hungry, or go into debt for their education, or if they’ll die alone in some state care home, because they’ll be looked after, always . "

"What about their father?"

Sarah looks away for a moment, hand on her cheek, thoughtful. "He was like you. He didn't see the advantages of life in a hoard."

"What happened?" I ask, dread crawling up my throat.

Sarah chuckles. "Master Tudor didn't roast and eat him, if that's what you're imagining. He left."

That piques my interest. "How do you mean?"

"He asked to go, and Master Tudor said he could." She stands. "The price was that he would never see his children again, but that was fine with all of us, frankly. The boss has been a better father to Martha and Nate than that dipshit ever was. You look surprised."

"I didn't think…" Sarah leaves me space to finish the thought, but I haven't formed it yet. So I repeat: "I don't want to be owned."

"No. But you do want to be loved. And so does the boss."