Chapter 141 Chapter 141
Violet
I stared at her for a few seconds when she said that line, and her tone was so entirely pleasant and so entirely unspecific that it took me a full second to feel the weight underneath the words.
"It was a long evening," I said, carefully.
"It was a productive one," she said, and something shifted in her expression. "I find myself quite pleased, actually. With the progress."
I looked at her, and felt the need to narrow my eyes. "I beg your pardon?"
Her brows rose, gently
"Elijah, of course" she said, as though the name were its own complete sentence.
"He spent a rather considerable portion of the evening watching you, my dear. And having observed my son abstain from social events for many years, I would say he definitely wanted to be there."
She lifted her own cup and took a sip. "And the reason, I believe, is in front of me. He did not look at anyone else that way. Not once, all evening."
The heat crawled up the back of my neck before I could stop it, and I hated myself thoroughly for it. "I think," I began, and made myself keep my voice even, "that he was surrounded by a lot of alphas and females other than me."
She smiled at that. “At least you didn’t deny my claims then.”
Huh?
“That is not what I…” I began
"Were you not," she said, cutting through the middle of my sentence with a smile, "doing exactly that as per our last conversation?"
I had opened my mouth to reply but closed it instead.
I looked at her across the small table and felt that any attempt I made to minimize what had happened between Elijah and me last night was simultaneously an admission that I hadn't been doing my job, and any attempt to claim I had been doing my job was confirmation of exactly what she wanted confirmed.
There was no direction in which I could move that didn't hand her something. She had built the whole thing without my noticing, because I was obviously lost in fantasyland. And now I was sitting in front of her, and she was watching me understand that with a slightly smug expression.
She seemed to find the silence perfectly comfortable.
She reached forward and poured herself a second cup of tea and said, in a tone so casually pleasant that it took me several seconds to fully absorb what I was hearing
"I mentioned to Alaric last night, incidentally, that the fine levied against your parents' pack last quarter seemed rather excessive. I suggested he consider waiving it. He agreed that perhaps they did deserve some leniency."
She looked up from the teapot with an expression of satisfaction. "I trust that will be some relief to your family."
I sat very still and felt the walls of the cage she had built around me become completely visible.
I had known that she had the ability to help or to harm the people who depended on me, and I had understood that she intended to use both capabilities in rotation, like instruments, to keep me moving in the direction she wanted. I had known all of this.
But knowing the shape of a trap is not the same as feeling it close, and right now, sitting in this room with bitter tea cooling in my cup and the sound of my parents' relief ringing in my ears like something I hadn't earned, I felt like she was tightening an invisible noose around me.
"My lady," I said, and I was distantly relieved that my voice came out even, "I am thankful for the leniency you offered to my pack but…” I swallowed.
“But since I am here can I request a way to achieve what you want without requiring me to—" I stopped, because I didn't have a clean way to finish the sentence, because every ending I could construct made me sound either naive or cowardly, and neither felt survivable in this room.
"Without what, precisely?" she asked, and her voice remained warm, and infuriatingly without the edges that should have been in it given what she was actually saying.
She set the teapot down with a small, deliberate sound and I noticed for the first time since I had come here that her hands were shaking a lot more than last time.
She saw me eyeing her shaky hand and then quickly pulled it away.
"You are not the only option available to me. I want you to understand very clearly a that there are several young women who are quite beautiful and who would find this arrangement considerably less complicated than you apparently do.”
Of course, she had noticed me getting jealous of all the women veering towards him. Or maybe I was imagining it.
I wasn't sure at this point.
“There are plenty of women who would require no persuading whatsoever, and who would not sit in my sitting room searching the walls for exits."
Her voice did not harden even once, which was almost worse than anger would have been.
"I selected you because I believed you were capable of understanding what was at stake and acting accordingly. I genuinely hope I was not mistaken in that assessment."
My thoughts drifted back to Elijah, to the specific and particular way he had looked at me last night when there was no one watching, the way he had declared a war against Nate and watched me willingly get tortured and Nate fume, hitting two birds with a stone.
I thought about how, in the hours between then and this morning, I had let myself almost believe that it might be real, that Elijah and I could be...
I shook my head and looked back at his mother who was sitting across a tea table from me calmly reminding me again that everything between him and I was happening only because she let it happen.
I was looking at her and feeling something turn over in my chest that I didn't have a clean word for.
"I will do my best," I managed when the faces of my parents flashed behind my eyes for a brief second.
"Wonderful," she said. "Then I have confidence in you, my dear." She gestured, lightly and almost as an afterthought, toward my cup. "Do finish your tea."
I looked down at the pale, bitter liquid, picked it up, and I drank.