Chapter 17: Asked Briar to Help Put on Shoes

 

Killian went very still.

Briar felt him stop breathing for a moment.

"What did you just say," he said.

"I want to reject you," she said again. "I want to be the one who does it first."

He put her down and took one step back and looked at her.

"Don't say that again," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I said so! Don't say it again!"

Briar looked at him. Her hands were shaking and she pressed them against her sides.

"You talk about the prophecy like it's everything," she said. "Like it's the only thing. You need two children and then you can have your heir and be free of me." Her voice wobbled but she kept going because Mabel had made her practice this one hundred times and she was going to finish it. "But you keep Vivienne waiting too. You say she's your fated mate and you keep her close but you won't reject me to be with her properly because you're scared. You're scared of a dead woman's words and so you're stuck and you're making everyone around you stuck with you."

"Who told you to say that." His voice had dropped to something very low and very controlled, which was worse than shouting.

Briar thought of Mabel's apartment floor at midnight, Mabel making her repeat the words back until she had them right. She said nothing.

"WHO," Killian said. Loud this time. Loud enough that it landed in the hallway like something physical.

Briar looked at the wall and kept her mouth shut.

He stepped toward her. "You have never spoken like this in your life. Someone put those words in your mouth and I want to know who."

"Maybe I put them there myself," she said.

Something moved through his face. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he looked at her like she was something he had found on the bottom of his shoe, cold and comprehensive and completely done.

"You're disgusting," he said. "This whole performance is disgusting."

He turned and walked to the other bedroom and the door shut behind him.

Briar stood in the hallway alone.

She stood there for a long time. Then she went to bed and lay on her back staring at the ceiling and pressed her face into the pillow and made a noise that was mostly disbelief and only a little bit crying.

She had said all of it. In the right order.

——

With Mary gone there was nobody left to watch her, which meant that the next morning Briar got up early, left a note on the kitchen counter that said gone shopping and slipped out before anyone could stop her.

Mabel was waiting outside the east entrance of Meridian Mall with two coffees and an expression of focused determination.

"You said all of it?" Mabel said, handing her a cup.

"All of it. In the right order."

Mabel looked at her for a moment. "Good. Now we find Eliza."

Eliza Vane was Killian's younger sister and the pack's most reluctant witch. She was also, as Mabel had established through three weeks of observation, completely unable to walk past a good shopping center. She was there every Tuesday and Thursday without fail, usually on the second floor, usually at the cosmetics counters.

They found her exactly there.

And they also found Vivienne.

Mabel's hand closed around Briar's arm. "Don't look. Walk. That way."

"But I just saw"

"Vivienne is with her. Move."

Briar moved.

Mabel steered her into a home goods shop two storefronts down and positioned them behind a display of decorative cushions.

"Vivienne wouldn't do anything bad," Briar said. "She gave me earrings."

Mabel turned and looked at her with an extremely specific expression. "Show me."

Briar found the photo on her phone. The deep red stones on white cotton.

Mabel looked at it for two seconds. "I have seen those exact earrings outside Rosie's secondhand market on Clement Street. There was a card on them. It said two dollars."

Briar stared at the photo.

"She said they were the only pair in the world," she said. "She said she had the other two melted down."

"She said a lot of things," Mabel said.

Briar put her phone away slowly.

"Tell me again," she said. "About Vivienne. All of it."

So Mabel told her. The wolf run, laid out step by step, how Vivienne had guided Briar into every part of it and then stood in front of the pack and said she had never suggested any such thing. The canteen footage and the AV control room. The dress that was two sizes too small. The coffee shop. The way every disaster had Vivienne's hands on the planning and none of them on the aftermath.

Briar listened. She nodded slowly.

"The coffee," she said.

"What about it?"

"She kept asking me to throw it on her before she said those things about my mother. She made up a reason, a drama exercise, something. It didn't make sense even to me." Briar frowned. "She only said those awful things after I kept saying no. Like she needed me angry enough to actually do it."

"Exactly," Mabel said.

"And Mary." Briar was thinking it through carefully, holding each piece up and turning it over. "Vivienne wrote to me about Mary. She said Mary was dramatic. She said Mary invented problems for attention. So when I saw the bruises I thought." She stopped. "I laughed. Because Vivienne told me it wasn't real."

"Yes."

"She made me be cruel to Mary on purpose."

"Yes."

Briar sat with this. It kept expanding the more she looked at it, reaching back through three years of disasters and confusion and moments she had spent wondering how things had gone so wrong.

"She's actually a bad person," Briar said.

"Yes," Mabel said. "She actually is."

"But she always seemed so." Briar shook her head. She did not have the word for what Vivienne had seemed. "She gave me earrings from a bin."

"Two dollars," Mabel said.

Something hit Briar's foot.

She looked down. A high-heeled sandal, expensive, had landed directly in front of her. She looked up.

Eliza Vane stood at the end of the cushion display with four shopping bags on one arm and the expression of someone who had never once in her life considered that the world might not immediately organize itself around her needs. She was Killian's sister and it showed in the jaw and the eyes, though she had done something with both that was entirely her own. She wore a jacket that cost more than Briar's monthly allowance and her dark hair was arranged with the precise casualness of someone who had spent forty minutes on it.

She looked at Briar.

She looked at the shoe on the floor.

"Well, there you are. Help me put them on. " she said. "You have nothing to do anyway, don't you?"

She said it the way you say something to a piece of furniture you have decided is being unhelpful.