Mask of Shadows (Untitled #1)(51)

“What about mine?” I clenched my hands together, trying to hide my shaking.

Elise’s head snapped up. Even through the thick glass of her spectacles, the redness of her eyes and puffy tinge to her cheeks were clear. “What?”

I half-bowed and my heart leapt in my throat. The words didn’t come. She didn’t recognize me. Of course she didn’t recognize me.

“Explain yourself, or I will have you removed and reassigned to the coldest, barest outpost in Igna.”

“I doubt you could reassign me.” I straightened up. “You couldn’t even have me arrested for robbing you.”

She didn’t answer. She might not want to see me at all. She might not have cared a lick about me lying to her. Lady, what if she’d been playing me? Pretending to like me and getting in my good graces like Maud had said, and I’d played her right back and neither of us wanted to be here—

“Twenty-Three?” Elise whispered, pen clattering to the floor and ink speckling her hands. She rose slowly to her feet.

“I wanted to apologize.” I licked my lips, cheeks warm—she was staring at me, wide-eyed and lost, like travelers finally finding their way home, the look burning within me. I could only nod. She wasn’t mad, but she wasn’t saying anything. I was too hot, too tight, and everything was new and odd. My own skin was ill fitting. I wanted to strip off the coat, put on a mask, and go back to yesterday. I didn’t know why I was here. “But I can go if you like.”

“No!” Elise dashed toward me, catching my shoulders in her hands. She ran her hand down my arm, silver ring pressing into my skin. “They said you were gone. I thought they meant dead. An auditioner died, and you were gone.”

“Probation.” The word came out like a curse, and I turned my hand over for Elise to see. No one had ever looked at me like this, stuttered over their words in their eagerness to see me alive. And certainly not an Erlend. “Basically dead.”

“Not at all.” She traced the callouses and scars crisscrossing my skin. My hands looked ragged next to hers as her nails trailed over my crooked knuckles and bony fingers. Drips of ink from her freckled hands stained mine. “Sorry.”

I tried to speak, but my words were gone, replaced with the impressions of her fingerprints on my hand, ink on my skin, and lemons on my lips. She was everywhere.

She gripped me so tight that I was sure I’d bear the marks forever.

And I didn’t mind.

“Are you all right?” She leaned back, eyes narrowing and smile falling. “What’s wrong?”

I took a breath, and a small voice I couldn’t stand to know was mine asked, “Why are you being so nice?”

I fought the urge to pull her back into the circle of my arms, to place myself back in the tight grip of hers. She’d hugged me—she hardly knew me and she’d leapt out of her chair to hug me.

She’d worried about me.

“I thought you were dead,” she said as if the words made any sense.

“Tons of people have thought that.” I stared at the stray curl bouncing against her cheek, unable to meet her eyes with that lost-and-now-found look. The aching, longing sense of wanting a life where I was me flared—one where I was known as me even if my name was Opal and I could be me. No one had ever worried about me. “But you’ve been crying.”

Rath had thought me dead once and clapped me on the shoulder when I reappeared. He’d never cried—another dead friend, another funeral pyre we couldn’t afford, another memory to dissolve as the years went on. I was always another.

Elise laughed. “I thought you were dead, and half of what I’ve been saying to you is how you’re too dangerous and wild. Last time we spoke, I insulted you.”

“Not more than anyone else.” I shrugged, dropping my shoulder so her hand fit more easily around my neck. This was new, terrifying, and I’d no idea what to do.

“People flirt with the Left Hand all the time.” Elise slid her fingers from my shoulder to the curve of my neck to my jaw, heat trailing wherever she touched. “I didn’t want you to think I was doing that. That I was lying or being insincere. I was keeping you at a distance but not lying. And then you were cross and dead, and you didn’t know.”

Lady bless, I couldn’t tell her I was the one who was lying now. Especially not when she’d been doing what I had—playing it safe, keeping her real meaning guarded.

Elise wasn’t like I’d thought at all.

She wasn’t her nation or an idea.

She was Elise, and I’d not been paying attention.

“Come.” She tugged me toward the table, pushing me into the seat. “You look like you’re the one who’s seen a ghost.”

“You cried.” I couldn’t reach out to her, not yet, not while all this was so new. “No one’s ever worried that much over me.”

Elise sniffed and closed the distance between us. “You haven’t known the right people. I thought you were likable even when you were robbing me—funny, nice about it, apologized eventually.”

“Only because you were a bully.” I smiled. “You thought I was funny?”

She looked at me over her spectacles. “In that mask? Funny looking.”

“I’ll get a new mask.”