Tell the Wind and Fire(49)
Gabrielle Mirren stirred, as if she was about to agree with me. I could almost see the words rising to her lips.
“Oh, don’t worry about my tender feefees, Uncle Mark,” Carwyn said casually. “You go right ahead. I never imagined you would listen to me at all.”
Mark took that as surrender. He smiled, brief and devastating. “That’s settled, then.”
“Sweet of you to worry though, sugarplum,” Carwyn said, not quite low enough. “I’m a delicate blossom, and you know that because you get me.”
I could pretend as well with the doppelganger as I could with Mark. Act as if he was Ethan, I thought, and simply smiled, resting back against him with perfect trust.
Him lounging around holding on to me like this was not how meetings were conducted, but I sat as if I was perfectly happy to be there while everyone talked a little more and wrapped the meeting up. When I was spoken to, I smiled and responded as appropriately as I could.
I waited, my head bowed, as if being close to him was something I wanted, until the last member of the council filed out. I waited, snuggled up, quiet and comfortable, until I was sure they were all long gone.
Then I wrenched myself out of his lap, out of his arms, with all the force I had. I didn’t care if I had to break his limbs to get free. I did not care if I had to break my own.
He let me go. I stumbled, clumsy in my violent haste to get away from him, almost dashing my brains out against the edge of the conference table. I grabbed hold of the table instead, hung on to it for an instant, braced and breathing hard.
I heard the muted sound of Carwyn’s chair moving back against the rich, soft carpet. I turned around, still keeping hold of the table, and cast a look at him.
He stood up and stretched, hands linked and arms arched over his head, and I hated him so much, I could see him only in fragments. Every fragment was a treacherous detail: his hair still shorter than Ethan’s, damp on purpose to distract from that, his leaner body in Ethan’s clothes, shirt collar buttoned up to conceal his neck, the blue shirt sitting differently on his shoulders, and Ethan’s jeans slipping down his hips a fraction too far.
He saw me looking and winked.
“Dull meeting, my petal. Don’t you think?”
I let go of the table. I stopped watching and began to prowl, moving in a slow, unstoppable circle back toward him. Carwyn stood and watched me come at him. He let me come, let me rest a hand on his collarbone, not far from his dark doppelganger’s heart.
I gave him a hard shove. He was the one who stumbled then, back connecting with the wall. I clenched the soft blue material of his shirt collar in my fist, wrenched it stranglingly tight, and spoke with my face close to his face—Ethan’s face, the doppelganger’s lying mask.
“Where is Ethan?” I demanded. “What did you do with him?”
Carwyn still had that smile on his lips, as if everything that was happening to him was impossibly amusing.
“My little love dessert, I think you’ve become upset and confused. I’m Ethan. Who else would I be?”
“Don’t play games with me, Carwyn!”
“These violent outbursts and this suspicious nature must be born of your childhood trauma, Golden Thread in the Dark,” Carwyn observed sweetly. “What a prince I am to understand your wounded psyche and put up with your erratic behavior, my damaged daffodil.” He reached up, patted my hand at his throat, and closed his eyes, apparently at his ease. “I know you only hurt me because you love me.”
“I know you. You’re not the one I love. And I will hurt you if you don’t answer me.”
He could have murdered Ethan, I thought. It was possible that it was already far too late to save him.
Carwyn’s eyes opened. They looked darker than Ethan’s even though they must have been the same color, as if the black of his pupils was spreading to swallow Ethan’s eyes up in darkness. “If you cause a disturbance, people will come in. What will you say when they start asking questions? If I’m not Ethan, who else could I be? Who is Carwyn?”
I stared at him mutely, my lips pressed together.
Carwyn smiled gently. “A long-lost twin?” he asked. “Maybe an eeeeeevil twin?”
My silence was the stony, absolute silence of a grave. My silence should have spelled out his own name to him, carved on a tombstone.
“Surely not a doppelganger,” said Carwyn, dropping his voice with solemn horror. “How could that be? Certainly the esteemed Strykers, the first family of the Light, would never create a filthy, unholy creature like a doppelganger! And even if they did, what hideous traitor would ever, ever remove the monster’s collar?”
I could not help myself. I started to shout. “How dare you—”
The door burst open, a stranger on the threshold who must have been Stryker security. He stopped short at the sight of me and someone he thought was Ethan, and I could read his uncertainty: nobody should have been threatening one of the Stryker heirs, but it was the heir’s girlfriend, and he might have been misinterpreting the situation.
Carwyn pulled himself out of my slackened grip and strolled toward the security agent.
“She’s a little rough with me sometimes,” he explained in a confidential tone, patting the man on his arm. “You know how it is. You want to tangle with a wildcat, you get clawed. Worth it, of course. We’re very much in love.”