The Gilded Wolves (The Gilded Wolves, #1)(45)

Before she could knock, Laila opened the door, her smile wide as always.

“Ready?” she asked brightly.

A wave of perfume hit her nose. Zofia scrunched her face, stepping back sharply, her shoulders rounding like a cornered animal.

Laila left the door open, disappearing into her room. She did not invite Zofia inside, nor did she wait for an answer. From where Zofia stood, she could only see a sliver of the room. A hint of green silk on the walls. One window draped in linen curtains so the room was not too bright. Near the threshold was a little jade table. And on it … a perfectly pale and round cookie.

Zofia took a step forward and swiped the cookie off the plate. She wanted to step back immediately, but then she caught a glance at the vanity table. Laila was habitually messy. Once, Zofia had tried to rearrange the kitchen, but stopped when Laila threatened not to make any more desserts. The last time she had been here, it was a disaster: pots of cosmetics on the floor; jewelry hanging from light fixtures; the bed not only unmade, but also asymmetrically positioned because Laila “liked to wake with the sunshine on her face.” It gave Zofia chills.

Now it looked different.

She poked her head through the door. All the cosmetics on the vanity were evenly spaced apart, exactly as Zofia would have done. But there was an exception. One glaringly tall tube in the middle of an otherwise perfectly descending scale. Zofia’s fingers twitched to rearrange it.

Zofia glanced to her left. Laila was fiddling with a long, black dress. Just ahead was another pale cookie balancing on a low trunk near Laila’s vanity. Warily, Zofia stepped inside. She padded over to the second cookie and promptly ate it. She felt … less terrible. But that might have just been the cookie.

“Nearly finished selecting your outfits,” said Laila. Now she was sitting cross-legged on the floor, fluffing up the train of the black dress. “You’ll need four outfit changes between Friday’s midnight feast and Saturday’s midnight ball. And of course, you’ll have time to tailor them with whatever incendiary devices you deem fit. I think all of that should fit in your traveling wardrobe.”

Zofia’s traveling wardrobe stood at the back of the room. It was less a travel wardrobe and more of a travel workspace. When completely closed and locked, it resembled tiers of embossed leather suitcases. When opened, it became something else. All the “suitcases” were attached and Forged to hold compartments containing a chemistry set, lock picks, moldings, vials of diatomaceous earth, iron filings, various acids … and dresses. A single piece of precious verit stone lay at the bottom, rendering it undetectable to House Kore’s sensors.

“You’re going to be fine,” said Laila softly. “You have the bearing of a baroness. Now you have to believe it.”

Laila took the dress off the hanger, bringing it toward Zofia. Zofia recoiled. She thought of the women she had studied in the lobby. They looked terribly uncomfortable. All cinched waists and pinched shoes. Laughing at unfunny things.

“Try it on!” said Laila. “My couturier at the House of Worth made it especially for you. There’s a changing screen right—”

Zofia shrugged off her apron, kicked off her shoes, and started shucking off her clothes.

Laila laughed, shaking her head. “Or that.”

Zofia knew that weighted sigh.

Her mother used to make that sound all the time whenever she thought Zofia lacked modesty. “Lacking.” Another word that did not fit. It was not as if she had some secret stash of modesty and had used it all up. She had learned what was considered modest. Taking off one’s clothes in public? Bad. In private? Fine. This was a closed room which meant private. Who cared? Besides, she never liked the feel of too much clothing. And she didn’t understand why she had to be self-conscious of her body anyway. It was just a body.

All the same, Zofia missed the sound of her mother’s sigh. After their parents died in the house fire, Hela had done her best not to fill their days with grief, but it seeped into the cracks of their life anyway.

“Tell me when you can’t breathe,” grunted Laila, pulling the stays.

“That. Makes. No. Sense.”

“Fashion, my love, just like the universe, owes you neither explanation nor rationale.”

Zofia tried to make a sound of protest, but ended up gasping.

“Tight enough!” announced Laila. “Arms up!”

Zofia obeyed. Black silk shimmered around her. She glanced down, noting the perfectly round beads of jet that frothed at the hem like black waves. They were Forged too, and the waves rippled and pulsed down the fabric. Zofia’s mind latched onto the pattern.

“Not discovered until 1746 by d’Alembert.”

Laila paused in her ministrations. “You lost me.”

“Waves!” said Zofia, pointing at the pattern of black beading. “Classical physics has lots of waves. They’re a beautiful hyperbolic partial differential equation. There’s sound waves, light waves, water waves—”

The rest of the room fell away while Zofia talked about waves. Her father, a physics professor in Glowno, had taught her all about recognizing the beauty of mathematics. How one could hear it—even the effect of waves—in something as complex as a piece of music. As she spoke, she hardly felt Laila pulling on the corset stays, sliding her feet into shoes, or tugging at her hair.

“—and, lastly, longitudinal and transverse waves,” she finished, looking up.