Skye’s POV
I slip away from Travis near the dessert table, my murmured excuses landing on deaf ears and satisfied nods. No one actually listens at these events; they simply wait for their turn to speak, and my departure provides them with exactly that opportunity.
The bar is mercifully unattended. The bartender has probably been summoned to fetch more champagne from the cellar, because God forbid these people drink anything that has been sitting for longer than fifteen minutes.
I reach across the polished mahogany, grab a full glass of white wine, and drink it like water.
The cold bite grounds me. Silences, momentarily, the screaming in my skull.
Travis's cologne still clings to my nostrils, his voice still echoes in my ears, his threat still coils around my throat like a hand that has not quite decided whether to squeeze.
I pour another glass and drink half of it before setting it down.
"Like mother, like daughter."
Diane's voice comes from behind me, amused and sharp in the way that announces she has been watching longer than she will admit.
I turn to find her holding her own glass, already half-empty, her eyes tracking my wine with knowing assessment.
"Meaning?" I ask, though I already know what she means, already feel the criticism forming in the air between us like storm clouds gathering.
"Meaning I recognize the look of someone fleeing a conversation." She settles onto a stool beside me, arranging her silk dress. "Your young man from the garden—Travis, was it? Such a shame you couldn't keep him interested."
The wine turns to acid in my stomach. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Don't I?" Her smile is thin, knowing, the smile of a woman who has catalogued every one of my failures and filed them away for moments exactly like this one.
"I don't want to listen to whatever nonsense you have to say, Diane," I say, trying to force confidence into my voice.
"I saw you two together," she continues, as if I haven't spoken. "The way he looked at you, so attentive. The way you ran from him like you always do."
She sips her wine, studying me with the detachment of a general assessing failed terrain.
"He seemed nice. Well-bred. The kind of man who could have given you stability, if you hadn't—"
"If I hadn't what?" I hear my voice rising and cannot stop it, cannot modulate the pitch into the pleasantness expected at Heinrich's parties.
"Ruined it, darling. Driven him away with your drama, your intensity, your inability to simply be pleasant." Diane sounds like she is delivering obvious truths. "You never could keep a nice man, Skye. Even as a girl, you were too much. Too serious, too sensitive, too demanding. Your father used to say—"
"Don't." The word comes out violent, a blade I have been carrying all evening finally finding its target. "Don't bring him into this. Don't pretend you know anything about what I am, what I need, who I—"
My breath catches.
The room tilts, suddenly wrong. The chandeliers are too bright, their crystals throwing fractured light across my vision like shattered glass. The voices around me swell into a roar, indistinguishable from the blood rushing in my ears.
My heart slams against my ribs with the force of something trying to escape, and my fingers have gone numb where they grip the bar's edge.
I am dying.
That is my first coherent thought. I am dying, or I am breaking, or both, and there is no difference between the two outcomes because either way I will cease to exist in the form I have always known myself.
I cannot breathe. The silk of my dress feels like a vice around my ribs, the room presses in from all sides, and my vision narrows to a tunnel that contains nothing but my own terror.
"Skye?"
Diane's voice sounds distant, underwater, coming from somewhere beyond the wall of panic that has risen around me.
I search for Kai's face in the crowd but there is nothing. Only strangers with champagne flutes and practiced smiles, only my mother's concerned irritation, only the terrible certainty that I am alone in a room full of people who would not notice if I collapsed.
"You look pale," Diane says, reaching for my arm with fingers that sparkle with rings, with the diamonds Heinrich has given her, with the evidence of the life she has built on my father's grave. "Perhaps you've had too much wine. I told Heinrich these events are exhausting, but he insists on—"
"Don't touch me." I jerk away from her hand, the movement too sudden, too violent, wine sloshing from my glass onto the bar and my own trembling fingers. "Don't—just don't."
My chest tightens. The air in the room has become thick, unbreathable, and I can feel my pulse hammering in my throat, my wrists, the backs of my knees.
"You don't get to be concerned now." The words come out uneven, punctuated by breaths that are too shallow, too fast. "You don't get to pretend you care about my wellbeing—"
My hands are shaking. I notice this with detached horror, watching my own fingers tremble against the stem of my wine glass like they belong to someone else entirely.
"—when you have spent my entire life telling me exactly what is wrong with me." I press my palm flat against the bar to steady myself, but the wood feels distant, muffled, as if there is cotton between my skin and the surface. "Exactly why I am too much and not enough and everything that disappoints you."
The edges of my vision darken. The chandelier lights blur into smears of gold, and somewhere beneath my ribs, my heart is trying to claw its way out of my body.
"Skye, you're making a scene." Her voice has dropped to a hiss, her eyes darting to the guests nearby, her priorities crystallizing in a single gesture. "People are looking. If you cannot control yourself—"
"Then what?" I laugh, and the sound is wrong, pitched too high, breaking at the edges like something that has been held together too long. "What will you do, Mother? Send me to my room? Cut me off from money I do not have?"
"I am trying to help you."
"You are trying to hurt me." My chest heaves, and I realize that tears are threatening. "Travis was not nice. Travis was never nice. And the fact that you cannot see that tells me everything I need to know about your judgment."
Diane's expression flickers. For a moment, something human surfaces beneath the performance but it disappears before I can be certain I saw it at all.
"You're hysterical," she says finally. "You're embarrassing yourself. I suggest you find a quiet corner and compose yourself before Heinrich's guests begin to talk."
I do not respond. I cannot respond. My throat has closed, my lungs have forgotten their function, and the only thought left in my skull is run.
I turn and walk. Fast, then faster, weaving between guests who part before me like water around a stone. They see me and look away.
The stairs rise before me. I climb them with my hand on the railing, my knees threatening to buckle with each step, my heart still pounding a rhythm that says danger, danger, danger.
The second floor is quieter. The sounds of the party fade to a distant murmur, replaced by the ringing silence of empty hallways.
I find a bathroom. Small, white-tiled, blessedly unoccupied.
I lock the door with shaking hands.
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