SYLVIANNE.
She took a pull from the cigarette, letting the smoke curl from her lips out the windows. Smoking in the dorm rooms was a violation, Sylv was sure, but it was one that she had seen yet to be enforced. Had she of been in a better mood, she’d of offered Bas one. Since she was not, she tapped the ash onto his window sill.
“She’s an annoyance,” Sylvianne said, refusing to allow Gia any more space in her mind. “Nothing more.” The girl was more than that; in truth. An annoyance, but also a fascination– a rival who should have no means to compete. Someone as ugly as she felt. “I can imagine as well what she wants from me,” her gaze fell back to Bas, still in seated. “But, you make your own choices.”
Sylv lifted a shoulder, finally returning to the foot of the bed. “What do you think of me these days?” It was a broad question, but like most posed by beautiful women, it was a trap.
Once she was close enough, Bastian reached out to touch her. He ran his fingers down her sleeve, across her wrist, along the lines of her palm. In fact, he thought less of her now than he had before. It was almost certainly a temporary shift, much like laying a hand on the scale, but he believed jealousy was an ugly color on her. More than expecting her to be cold and unshakeable ( unrealistic and boring as that would be ), he thought she might have understood the nuance of the situation. He had known — and continued to know, as it were — that she was special, and that their relationship was worth more than anything else being offered. Sylvianne was more than a catch or a precious gem; she was an equal and a partner. This momentary lapse in esteem, however unfortunate, did not alter that reality.
“Nothing has changed,” he answered. “Is that what you want to know? I think you’re being impulsive which I do dislike. Imagine if anyone else knew that you were feeling threatened by Gia Fox. That’s a more interesting rumor, isn’t it?”
He chuckled, but it wasn’t with as much amusement as he would have liked. Perhaps if he were someone else, it would be more absurd for Sylvianne to feel as she did. What had drawn him to her in the first place, after all? Their relationship was built on a foundation nearly as strange as the one he shared with Gia. Deceit, carefully contained and artfully curated, was a common denominator. There was also that both Sylvianne and Gia oozed a certain kind of power — whether refined and seductive or violent and impassioned. Occupying a space between them would prove to be unendurable so long as they existed as opposites, if only because Sylvianne’s framing made it feel so exhaustingly pedestrian.
He leaned back, settling in against the pillows. With a steady, curious gaze, he asked in return, “What do you want me to think of you?”
It was unsettling to be associated so closely with life again — Gia was filled to the brim and overflowing with vitality, red-palmed and black-eyed. (Dead girls didn’t float through the cloisters with their hands balled into fists and their pupils swollen, they were dead.) Since she was no longer a spectre, relegated to the walls and moving quickly, before she could be seen and questioned, she lingered, and listened, recognising her name even when unspoken: the epithets were sharp and sweet, like cherry wine, like the rose colour and rusted taste of blood in the back of the throat. Ship-sinker. Warmonger. Crazy woman. Hysterical. But undeniably alive. Something, someone, infectious.
She hadn’t found Décsey after she had abandoned him among the trees, but the reciprocal was equally true; he had failed to seek her out among the ash and snow and it was impossible to tell if she could attribute that to a failure of her own or to the programme of deprivation she’d began a mere after hour, remaining that cold, dead girl for him alone and disappearing when even the rumour of his presence came too close. His coat had vanished too, left on the back of a chair in the library and never reclaimed, its pockets empty. (Gia probably needed to apologise for that. It was a gift, and it had kept her warm. To a degree.)
She could survive ambiguity. She couldn’t. One night awake until dawn was enough.
Gia dressed in a way that befit her new titles: for battle, armor-clad, or the closest thing to it, wearing only a cross-shaped pendant — that was obscenely appropriate, was it not? — under the silver jacket that Kovalenko had almost ruined for her. She found a wine-coloured lipstick in the bottom of her makeup bag. Something that would leave a mark. She set out, not on horseback nor shepherded by an army, but alone, on foot, raising her hand to Bas’ door as she had a thousand times.
“Décsey. I shouldn’t have refused you at the bonfire.” She spoke before the door had the possibility of opening, and that was a kind of bravery she had not known before. Especially not when it came to him. “I need you.”
