CHAPTER TWENTY- Finding a Way
Empty.
She didn't really think there was a better word than that in the entire English language. Empty… it was perfectly descriptive, perfectly perfect. It felt flat and nasal and cold coming out of her mouth, and it felt flat and nasal and cold lodged in her head.
The opposite of love-if love actually existed-wasn't hate, Gen thought. No, the opposite of love was definitely emptiness.
Not that she'd ever loved Drake Mallory in the first place. A week-long spat followed by a week-long physical fling did not true love make, she lectured herself to the rhythm of her trodding feet. However, since she was quite certain she didn't love Drake Mallory (quite certain, thank you very much, and never you mind those tears), and hate was simply too consuming of an emotion (and we'd never let him consume us, thank you very much, and never you mind the preoccupied look), then emptiness fit perfectly well.
She felt positively wrung out.
Gen skipped supper that night, pleading off with a stomachache. It wasn't entirely a lie-she felt ill-but in a way, it hurt her more to be so secretive with her family. She'd lied so much already, and for what? For a man… a boy… who wished nothing to do with her? Who had, it seemed, used her and then shut himself away from her?
She would be just fine without him, she swore as she laid awake and stared at her ceiling through the wee hours of the morning.
She was just fine before him, and she'd be just fine after.
First, however, she had to cry a few tears, and if she did so in the dead of night, no one would know any different.
~~~
"Ohhh…" Hermione bent closer to the bowl of water, the curled tips of her hair nearly falling into the liquid. In an absent gesture that was already comfortable, Harry reached up and held the glossy locks back so they could both see more clearly.
"What is it?" He peered over her shoulder and wished, not for the first time, he weren't so damned near-sighted.
"Ginny," Hermione breathed. Of the two bowls they could view-Ginny's and Ron's-only Gin's showed such odd unrest.
Her chips-still dual-were no longer swirling or agitated, but meandering around the bowl as though lost, sometimes sinking into the water and struggling to float again. The water itself was another matter entirely, its levels seeming to rise and fall with no discernible reason, sometimes becoming downright choppy.
"That's not possible," Hermione said, her voice queerly weak. "The water levels aren't supposed to change."
"'Mione, pardon me for saying so, but wood chips aren't really supposed to move themselves around, either." But it worried him, as well. What could it possibly imply?
"Stupid," Hermione said sharply, making Harry jerk a bit before he realized she spoke not to him, but to herself. "We were too… preoccupied to even pay attention to our friends!" They'd spent the last weeks getting reacquainted in an entirely different manner, moving the bar from friendship to something higher. Their eyes met, both guilty, and the moment between them was tacitly clear.
Heroism was a full-time job, whether you were the hero or heroine.
"They're safe," Hermione insisted, but she didn't sound so sure to Harry.
It sounded like a question, and he had absolutely no answer for it.
~~~
"This is most worrisome." Madam Pomfrey looked at the headmaster, prying up his eyelids and clucking her tongue. "It's absolutely disconcerting," she reiterated stiffly, pinning Professor Snape with a sharp look.
"I am fine, Poppy," Albus said, and though the smile in his voice was evident, his statement was nearly inaudible.
"This must stop," she insisted, mixing a potion and shoving it unsympathetically into his trembling hand. "It is not meant for one wizard to hold so much on his shoulders, no matter how powerful he is." She gave Severus another look, making him spread his hands apart in a grandly sarcastic gesture of subordination.
"What would you have me do, Madam? Pray tell, is there anything you've thought of that I haven't thought of myself?"
Instead of replying, she gave a little 'hmph' and turned to make certain the headmaster drank what she'd given him.
"I thought not," Severus said snidely, rolling his eyes in an expression that said far more than words.
"Friday at midnight," Dumbledore said, stroking the very tips of his beard as though he couldn't muster the strength to make it the entire length. His expression was sad now, faraway. "I will stop then, if they have not stopped themselves."
"You know they won't," the Potions master said. "Optimism at this point is tantamount to foolishness."
"Charmed are the fools," Dumbledore quoted a wizarding proverb, his wistful smile once more returned, "For their grandest spells shall hold true."
~~~
He was not there, and really, Gen thought, neither was she. Her mind engaged itself in the facts and figures of her classes, her body carried her from room to room, but her heart was elsewhere.
She longed to talk to someone-anyone, Connor, Lucia-about him, to voice her concerns or tell them what had happened. And what had happened? She still wasn't certain, but she knew she could not ask the only person who knew, for he was not here and he did not want her with him.
But no matter how many times the words came to her lips to speak to her closest friends, she could not voice them.
He did not want people to know, and so they wouldn't know. And that was only part of it. Genevieve Wesley was too stubborn and too proud to admit to her friends she'd fallen into some sort of thrall with Drake Mallory. It was shameful, and it was just plain laughable. If he was too good to be seen with her, then she'd certainly return the favor. He simply wasn't good enough to tell her friends about. If he wanted to treat her as a dirty little secret, then she'd treat him as hers.
She'd never recognized her want for a real relationship, a public acknowledgment, and she wasn't about to openly recognize that want now.
Foolishness.
She'd lived her life perfectly well before him-had, in fact, lived her life independently, proudly, and honestly.
She vowed she would do so again.
~~~
"You've not made me attend classes." His voice was flat, belying no particular emotion. In truth, Drake wasn't sure he really had any emotions left to belie. His father sat in front of him in the ridiculously opulent study-who could actually study in a place like this?-a tiny pair of spectacles nearly marring the icy perfection of his face.
Nearly.
He still looked sane, which was a flat wonder to Drake, considering how bloody mad the old man obviously was. Drake was fairly certain no other man in the world was, at this moment, holding a recording of his son having sex and offering that same son money.
Sick.
"No, I haven't," Lucas drawled indulgently. "You've more important things on your mind. Besides, if you're here, you're not with her, and that's a considerable weight off my shoulders, boy. Think if you'd gotten her pregnant." Lucas shuddered theatrically and thought for a moment he really might be ill. "Ignorant fool."
"I've come to a decision," Drake interjected, having heard more than enough. The words he'd prepared tasted dirty in his mouth, rotten and foul and sour. Part of him wished to spit them out, and part of him wished he could just be man enough to swallow them and be shut of them, once and for all. But he was not man enough, and how could he be when spawned from such a monster as sat before him? "You shall give me the recording and you shall give me the money." Warming up to his part-and a role was all it was, for he could not honestly feel what he was saying, he was so numb, so terribly and awfully numb-"Because I am not nearly the fool you seem to think I am, I realize you cannot get me all these things immediately. I will allow two days for you to gather your assets. This makes our exchange on Thursday. I also ask that I be free to do with the money whatever I wish, as you're asking me to alter my entire life for it."
"I'm not asking you to alter your life," Lucas said, tilting his head with a wide-eyed look of interest. This was a different Drake than he was accustomed to, more sharp than sullen, more reticent than rebellious. "I'm only asking that you rut with something less distasteful."
Drake felt more words, ugly this time, ugly and painfully and terribly honest, rise up in his throat, and he tasted blood as he sank teeth into tongue to restrain himself. You're so close to being free, don't let him provoke you…
"You may do whatever you wish with the money," Lucas said, clearly amused at the sudden brick-red flush of his son's face. "Only not with the impoverished class."
"Thursday," Drake repeated, turning on his heel and striding away. He did not quite make it out fast enough to avoid hearing his father call after him.
"Oh, Drake… do groom yourself a bit. You look like hell."
~~~
"I need a favor."
There wasn't a single tremor in her voice, and for that, she was proud. Three days had gone by, and Gen thought she'd done rather well and had looked for Drake less and less.
She thought about him more and more, but no one needed to know that, least of all her own conscious self.
And now, not looking for Drake (and certainly not thinking about him, oh, no, indeed), Gen was asking Lucia for a favor, a bit uncertain about the outcome. Lucia was, after all, completely dotty. A lovely young woman, yes, with the best of intentions, but not what Gen or anyone else would ever term "normal."
Gen was just hoping her friend's eccentricity extended to big favors and good resources.
Lucia looked up from the article she was editing and peered, as she always did, a bit myopically at Gen. All that red hair, for a moment, she'd thought…
She cleared her throat and extended a hand, inviting Gen to sit down across from her. "What sort of favor?" she asked, trying to keep the weird and suddenly giddy note out of her voice. Full moon this week, she reminded herself, perfectly dividing her attention between her article and her troubled friend, and everyone knew full moons meant weird behavior.
Lucia had even noticed her own behavior becoming a bit odd of late.
Gen sat down and closed her eyes for just the smallest moment, giving herself a moment with the vision she wanted to create. Independence, beauty, and even wealth, if only for a night. Just to prove to herself-and perhaps to other people-that Genevieve Wesley needed no one, and she would scrape for no man, not even Drake Mallory. Especially not Drake Mallory.
"It's about the masque," she said, and blonde head bent to red as the two friends schemed about the following night.
Neither of them saw the pale, silent young man slip into the school, ducking into the library where he was not allowed and out again with the stealth only those with nothing to lose can manage.
~~~
He paced the parlor end to end, cigarette after cigarette dangling from his lips, ashes carefully disposed in sterling silver trays poised at either end of the room.
Thursday had come, and Drake was waiting for the money for which he'd sold Gen. Just your tutor, he insisted, holding a cigarette up to his lips with a shaky hand. So it's really no big deal.
He snubbed out the meager inch of the cigarette-mostly filter anyway, bloody awful things-and pulled out another one, realizing with painful clarity that he hadn't smoked half as much when Gen was right there with him. He didn't really know why, didn't really have a reason. But now, there was certainly no reason to refrain, so Drake pulled out his monogrammed lighter and put it to use.
He'd needed to see her, needed to see her more than he needed to sleep or eat. He needed to catch just one glimpse at her more than he needed the money his father had promised him.
But he pretended it was his lighter he'd needed, the one object left at Holforth which he could actually get back.
The one thing he'd lost within the last few weeks that he could recover.
He'd seen her in the student lounge, seen her with that fall of red hair, talking to that lunatic Lovejoy. She looked fine, damn it all, fine and just bloody dandy without him. She hadn't even seen him as he'd slipped past, big, shadowed eyes pinned on her.
It's better this way, he told himself, snubbing and relighting as he turned watchful eyes back to the front drive again.
It was better this way, and the money would come soon, and with the money, the video, and with the video, her safety.
"Is it worth it?"
The voice, so often heard only through walls, and never heard as forthrightly as it was now, jarred him, and Drake jerked, sending a smattering of ashes over his already filthy shirt and his bare chest.
Drake stared speechlessly at his mother, jaw hanging unattractively agape, cigarette dangling precariously from the corner of his mouth, and like a character on the telly, the woman who only rarely-very rarely-came out of her bedroom reached up and plucked the burning tobacco from his mouth, tossing it into the silver dish with a distasteful look on her face.
"You're too young for those," Natasha Mallory said, unconsciously wiping her fingertips on the silk sleeve of her dressing robe.
He couldn't help but goggle at her. When was the last time he'd seen her so, out of her bed and walking around without Lucas dogging her steps? Her yards of pale hair were pulled back away from her face, her keen blue eyes for once not shifting around in search of her husband.
This time, those sharp eyes were focused on him, and they didn't look weak, or vacant, or distant. They looked… angry.
"Listen to me, before he comes with your money," she said, putting her hand to his arm even as she spat the last word out of her mouth like something disgusting. She'd done so much wrong with him-or allowed so much wrong to be done, and which was worse?
She'd be willing to bet the latter.
"I asked you a question, Drake. Is it worth it? Are your thirty pieces of silver so precious?" She'd heard the deals between father and son, heard the cries of her son when he accidentally drifted into fitful, sick sleep, heard the flat glee in her husband's voice as he taunted his son, their son, with a recording that should have never been made, a recording that made her ill to her very core.
She'd hoped against hope her son wouldn't bend to the overwhelming pressure of her husband. But here he was, pacing the floor, waiting for his father to bring him his money.
Drake finally found voice to answer, weak though it was. "The money isn't, but the freedom is."
"You'd sell her for it?" Natasha asked directly. She had been disappointed by love, even trapped by it. She had no illusions, and no pretenses. She would ask him what she wanted to know, and he would answer her.
She still had a little power left in her, somewhere.
He weaved, thrown by the bluntness of the question, and a wave of nausea rolled through him. Too bloody many cigarettes, he told himself, but he had to grab the back of the settee to keep himself upright.
Sold her.
"It's better than the alternative, don't you think?" he said bitterly, raising his head to look at her, his hair hanging lank in his face. Had it come to this, then? Pacing the floor waiting for hush money, money to keep his father's name good and Genevieve's reputation above water?
And who was being paid to keep quiet here, Drake wondered. Was it his father or was it him?
"I can get you out of here," he said, his voice small.
And Natasha laughed… actually laughed at this, but it wasn't entirely humorous and not entirely right. It was a twisted laugh, somewhere underneath the pretty face and the expensive gown. "Did it ever occur to you I don't want to get out of here?" She saw him wince, saw another piece of his heart break, and wished she had the words to explain it.
Not so long ago, she'd been a pretty, bright, promising young girl, entranced by the graceful hands and smooth voice of a man with more beauty than even she had.
She did not want Genevieve Wesley to be that same girl, and she did not want her son to be that same man.
"Listen to me," she said again, and she put her arms around her son for what she knew could be the last time, speaking to him in a whisper. "If you take his money, you will never be free of him. Receiving due from the devil gives you no peace." She stepped back then and hoped she wasn't too late. "Give him his money and let him damn himself."
"What about you?" Drake asked, tilting his head back to stem tears. Tears were but a weakness, and could be stopped. So he told himself.
"I?" Natasha asked, a vague, strange smile on her face. "I'm already damned, and damned by choice."
He sat on the floor and stayed there even as she went into her bedroom.