Series: Cobalt Empire Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 220
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215301 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 861(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
“You realize that’s what’s happening here?” Audrey speaks passionately to me, Eliot, and Charlie. “I’m to be trapped in a castle because Ben is afraid I’ll be harmed if I go out into the world. You mean to trap me here. Forever.”
“I won’t leave you here,” Eliot promises.
I’m being ripped in half. “Not forever,” I mumble.
“Set her free,” Jane says with a knife tap to the goblet.
“Delusion,” Charlie tells our older sister, blowing smoke up at the chandelier. “You’re encouraging utter fucking delusion, Jane.”
“I am encouraging our sister’s independence,” Jane rebuts. “You and Beckett had yours at sixteen when you moved to New York. She turns eighteen in January. It’s hardly a giant leap.”
“You think I care how old she is?” Charlie’s voice is corrosive, meant to hurt. He fixes a harsh glare at Audrey. “You know why Ben is so upset? You know why he fears for you? He knows what you are.”
Oh fuck.
“Charlie,” Jane warns.
“No, it’s quite all right, Jane,” Audrey raises her carriage, as though understanding Jane won’t be there in New York. If she’s to gain any favor with Charlie, she can’t have our oldest sister fighting her battles for her. “Speak what you must, Charlie. But I’ve heard it all before. You think I’m naïve, foolish, reckless, and irresponsible, but I know I’m far more mature than you believe me to be.”
“So mature,” Charlie says coldly, flicking ash on his dinnerplate. “You took a pill out of a baggie of mixed pills and believed it was Tylenol just because someone told you it was.”
“A lesson learned,” she nods. “Do not trust frat boys.”
Eliot gestures a hand toward her. “She’s maturing right before our eyes.”
“Is that the lesson?” I feign confusion and just end up wincing. This is not good. This is actually awful. Eliot knows she’s young and impressionable, but he will never erode her confidence. I haven’t wanted to either. I like Audrey thinking she’s indestructible because I like believing she is too.
Cries echo through the baby monitor, and Audrey gives Jane an assured nod to go check on Maeve. “Je peux voler de mes propres ailes,” she says. I can fly on my own.
Jane nods back, then exits with the monitor in hand, leaving a trail of loose white feathers behind.
Audrey scratches at dried wine on her neck. “You don’t have to babysit me. Because I’m not a baby.”
Charlie lets out a pained laugh into a shorter drag. He blows smoke at Audrey. She wafts the air while he tells her, “And what happens if we never showed up at the frat house, little sister?” His lip curls as he stares her down. “You are only standing here because Beckett had Narcan in his car.”
“I know—”
“You were incapacitated in a basement alone with only fraternity brothers around. Do you know, Audrey? Really?”
I feel sick to my stomach, regretting the wine churning inside me.
“Of course, I know the dangers of being a woman around unthinking, immoral, disgusting men,” she retorts. “I know it better than you.”
“I’m sure you believe you know everything better than I do. You’re so smart, so well-equipped to face people who will manipulate and take and screw you until you can’t fucking stand—”
“Dude,” I cut in, about to upchuck on the table. “Can we not?”
Charlie is trying to rattle her.
Audrey stands taller than before to say, “I have armor.”
He snuffs the cigarette on the plate. “You have been sheltered—by all of us—your entire life. We’ve made your armor.”
“Brother,” Eliot warns, not wanting him to destroy it.
Her eyes glass. “That is precisely why I’d prefer to live with you.” She looks from me, to Eliot, to Charlie. “I can’t deny you’re the manufacturers of my arsenal and the pillows that catch my falls. I can’t pretend not to love that you are, and maybe it’s selfish of me to want the strength and shelter you provide. But I want it, and it’s rather humiliating that I need to beg you to give it.”
“We’ve always given it,” Charlie says sharply. “When have we ever taken it from you?”
“You’re about to.”
I lace my hands behind my strained neck. How do I not look after my sister if she’s in New York? That’s like asking us not to care about her. Which is asking me not to breathe.
But Ben.
Ben.
“The timing. Ben,” I say to my sister. “I’m trying to look out for him.”
“We can look after both,” Eliot says with the squeeze of my shoulder.
Can we really? We’ve been able to afford to live inside the belief that we can handle everything—but I don’t want to overpromise when the cost is one of our siblings.
“Ben could warm up to the idea,” Audrey tells me. “And we don’t have to decide right away. I don’t graduate until the end of the year. I bet once the alarm wears off, Ben will want me to live with him, too.”