“Have they? I can’t say I’ve noticed. Lila,” he added in a faintly sinister tone, and I snapped my head up to glare at him. “Have things changed much from your memory of it?”
A test, whether he knew it was one or not. He had been acting as Daxton Hart long enough that he had undoubtedly visited Creed Manor several times. I had no idea if things had changed, or if Greyson was merely imagining it. But as long as Daxton seemed determined to pretend everything was perfectly all right between us, I would be determined to prove they weren’t.
“It’s soulless,” I snapped, not bothering with any form of neutrality. “I’m not surprised you can’t see it, considering you have no soul.”
For a split second, everyone in the room seemed to tense. Bradley blinked and focused on Daxton, Greyson’s fork stopped halfway to his salad, and Benjy stilled, staring at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d said that to Daxton’sface. But of course he hadn’t been with us for the past month, so he had no idea that this was our version of normal.
I half expected Daxton to dismiss me from the room and find some twisted way to punish me later for embarrassing him in front of his guest, but instead, he merely chuckled. “Oh, I know exactly what soulless means, darling. We saw it earlier today, didn’t we? In the ash of Elsewhere.”
I clutched my fork so hard that it began to bend. If I’d had the skill to do so, I would have flung it across the dining room straight into Daxton’s eye. Something to practice in my spare time, I mused.
Before things could get uglier, Minister Bradley cleared his throat. “Yes, about Elsewhere, Prime Minister. There are several replacements I would like to speak with you about, if you’ll excuse the grisly talk over dinner...”
The pair of them bent their heads together, and though I could feel the heat of Daxton’s stare every now and then, I purposely ignored them for the rest of dinner. Greyson, Benjy, and I remained quiet for the most part, only commenting on neutral topics when we spoke at all. The weather, the rebuilding of Somerset, how nice it was to be out of the Stronghold at last—we avoided any mention of Elsewhere, and none of us said a word about Benjy’s near-execution. I couldn’t be overly familiar with him anyway, in case I accidentally tipped Daxton off. However long this tightrope walk lasted, I would have to convince not only Daxton that I was Lila, but myself, too. By the endof it,I wasn’t so sure I would recognize this new me at all.
It was strange, looking at Benjy and knowing he wasn’t mine anymore, not the way he had been before. I caught myself thinking of him as my boyfriend more times than I could count, but slowly I began to remove myself from that connection. I would have to, not only to be convincing as Lila, but because we weren’t Benjy and Kitty anymore. We were just Benjy and Kitty. Separate. And I would have to get used to it sooner rather than later.
At long last, after the dessert course had been served, Daxton stood. “I hope you all have an enjoyable evening in our new home. It’s only temporary, I assure you—construction on Somerset is due to begin any day now—but it’s always best to be as comfortable as possible.”
He winked, and a shiver ran down my spine. I didn’t want to know what constituted comfortable for him.
Once he was gone, with Minister Bradley trailing at his heels, the three of us stood. “I need to finish up with the Prime Minister,” said Benjy, but before he left, he hesitated and leaned toward Greyson and me. “Be in Greyson’sroom at ten o’clock.”
Before I could ask what was happening then, he disappeared, leaving Greyson and I to exchange a look. There was no use speculating—a servant could overhear, and we wouldn’t be any closer to the truth anyhow. But together we ascended the stairs, and once I’d changed out of my dinner clothes, I joined Greyson in his suite.
“What is that?” I said, making a face. Greyson stood beside a glowing three-dimensional blueprint of something that looked more like an insect than anything useful. Sometime that afternoon, he had turned his sitting room into a makeshift laboratory, complete with the equipment he’d taken to the Stronghold with him—the only equipment he had left after the bombing of Somerset, I realized.
“It’s a device I intend to start working on tonight, if I can get the mechanisms right,” he said, his brow furrowed as he spun the image around, searching for something.
“It looks like a cockroach,” I said.
“Excellent. That’s what it’s supposed to be. A bug.” He motioned for me to join him, and I crossed over to his workstation. “It isn’t a new concept, of course, spy devices that are hidden in plain sight. But this one’s designed to move around exactly like an insect would. I wanted to attempt a common housefly first, but the wings are too complex for me to create with my limited equipment.”