Page 83 of Inside the Wicked

Adam sits beside me. Across from us, Aurora Van der Laize dines with us while her parents chat with mine and Adam’s. We’re not friends, but her family is close to mine, and we’ve dined together or attended the same parties often enough that maybe people expect us to be.

She’s strange though not in an off-putting way. I just can’t figure out what is about her that makes me uneasy. It’s like her smile is an alluring mask. She has electric blue highlights through her long, curled dark hair, which she wears in a high ponytail, but I’ve seen those highlights in purple, silver, and neon pink. She has heterochromia, with one eye dark brown and one a mossy green. Adam tried flirting with her once, but even he agreed there was something that made his hair stand on end in her presence.

“Can you stop that?” Adam mutters to me.

“What?”

Aurora says, “The incessant bouncing of your knee. It’s shaking the table.”

She doesn’t speak much, but I’ve often noted the different personalities she adopts. As if she knows how to craft her entire being to be what someone wants.

“Sorry,” I say.

Adam eyes Aurora, who goes back to acting as if we’re that last people she’d give her attention to. “You haven’t stopped checking the time. What are you getting up to after this?” He leans in to whisper to me.

I can’t risk talking about it here. Even though our parents are loudly engrossed in conversation, I don’t trust Aurora can’t hear. She might not know the specifics of anything, but she knows about Rhett from the tabloids and likely my father.

“Not here,” I whisper back.

“No fun,” Aurora whines, lifting her wineglass.

She’s my age of twenty-four, but she never went to college. I don’t know much about her other than the times my father would say he was glad I had the ambition to get a higher education when the Van der Laizes were at their wit’s end with Aurora. She got kicked out of three high schools before they sent her away to boarding school for her final two years.

I find her unpredictable and unnervingly observant. When we were younger, I used to admire her confidence and rebellious streak, but now I’m cautious about it.

We finish up dinner, and our parents all migrate to a lounge room, where they’ll drink, likely smoke, and keep talking for hours.

I plan to slip out undetected.

Adam and I are heading into the main foyer when Aurora’s voice stops us.

“You look like two people on a mission.”

We stop, exchanging a look, and I’ve plastered on a kind smile by the time we turn to her.

“I don’t care for the extravagance of this place,” I say casually.

She doesn’t usually take any interest in us. Like I said, she’s too observant, and the last I saw her, I wasn’t part of the underworld. I was just Anastasia Kinsley, the hopeful president’s daughter, and an absolute hollow existence.

“Agreed. Can I come with you?” she asks.

I look to Adam for help. His brow curves, and he flounders as much as I do.

“We’re just going home,” he says.

“Are you two a thing again?”

She’s so bold, brazen, in the way she speaks and moves. Aurora slides a hand over the round table in the center of the foyer and then hoists herself onto it. It’s against all etiquette and decorum, but while the staff around shift like they should scold her, no one does with the tilted eyes and daring smile she casts over them like a spell.

I decide she reminds me of Silas, wearing her madness on her sleeve, but her composure is enough to pass it off as confidence—or arrogance, depending on your perception.

“No, we’re not,” Adam answers.

“Because you’re all hung up on that dead boyfriend still, right? I wish our parents wouldn’t keep repeating the same boring bullshit,” she says, canting her head at me.

My jaw tightens at that.

Aurora sighs, swinging her legs. “Ana, the tragically heartbroken and cold kid. Adam, the reserved and uninspired kid. Me, the unhinged and troublesome kid. We’re all lost causes—may as well live up to the hell we seem to give them.”

---