Page 73 of Feed Your Fiends

“For your year,” I say before addressing Delphine again. “But your parents used so much force that it was painful?”

She nods as Sylo seethes beside her. “Ballet, twenty-four, seven. From sun up to sun down. We didn’t go to school, we had tutors. We didn’t have friends, we had competitors. All we had was each other until we didn’t.”

“When did it all change?” I ask, my spine stiffening as I lean off the cushions. Elle’s fingers gently stroke my back where Delphine nor Sylo can see. It feels so private, so intimate in a moment that can’t be, and I sink into her touch.

“Everything is simple as children.” She peers out the window as if travelling to another time. “Then you grow up and hormones come in. Naturally, boys and then men follow. We weren’t allowed to date. It’d been drilled into our heads since we were eleven and nine, but your mother still fell in love a few times. I kept her love affairs a secret when she still trusted me. They were always fleeting, but one year, one stuck. She ran off with him.”

“To Europe?”

Elle turns toward me, silently questioning how I’d guessed that.

Delphine freezes, her eyes tearing from the window to look at me before she slowly shakes her head. “No. She went to Budapest after.”

To have the baby.

“Why Budapest specifically?” I ask, my eyes burrowing through her skull to capture any giveaways.

She shakes her head again, her eyes falling into her teacup. “To study some new ballet techniques? She was flawless when she returned, so I assumed that was the reason. She never told me because she didn’t trust me at this point.”

“And why was that?” I ask, barely containing the bite in my tone. She always had a reason.Always. Maybe that’s why I’m trying to understand why she hid her first prince from me and not just Bart.

“It was entirely my fault,” Delphine says with a swallow, but she meets my gaze head-on. “I started growing resentful. Marisol was my only friend, not just at auditions, but in the entire world, because our world was different. Limited. Only she understood me, and only I understood her. The men were forms of entertainment, outlets, and escapes from our reality that we always returned to come sunup. I mean, I’d entertained myself with them too. I understood them in that aspect.”

Sylo cringes into his cup.

“But I’d never felt threatened until he came along. She wanted to run away with him, she was rethinking her future with ballet.” Her eyes darken, as does the sunlight streaming over my shoulder. “How could she ever reconsider the future we’d meticulously planned together for a man? I didn’t understand it. He was just a man, right?”

Elle’s fingers pause their ministrations on my back.

“One time she snuck out, and I’d had enough. I didn’t want to hear about the delusions she was creating and planning with him. So when my parents asked where she was, I didn’t cover for her. I let them figure it out on their own…through her journal. I knew they’d find it snooping through her room, and I didn’t care.”

So it was a betrayal.

“It wasn’t horrible. It was…ghastly.I’d never seen my father react that way. I’d never seen him angrier, not even when Mari and I snuck out to a gypsy festival where we danced barefoot for two days before returning home. We’d thought, hey, we’re fucked anyway. What’s one more night?” A phantom of a smile stretches her lips at the memory before it vanishes. “I’d thought that reaction was ghastly, but I was wrong. So wrong…”

A long pause fills the room again.

“It didn’t matter that I hadn’t handed them her journal directly; I may as well have. She didn’t trust me any more, and she never trusted me again. They dragged us from our beds, still dressed in robes, and demanded Mari take us to his house to speak with his parents. She wouldn’t say where he lived. They made us walk around our small village for hours until the sun rose. It wasfreezing. Eventually, I caved. I showed them where, but it’s not what you think.”

Elle leans forward with me, her fingers gripping the back of my blazer.

“See, I knew he didn’t live in a house. Not a traditional one, anyway. He was an orphan, set to be kicked out at eighteen. He was twenty at this point, two years deep into their love affair. So I knew he wouldn’t be there, but I knew once we asked for him, they’d confirm that he had lived there at some point. I figured this would cool my parents off for a few hours. I thought maybe Mari would catch on and lie that he was a traveller, and now that he’d left the orphanage, he didn’t have a real address. I thought she’d say he left the country. I’d thought…”

I can’t take another long pause, not when I’m finally learning the truth. Or Delphine’s version of it. “You thought what?”

“That she’d see what I was doing and forgive me. Well, she did catch on, and she played like he was gone and that her night with him was her last. She pretended so well that even I believed her because she wasn’t sneaking around. Then, out of the blue, she ran off to Hungary four months later and didn’t speak to us for months. To be honest, I was surprised when she came home. I think her money was gone. My parents hated what she’d done, but they didn’t hate her, they missed her. We all did. So when she called, our father agreed to help her under certain conditions and proposals.”

“Through my father,” I say.

She nods. “Before her disappearance, Mari was shooting to the top of the ballet world. Once she returned, it was incredible, like she hadn’t been missing for almost six months. She was so determined. Driven. She became a prima that year, and on that same night, our father introduced her to Bart Auclair, the man who’d been clawing to get her attention for weeks. Bart proposed two months later. They were wed a month later, and Mari was pregnant with you before the month ended.”

If she was already three or more months pregnant before she left, then the timelines add up, given that my brother is a year and some change older.

“But wait,” Elle interrupts, seemingly surprising herself as her cheeks tinge red. “I thought your parents didn’t want you to have romantic relationships? Or did they allow it if it were on their terms?”

“They wanted us to marry, to have children, but only with worthy men, and who could be worthier than Bart Auclair?”

On paper.

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