Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 72897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
But he’d never tried to contact me.
And now he was sitting, rigid and expressionless, right next to me, and his indifference to me was more palpable than ever.
He certainly looked princely as he stared down at a pocket-sized leather-bound notebook, clutching a pen that looked like it was made out of pure gold. His knuckles were white as he scrawled in the notebook, probably drafting some decree that would lead to banning me from Berrydale for all time.
“Fuck you,” I said simply as I watched Sebastian, and was immediately met with four pairs of staring eyes. “Jesus, keep your eyes on the road,” I said to the driver.
“My name is Xavier. And what did you just say to the Prince?” the driver said, thankfully turning back to the front. The rest of them still stared at me.
“I’ll say it again louder this time,” I told Sebastian, staring right at him. “Fuck you.”
The woman in the front seat gasped.
“Unacceptable,” Xavier said, turning on his blinker to pull over.
“Keep going, X,” Sebastian said, briefly putting his hand on Xavier’s shoulder.
“How can you allow this man—”
“This man is Henry Denton,” Sebastian declared, his voice calm and unaffected. “He was… my friend, when we were children. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”
“Eleven years,” I said. “Of silence.”
“Ten years and ten months,” Sebastian clarified, his lips slightly parted as his eyes danced across my face. “Henry and I have matters to discuss, which will be sorted when we’re back at the castle. But I promise you, he means me no harm.”
“Glad to hear you still trust me that much, Sebastian,” I said.
He swallowed, his jaw set tightly. “We’ll have him at dinner tonight, too. Genoveve, let the staff know we’ll have one extra.”
The woman in the front seat must have been his assistant. She nodded, but still looked at me with questioning eyes.
I puffed out a laugh. “Like hell I’ll be eating at a dinner table in that castle.”
Sebastian looked back down at his notebook. “Mother is out tonight, visiting a cousin a few hours north,” he said. “We’ll need someone with a sharp tongue to take her usual spot, won’t we?”
“Don’t speak of your mother this way,” Xavier chided him, like he’d had to say the same thing a thousand times before.
It was a massive relief knowing that his mother would be out of the castle. But it still didn’t mean that I had any intention of going to a dinner in the place. Sebastian’s gaze made me feel like I was a bug he might squash at any moment, and I had a laundry list of things to do back at my own cottage, anyway.
I was furious when I looked at him. His cheekbones that had only become more defined after years of time. The hard look in his eyes, where back in the day there had only been innocence.
He was breathtakingly handsome, and yet it seemed like all of the light and life had been ripped from him so long ago. The yearning that used to inhabit his gaze was replaced with a tight caginess, like he was a starved wolf, protecting himself no matter the cost.
Time had done beautiful and awful things to Sebastian. But the boy I’d once known was clearly gone.
“The tangerines, please,” Sebastian said to one of the servants that had come to his side, displaying a tray full of options for us to snack on. She placed the bowl of fresh fruit on the table between us.
Sebastian had swiftly taken me through the stone halls of the castle the moment we’d arrived. In the car I had been so focused on watching him, getting angrier with each time I looked his way and found him furrowing his brow and looking down at his notebook.
He’d barely even glanced at me for most of the drive up to the castle. When we’d finally arrived, I stepped out and looked at the castle up close for the first time in my life.
It was colossal. Seeing it so close felt like a dream. I’d stared at the thing from down in the village for so many years, but I’d never been nearby. It had felt malevolent, somehow, like a place I had always been better off staying far away from.
It still felt that way. There was no denying its beauty, but Frostmonte Castle was no place I wanted to be.
I’d gotten chills up my spine as Sebastian took me through the corridors. I hadn’t thought about ghosts in years, but Frostmonte reminded me of every night I spent as a kid, being afraid a ghost was lurking around every corner.
Even if the castle didn’t have real ghosts, Sebastian himself felt like one to me now. A relic of my past. Something that used to be so alive, so kind, but now existed only as a shadow of himself.