The door back into the hallway seemed impossibly far away. She caught herself willing Paul Keenan to come through it but quailed at the thought of being fired in front of everyone.
“Has anyone bet on me?” It was the most dignified thing she could think to say.
“Fat chance,” Fisher said with a sniff, clearly pleased not to be the one on the receiving end of misery for a change. “We’re taking odds on how long it’ll take.”
“Whether you’ll cry.” Heather cracked her gum again.
The notion of tears had been far away, but now Aurora pushed it even farther into the tiny black hole where all her problems dwelled. She’d be damned if Heather would make a cent off her.
“It’s something you don’t see in this day and age,” Eric said. “Like something out of… Hey, Percy! Who am I thinking of.”
“Shakespeare,” Percival said, fiddling with his glasses.
“That’s it,” Eric snapped his fingers. “Rising stars on their way down.”
“The mighty falling,” Dion chimed in.
They were really having a field day at her expense. All the work she had been putting in since starting had only given them fodder for this moment. Laziness always had contempt for industry, and the air was thick with all their envy boiling over. For these cannibals, a dish like Aurora was too tasty to refuse.
The air grew thick as they kept jeering and laughing, but Aurora stopped hearing any of it. Her ears were ringing, and her pulse was so tight in her neck that she felt like she might split.
And then, she was moving—first one foot and then the other, in a clean, steady progress toward the door. She kept her head as high as she could until she felt the brass knob in her hand. Freedom. Escape.
The door clacked behind her and she was in the cool quiet of the hallway again. She swallowed hard, her throat so stiff it only came with great effort.
“Fuck.”
Even though her voice was low, the word rang out into the silence. She never allowed herself to speak that way, yet the word felt perfect in her mouth, the only expression viable in a moment like this one.
“Fuck,” she said again, a little louder.
She began to stride down the corridor, more vulgar language piling up in her throat so fast that she had to cage it behind her teeth. When she reached the bend in the hall, she could see the sun through the doors leading outside. Looking back, it was as if the whole of the Judiciary was waiting for her to walk out for good.
“Fuck you.”
It wasn’t a shout exactly, but it was enough.
Sixteen
Walking along the banks of the Sanguine Sea, Aurora had managed to get a better grip on herself. Well, at least she wasn’t in danger of swearing the world to pieces anymore. It would have been easy for her to take herself to task for saying such things, but she focused instead on being proud of herself for not losing control of her magic.
It was the longest bit of rope she was willing to offer herself, so she might as well take some comfort in it. She was also relieved that the shoreline was relatively deserted. The solitude gave her plenty of room to obsess over what she was going to do when Paul inevitably fired her.
At least she would get away from that wake of vultures back in the office. Up until her defeat, most of the sniping hid beneath the pretense of being good natured, but the lashing she’d been subjected to had been anything but.
“Jerks,” was the harshest word she was allowing herself at the moment. After finally cutting loose, she was sorely tempted to swear some more, but she held fast. There was no sense in lowering her self-respect just because of their petty hatred. She was better than that.
“What am I gonna do?”
Aurora hated it, but the answer to that was pretty obvious. She was going to have to move out of Hollow House, which certainly meant losing the first people she’d ever thought of as her friends.
Worse, she would probably have to move back in with her parents—at least until she found another job and could afford her own place. After the trajectory she’d been on, that felt like a particularly crushing failure. All the time she’d spent avoiding her family, thanks to her job at the Judiciary, would undoubtedly hang in the air.
Imagining herself back in her childhood room brought bile into her throat. Despite all her time dressing in actual colors, she envisioned herself painting the walls black and crawling under the covers to spend the rest of her miserable life in hiding. At least her parents might take the black walls as a good sign.
Looking up at the sky, she missed the shadow cast by the massive airship the last time she’d been at sea. The thrill of the bungee jump. These were small ways she could allow herself to admit to missing Dane.
The prickle of excitement that came with sitting beside him, and how that had fanned hotter by actually being strapped to him for the dive. Just by remembering, she could conjure the cold lurch in her heart when the cord had reached its limit and yanked them back into the sky.
She could still feel the way his hands had fastened around her as they sprang through the air. They had been the real reason for the thrill searing into her heart, far more than the jump itself.
And then that kiss.
She had wanted it so ferociously and had denied herself the pleasure until that moment of extremity. But, when his lips had touched hers, a whirlwind had roared inside her, unlike anything she had ever known. The surrender of it was as dangerous as she could imagine, and at the same time, a realm of infinite safety.
What a shame Theophilus Abernathy had risen to spoil it. What a shame he had risen to spoil everything. Dead as he was, the mistrial would have been called even if he’d never turned up, but still.
It was the closest she had come to raising a human, and even that was a misfire. If only she had been able to keep him reanimated, maybe she wouldn’t be in this situation. Not that he would have made it to court or anything, but at least she might have been able to find out who had taken him out.
All the joy of the kiss soured in her heart when she gave in to the feelings of shame she carried over everything that had happened. Aurora Rhonelle had thrown herself the occasional pity party, but this was something else, and it threatened to swallow her entirely.
“Hey, Aurora!” That deep, sonorous voice washed over her, and she turned to find Dane strolling toward her along the water’s edge. He looked so relaxed it would have rankled her if she wasn’t melting at seeing him again.
“Hey.” Offering a light wave, she let her demeanor tell him she clearly wasn’t as at ease as he was. How could he be, given how ruined everything was? As he got close to her, he had a light frown on his face.
“You’re looking really down.”
“Shouldn’t I be? We both know Griffin Finch is guilty, but he’s walking around free right now.”
It was only part of what was bothering her, but she hoped he would understand. Dane just shrugged and scanned the horizon.
“Sometimes the bad guy gets away with it.” He turned those tender eyes back on her, and they cut through the cloud of her sadness a little. “It sucks. But it’s something you’ll have to get used to in this line of work.”
“If I stay in this line of work.” She dropped her head, doing what she could to shroud herself from him again.