tricks of time ― grayson hawthorne [the inheritance games]

028. CUT THE BULLSHIT

Even my necklace was eerily like hers. It might even be the same one. 

I'd assumed, when the stylist had asked if I wanted to look like the picture, that Alisa was the one who'd supplied it. I'd assumed it was a photo of a model.

Not a dead girl.

"Why would you do this?" I asked Celeste, amending my question.

"It's what Emily would have wanted." Celeste pulled a tube of lipstick out of her purse. "If it's any consolation," she said, once she was finished turning her lips a sparkling ruby red, "I didn't do this to you."

She'd done it to them. "The Hawthorne's didn't kill Emily," I spat at her. "Rebecca said that it was her heart."

Technically, she'd said that Grayson had said it was her heart.

"Why did you do this? For Grayson's love?" 

She looks at me with sympathy that makes my blood boil. "Oh honey," she says, grabbing my hand, "I already have that." 

My free hand is balled up in a fist. 

"You have Jameson," she continues in a sly little smirk that proves to me that she knows she's bluffing. "Like I said, I did this because it would be a nice token to Emily. The brothers- and the rest of the family would remember her when they see you. It would be a nice moment. You even look like her!" 

"What if they don't want to remember her?" I exclaim. "She's dead, for God's sake! Why would they want to remember a dead girl?" 

She smiles at me. A little, cunning smile. "Oh, Leah, you wouldn't know, would you? They loved Emily. Maybe even more than me. They were so convinced she was going to marry Jameson and I was going to be with Grayson. It was perfect." 

She knows exactly what she's doing. I'm so tempted to tell her how Grayson never loved her, but I'm not about to turn this into a fight about a boy. 

"How sure are you that the Hawthorne family isn't trying to kill you?" Celeste added. She had been there this morning. She'd been shaken. And now she was acting like this was all a joke.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with you," I said.

My fury didn't seem to penetrate her. She powders her face with a brush crusted in gold. "Everyone close to the Hawthorne family knows that they are nothing but a twisted, broken mess." She stared at the mirror a moment longer. "I never said that I wasn't one, too."

___

I took off the necklace and stood holding it in front of the mirror. The hair was a bigger problem. It had taken two people to put it up. It would take an act of God for me to get it down.

"Leah?" Alisa stuck her head into the bathroom.

"Help me," I told her.

"With what?"

"My hair."

I reached back and started pulling at it, and Alisa caught my hands in hers. She furrows her brows as she transferred my wrists to her right hand and flipped a lock on the bathroom door with her left. "I shouldn't have pushed you," she said, her voice low. "This is too much, too soon, isn't it?"

"It's not that, I say, dropping my hands into my lap. Do you know who I look like?" I asked her. I shoved the necklace in her face. She took it from my hands.

She frowned. "Who you look like?" That seemed like an honest question from a person who didn't like asking questions she didn't already know the answers to.

"Emily Laughlin." I couldn't keep from cutting a glance back to the mirror. "Celeste dressed me up just like her."

She shuts her eyes and breathes out. Almost as if she was expecting this. "God. I need to get Grayson away from her. I don't know what she's going to do to him this time." 

She looks back at me. "I'm sorry. I didn't know." She paused, considering. "The press won't, either. Emily was just an ordinary girl. She didn't come from a family like Celeste." 

There was nothing ordinary about Emily Laughlin. She may have come from a simple family, but in the eyes of the Hawthorne's, she was golden.  

I didn't know when I'd come to believe that. The moment I'd seen her picture? My conversation with Rebecca? The very first time Jameson had said her name, or the first time I'd said it to Grayson?

"If you stay in this bathroom much longer, people will take note,""Alisa warned me. "They probably already have. For better or worse, you need to get out there."

I'd come tonight because in some twisted way I'd thought that putting on a happy face would protect this new empire I reigned. I'd hardly be here other than the fact I had to look powerful. 

"Fine," I told Alisa through gritted teeth. "But next time, you have to find what I wear. Don't give the job to anyone else. I don't want this again. My relationship with the brothers are already messy enough." 

I saw Alisa swallowing back whatever it was she really wanted to say. All that exited her mouth was: "You have my word."

authors note 

n/a 

word count: 1463 words