BLUE BLOOD

8 | it's not worth it

x

"Ella, I'm back!" I shouted as I stepped into our home. "Ella?"

"She is in her room, Ms. Du Sang," Pierre told me kindly, wrestling my baggage from me. "Your father's will be here tomorrow morning."

Curiously, I looked to Pierre. "Aren't you with him all the time? I thought he stayed here with Ella."

Pierre only answered. "He sent me to greet you on the private jet. Your father doesn't stay home here very often anymore."

I knocked on Ella's door. "Ella?"

"Vesper? Come in."

Already, I felt strange. "Ella? Didn't you hear-"

I blinked as Ella turned around. For a moment, I was shocked. The words melted away as I tried to process how different Ella looked after a couple of months.

No longer was her hair dirty blonde. It was shiny platinum. Her nose was different, curved upward like mine.  Her face shape appeared the natural structure it was but I grew up with Ella. Something was off.

And her freckles. They were gone.

Not covered by foundation but gone. Completely.

Some type of surgery or something. Regardless, Ella looked... like what her mother always expected her to be.

"Hear what?" Ella questioned as I stood there, gaping at her until I broke out of my trance. "Vesper?"

"Never mind," I forced a smile. "I missed you, Ella."

x

"Don't you-" I broke the silence, clearing my throat. "Don't you need my address?"

I wanted to leave the party alone, but the blue bloods all expected him to drive me home so here we were.

Avery Dragomir had one hand on the steering wheel of his sleek Mercedes and the other holding a Rubik's cube. It was so random of him but it made sense.

He didn't say anything. He didn't ask me anything. He just drove while solving his Rubik's cube, oblivious to Kalina's words endlessly bouncing in my mind.

She died.

"If you wanted to go home, you would have given it to me by now," he answered with a distracted side-glance.

I didn't know how to respond. Instead, I looked out the window and into the night. "Where are we going then?"

Avery shrugged. "Do you need a destination?"

"Do you need to answer with a question every time?" I leaned forward, studying as he solved the Rubik's cube for the twenty seventh time. "You take about fifty four seconds to solve the cube once."

When Avery didn't stop staring at me, I realized what I just said out loud.

"What?" I pursed my lips, trying to not blush out of mortification.

"For this entire ride, you faced me for a total of three hundred sixty five seconds. How did you know-" Avery then realized how I figured it out and intrigue filtered his thoughts. "I tap my Rubik's cube with my thumb every time I finish solving it."