Caraval (Caraval 1)

No.

Scarlett closed her eyes and took a steadying breath. She’d been warned about this, the game playing tricks on her. It couldn’t be true. She didn’t know when it had happened, but somewhere, at some point, in this strange world full of impossible, Julian had started to mean something to her. She’d begun to trust him. But if Julian really was Legend, everything significant to her had only been part of a game to him.

Julian’s solid chest rose and fell against her back, as heat slowly returned to him. Scarlett felt warmth wherever their bodies aligned. The space behind her knees. The small of her back. Her breath came out in uneven wisps as he leaned farther into her, his fingers drifting up to her collarbone.

A prick of blue on the tip of one of his fingers brought a flush to her cheeks as she remembered his blood on her tongue and the way his lips had felt as he’d tasted her. The most intimate thing she’d ever done. She needed that to be real. She wanted Julian to be real.

But …

This wasn’t just about what she wanted. Scarlett remembered every time Julian had told her that Legend knew how to take care of his guests. According to her dream, he did more than just take care of them. He’d made that woman fall so madly in love, it had driven her to suicide. Legend likes to play twisted games with people, and one of his favorites is making girls fall in love with him. The words from her dream gurgled up like vomit in Scarlett’s throat. If Julian was Legend, he’d been enticing Tella before the game even started. Perhaps he’d even seduced them both.

Nausea coated Scarlett’s stomach at that awful possibility. With disturbing clarity, she recalled those last moments before she’d died, and how she would have given him more than just her blood if he’d only asked.

She needed to escape from Julian’s arms before he woke. She was still trying to hold on to the hope he wasn’t Legend, but it was too much of a risk to assume otherwise. She would never throw herself out of a window for any man, but her sister was more impulsive. Scarlett had learned to temper her feelings, yet Tella was driven by her volatile emotions and desires. Scarlett could see how both Legend and this game could easily drive Tella to the same unhappy ending as Rosa, if Scarlett did not save her.

Scarlett needed to leave and find Dante. If Rosa had been his fiancée, she imagined he would know if Julian was really Legend.

Holding her breath, Scarlett took Julian’s wrist and carefully pried one hand from her waist.

“Crimson,” he murmured.

Scarlett sucked in a gasp as the fingers that had been on her collarbone lingered up the column of her neck, leaving a prickly trail of ice and fire. He was still asleep.

But he would wake up soon.

No longer bothering with caution, Scarlett slid off the bed and landed in a heap on the floor. Her clothes now looked somewhere between a mourning dress and a nightgown, black lace and not enough fabric, but she didn’t have time to change into her new dress, and in that moment she didn’t care.

As she pushed up from the ground, she calculated that it must be exactly one day since she had died. It was the cusp of sunup on the seventeenth, giving her only one night to find Tella before she had to leave for her wed—

Scarlett froze as she caught her reflection in the mirror. Her thick dark hair now had a slender streak of gray ripping through it. At first she thought it a trick of the light, but it was there: her fingers shook as she touched it—right near the temple, impossible to hide with a braid. Scarlett had never thought of herself as vain, but in that moment she wanted to cry.

The game was not supposed to be real, but it was having very genuine consequences. If this was the price of a dress, what else would it cost her to get Tella back? Would she be strong enough?

Red-eyed, and still looking half dead, Scarlett didn’t feel particularly tough. The chain of fear around her throat choked her as she thought of how little time she had. But if Nigel, the fortune-teller, was right about fate, then there was no omnipotent hand determining her destiny; she needed to stop letting her worries control it. She might have felt weak, but her love for her sister was not.

The sun had recently risen, so she couldn’t leave the inn, but she could make the most of her day by searching La Serpiente for Dante.

As she stepped out of her room, candlelight flickered across the crooked hall, buttery and warm, but something about the space felt wrong. The scent. The usual hints of sweat and fading fire smoke were mired with heavier, harsher scents. Anise and lavender and something akin to rotted plums.

No.

Scarlett had only a blink to panic as she watched her father step around the corner.

She darted back into her room, locked the door, and prayed to the stars—if there was a god or saints, they hated her. How had her father gotten there? If he found her and Tella now, Scarlett had no doubt he would kill her sister as punishment.

Scarlett wanted to think the sight of her father was a cruel hallucination, but it made more sense to believe he’d figured out her sister’s kidnapping ruse. And maybe the master of Caraval somehow managed to send him a hint. Tell me who you fear the most, the woman had said, and Scarlett had been foolish enough to answer.

What had she done to make Legend hate her so? Even if Julian wasn’t Legend, it felt very personal now, though Scarlett couldn’t fathom why. Perhaps it was all the letters she’d sent? Or maybe Legend just had a sadistic sense of humor and Scarlett was an easy person to torment? Or maybe—

The beginning of Scarlett’s dream rushed back in awful shades of purple, followed by one name, Annalise. During the vision she’d been unable to make the connection, but now she remembered her nana’s stories about Legend’s origin. How he’d been in love with a girl who’d broken his heart by marrying another. Had her grandmother been Legend’s Anna—

“Crimson?” Julian sat up in the bed. “What are you doing against the door like that?”

“I—” Scarlett froze.

His wild dark hair framed a face cloaked with convincing concern, but all she could see was the soulless look Julian had worn as he watched the funeral procession of the girl who’d killed herself after he’d made her fall in love with him.

Legend.