Echoed Lullabies (Lunar Chronicles x Reader)

Chapter 63

A/N: Hey, y'all. I don't usually do a/ns in the beginning of chapters but this is important. I rewrote Chapter 62 and it has a very big plot change. Originally Y/n was going to escape with Scarlet and Winter, but now she's staying behind with Cress. 

Linh Pearl stepped off the elevator, clutching the strings of her purse against her shoulder. She was shaking—livid with rage. Since Cinder had made that spectacle at the ball and been revealed to be not only an insane cyborg but an even more insane Lunar, Pearl's world had crumbled around her.

At first it had been minor inconveniences—annoying, but tolerable. With no servant cyborg and no money to hire new help, Pearl was now expected to help around the apartment. Suddenly she had "chores." Suddenly her mother wanted her to help with the shopping and to cook her own meals and even do the dishes when she'd finished, even though it had been her stupid decision to sell off their only functioning android.

But that she could have lived with, if her social life hadn't simultaneously splintered along with her dignity. Overnight, she had become a pariah.

Her friends had dealt with it well enough at first. Filled with shock and sympathy, they flocked around Pearl like she was a celebrity, wanting to know everything. Wanting to offer their condolences, knowing that her adopted stepsister had been such a terror. Wanting to hear every horrific story of their childhood. Like a girl who'd barely escaped death, she had been the center of all their conversations, all their curiosity.

That had dwindled, though, when Cinder escaped from prison and remained at large for too long. Her name became synonymous with traitors and it was dragging Pearl down with it.

Then her mother—her ignorant fool of a mother—had unknowingly aided Cinder in the kidnapping of Emperor Kai by giving her their wedding invitations.

She'd traded them for napkins. Napkins.

And it had baffled her. Hours before they were to attend the royal wedding, already dressed in their finest, her mother had torn the apartment apart, frantically digging through every drawer, crawling on her hands and knees to peer beneath the furniture, searching every pocket in her wardrobe. Cursing and swearing over and over that she'd had them, she'd seen them just that morning, when that awkward woman from the palace had brought them and explained the mishap and where could they have gone?

They missed the wedding, naturally.

Pearl had screamed and cried and hidden in her room to watch the newsfeeds—the live footage that had gone from talk of wedding traditions and palace décor to a devastating account of an assault on the palace and the disappearance of Emperor Kai.

Linh Cinder was behind it all. Her monstrous stepsister, once again, had ruined everything.

It had taken two days for the palace's security team to trace the invitations of a Bristol-dàren (who had been at home in Canada, enjoying a bottle of fine wine) back to the actual invitations that had been given to Linh Adri and her daughter, Linh Pearl. Only then did her mother understand. Cinder had made her out to be an idiot.

That had been the last straw for Pearl's friends.

"Traitors," Mei-Xing had called them, accusing Pearl and her mother of helping the cyborg and putting Kai in danger.

Furious, Pearl had stormed out, screaming that they could believe whatever they wanted for all she cared. She was the victim in all of this, and she didn't need so-called friends to throw these accusations at her. She had enough to deal with as it was.

She'd expected them to chase after her, apologies in tow.

They didn't.

She walked all the way home with her fists clenched at her sides.