2

The car ride home is long and tedious.

I pass the time by riffling through the bags. The unenthused fatigue drapes over me like a shawl as I pick through shoes, from boots to stilettoes, and dresses and new sweaters for school, some leatherbound tomes, soft paperbacks, and a whole bag of salted caramel fudge and some sweets.

I pop a boiled butterscotch drop into my mouth, then fall back into the leather seat. It creaks faintly under my shifted weight.

Tugging an elastic off my wrist, I tie up my tangled hair. The quick bun leans off the side of my head, but I won’t have my hair stuck between my back and the spine of the seat as I rest.

I shut my eyes and rock with the sway of the car.

After what feels like forever, the uneven road turns to a smooth driveway. The change in ground texture perks me up.

Craning my neck, I peer through the obscure tint of the window to the country-house looming ahead in the distance: Elcott Abbey.

The stone facade of the manor interrupts the pinkish hue of the evening sky. I rest my temple on the car door and, though I watch the stretch of long stained-glass windows inch closer the further we drive up the property, my mind wanders to our neighbours.

The Sinclairs live a stone’s throw away, in the next town over, and that is a manor house that towers over all in the area. The opulent grounds and rich gardens are a favourite of mine, mainly down to the swimmable ponds that come in handy in the heat of summer.

Dread pins me to my seat, like lead in my stomach.

I know to expect the Sinclairs this evening.

The Sinclairs are more than just our neighbours. They are my family’s closest friends, business partners, oldest allies and—to my misery—frequent visitors.

Anything that we, the Cravens, have our hands in, the Sinclairs have theirs in, too. Fingers entwined together.

We dine with them often. Too often.

Because that means he is around.

He. The devil in Prada.

Him. The bane of my Bluestone existence.

Dray Sinclair.

My jaw rolls as he finally succeeds in invading my mind and disturbing my peace.

Best part about not being at Bluestone for the school holidays? Getting away from Dray.

And yet, I don’t ever escape.

Dray is around more than I would like (which is none at all) and I hope one day he blows himself up in a ritual gone wrong.

Fucker.

Dray is…

Well, he’s the core of my torment.

He is what it means to have once been in na?ve, childhood love with someone who later became a nightmare.

Childish love. Childish notions.

Childish Olivia.

The ride smoothens into a gradual stop, right between the fountain and the limestone steps that lead to the lacquered double doors.

I loosen a weary sigh before I peel myself from the seat.

The door opens from the other side.

A servant holds it by the handle and steps aside.

I clammer out with the day’s fatigue turning my movements clumsy. I’ve hardly brushed out the creases from my dress before the servant, Mr Younge, dips his head—and speaks a curse at me.

“Your father is in the foyer,” he tells me, his voice as smooth as the car’s engine still softly purring behind me. “The Sinclairs have arrived—and the party leaves shortly for dinner.”

My mouth puckers and I blow a raspberry right at him.

Mr Younge’s round face is unchanging, entirely unfazed, since he’s worked with our family since before I was born. He is well used to my rolled eyes and scowls and grumbles by now, used to the unrefined, rougher edges I wear, those that never seemed to polish out, no matter my upbringing.

“If I crawl back into the car, will you stop me?” I grumble the complaint, but we both know the answer to that.

Yes.

Yes, he will stop me.

Drag me out by the ankles if he must, just as he has done many times over the years when I’ve tried to hide in bushes from the Sinclairs, or avoid my vegetables as I took refuge in closets.

Leaving my bags in the car, I know Mr Younge will attend to them, put them in my room, or order a lesser ranked servant to perform that duty for him. Probably the latter, honestly, since he’s a bit of a snob.

I make it just one step.

“Miss Olivia,” he halts me.

I frown over my shoulder at him.

“There is no time for a change of clothes,” he says and lingers his sharp eyes over my appearance.

Though his eyes are an ordinary brown, they are brown swords, chiselled from mahogany. Those swords linger over the limp bun nesting on my head, drooped aside from the sway of the car. Then he drops his gaze to the brown lace-up boots that I flex my toes in.

I drop a frown to the boots.

Some splashes of puddles stain the suede, sure, and a lace is undone, but they aren’t so unacceptable. The beige of my linen dress is creased from the car ride, and perhaps the hem is a tad shorter than my parents might approve, but there’s little I can do about that right now.

Not like I picked these items out of a bin on the side of the road, these are Saint Laurents.

I huff with a touch of exaggeration, and I aim it right at Mr Younge.

He only smiles tightly in response.

I tug out the elastic from my lopsided bun. The weight of the fall is instant. Hair draping into place. It’s not nicely done today, so it’s kinked in some spots by the elastic, and curls in the wrong direction, but whatever, I have no desire to impress the gazes of the Sinclairs.

Letting my hair shift into place, I drop to one knee and fasten up the laces, tight. Then, as I rise, I spread my arms in a mocking ‘ happy now ’ before I turn my back on Mr Younge.

I stalk up the steps, my boots clopping and scuffing all the way to the doors.

They open from the inside.

I spare no glances on the servants who hold them for me—my gaze is fast stolen by the crowd gathered in the middle of the foyer.

I have a role to play, as we all do. Some roles are better than others, and easier to play.

The pained smile that stretches across my face is quick to ache my cheeks.

Oliver, my asshole twin brother, sighs at the sight of me, as though to make a point in drawing attention to me—drawing all attention to the fact that they have all been standing around waiting for me to come home.

Olivia and Oliver. Yes, I know. The sort of tacky that’s charming among the aristos but mocked among the commoners.

“Finally, she arrives,” Oliver drones, dull, and the chestnut brown of his hair looks darker under the crisp gel that has it combed properly into place. A richer shade of brown than my faded brown.

The smile is forced, but it keeps pinned to my face as I advance on the party. “There was traffic.” I draw closer to Father who reaches out his hand for me. “And you told me dinner wasn’t until seven—”

“Olivia,” Father firms his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure there was a misunderstanding,” he says, a pitiful half-assed attempt to ease the tension between Oliver and I—tension that he started. “But we are all here now.”

I linger my steady gaze over Oliver for another heartbeat.

I would shoot him a scathing look if I didn’t have such an audience. He knows it, too. The glint in his sharp emerald eyes dares me to. But there’s only so far we can take this battle of ours with our parents around.

At Bluestone, I have learned, there are no such limitations.

More so with Dray Sinclair.

And as my gaze finds him, standing beside Oliver, hands in his pockets, head tilted as he looks down on me, my stomach drops to my bum.

Father’s hand still rests on my shoulder, but the hold is slight as he calls for the cars to be prepared.

I narrow my eyes on Dray.

Still, he looks down at me.

The ghosts of the foyer’s fireplace shadow his face, deepening the summer hues of his complexion.

Blond hair, the muted, deep shade of sand and sawdust, is a stark contrast to the darker brown of his brows. But even more contradictory is the inhuman sharpness of his eyes, a blue so pale that it isn’t unlike the faintest hues of a diamond. But most of the time—like right now, as he looks down his nose at me—his eyes are blue tinted swords.

“It’s a pleasure to see you, Olivia,” he drawls, and how he lies through his perfect white teeth.

Once upon a time, he meant those words.

Now, they are just niceties that we throw around in company, but in the shadows of dark corridors at Bluestone, he’s wretched.

His mother, Amelia Sinclair, reaches out her dainty hand for a crooked stand of my hair. “You have been missed in our visits.”

I land my gaze on the polished floor, away from the pallor of her marble skin, the piercing glint of glass-like eyes that Dray inherited.

I’ve been in hiding.

Every time I caught a mere whiff of the Sinclairs coming to Elcott Abbey, I got my ass out of here.

It’s not Amelia I avoid. Not even Harold Sinclair, her husband.

It’s Dray, it’s always Dray, and it will always be Dray.

I’ll avoid him and loathe him and weep because of him probably forever.

Amelia recedes her touch from my brittle hair, too dry, ill-nourished. Her passive judgment is found in the slight rub of her fingers, but when I cut a glance at her, she is still smiling as softly and sweetly as ever.

Dray runs me over with his stare. “Where have you been?”

I know he means over the break. He asks of my absences. Not why I am late today.

Still, I latch onto the least awkward conversation to fumble through. “I was just out getting the last of my school supplies,” I say with a throwaway gesture, a shrug of the shoulder that finally slips Father’s grip from my shoulder. “I apologise for keeping everyone waiting.”

The forced smile is slight on my face. I aim it at the Sinclairs. Then I cut a sharp, lingering gaze at my evil twin brother.

“I had my times mixed up,” I add.

His smile is small, fleeting and wicked; the dazzle of his emerald eyes glint that bit sharper.

Mother runs me over with her beady eyes, ink pots the same striking black as her hair, all twisted and glossed at the back of her head. Her pinning gaze washes over the uneven crimps of my hair before landing on the damp stains of my boots.

“Are you well, dear?” she asks.

She means to be snide—but I see it as an opportunity.

I tap my temple. “Headache. The day’s sun, the traffic. It took its toll.”

“You have headaches so often, I wonder you don’t see a specialist,” Dray says, and he picks at speck of not-at-all-there lint on his shirt, as though he’s entirely disinterested in me, in this business, and more interested in the perfectly dry-cleaned and steam-ironed black shirt.

I snub his implications and turn to Father.

I don’t get the chance to ask.

I don’t spare another moment on a faux headache.

The look he swerves down on me is unkind.

And it silences me instantly.

Gone are the complaints of a slight, dull ache in my head, and I have no snappy words to spare on my brother.

I become a statue under my father’s glare. Stiff, and with absolutely nothing to say.

Mr Younge appears at the doors. Hands behind his back, he has no need to announce the cars prepared and fuelled in the driveway—my father notices him before he can even part his lips to announce anything at all.

“Shall we,” Father says, and it is no request.

Dray moves for me.

The instinct of it all is monotonous, and I don’t think he truly considers these steps towards me, I don’t think he puts his mind into it as he places his hand on the small of my back—and I doubt entirely that he feels my muscles jumping beneath his touch or hears the sharp interruption of my breath.

He doesn’t pay attention to any of those smaller details. He acts in monotony.

It means nothing, it’s merely the order of things.

He is to be my escort—it’s just the way things are.

But we don’t move into step yet. We wait, side by side, his hand searing a fucking hole into my flesh, for the others to go ahead. Mother and Father, Amelia and Harold Sinclair.

Then Oliver curves around me.

As he makes to pass me, Dray’s hand glides around to my waist—then firms, like he is pinning me in place, and he is doing just that, right as my brother comes around my front.

I swerve my glare to the doors.

Only the servants stand there. Faceless and nameless ones. Our parents have gone to the cars, led by Mr Younge.

Well fuck me.

Slowly, I lift my dark look to my brother, then cut it aside to Dray, and my face crumples into a scowl. I have the sudden urge to shove him into the grand foyer fireplace.

“That’s a horrid dress,” Oliver purrs, then plucks at the black strap hard enough that it snaps my shoulder. “Made out of a bedsheet, is it?”

I jerk back with a sneer.

Distantly, I am aware of a grazing sensation at my back.

Dray, running his thumb over the material of my dress, I assume; Touching me in a way he wouldn’t dare to with prying eyes around, with my father’s eyes around; Feeling out the linen with a frown on his face, or smearing the blood of puppies and children all over me, either way.

My eyes narrow into slits that I aim right at my brother. “I’ll call for Mother,” I warn him. “I’ll call for them all. Then what will you do?”

I lift my chin with more courage than I feel. The nerves betray me, reveal themselves in the bob of my throat.

But Oliver just smiles and steps back.

A warmth brushes the shell of my ear and tickles the hairs that fall down the side of my face.

I cringe back from the touch of Dray nearing me, bringing his pink mouth to my ear.

“Who will call out for at the academy?” he murmurs, softly, and I hate it, I hate that his gentle tone can sound so much like love, like sweetness, like he gives a damn about anything more than tormenting me. “Will you be so brave there?”

My heart twists in my chest. It’s a wretched feeling that guts me, that spreads up to my throat and silences me.

The softness of lips on my ear would be welcome if it were someone else. Anyone else.

My brother tugs back with a step. His eyes twinkle with threats before he turns his back on us—and leads the way out of the foyer before any of the others come back in looking for us, seeing what the delay is.

I take a single step before Dray’s grip turns to daggers piercing into my side.

“Your lace is undone,” he tells me.

I look down.

And the lace I tied up at the car, it has come untangled again. I made too quick, too hasty a job of it.

I drop to my knee and, again, fasten it with haste. “It’s a wonder you didn’t let me find that out the hard way,” I murmur, then push up, “break my head open for your pleasure.”

Dray’s gaze latches onto me.

He considers me for a moment, and I’ll add it to the list of things I hate about him, the way he looks at me sometimes, like he’s considering the shape of my nose, the bow of my mouth, maybe a pimple that I’ve patched with concealer. He inspects me, but there’s nothing clinical about how it feels.

Feels more like he could paint me, now; sketch out all the perfects and imperfects, every detail, declare he loves me—then cut out my heart with a pencil.

Then he’s tearing his gaze from me and, hand delicate on the small of my back again, leads me out to the cars.

I’m grateful to find that we are joining Amelia and Mother.

Oliver rides with Father and Harold.

And so I relax a little for a full twenty-minute drive to the nearby town.

Mother’s favourite local restaurant is tucked away in a romantic cobblestone street there, and according to her, serves the best salmon in the countryside.

Salmon is not what I would choose for myself. But I don’t get a moment to look at the menu before my father orders for me.

Steak tartare.

My mouth puckers.

Gross.

It’s not worth the battle, I decide. I’ll snack later in my room, just shovel buttered toast down my throat or something.

For now, I must endure.

I must suffer.

And suffer, I do.

The conversation is dull.

It winds back and forth between rumour and business. Rumour is where my interest is most piqued, but since it’s all of engagements, and I have none myself, it just puts me further into a mood. It further puckers my pout.

I pick at my raw meat, spear the prongs of the fork into the soft texture, then push it around the plate.

Before long, I’m sagging in the chair, and it’s a fight against myself to not plant my elbow on the table and lay myself to sleep. All I want is to eat my body weight in a proper dinner, and maybe squeeze in some time with my beloved pianoforte before I need to retire for the night.

There are no pianos at Bluestone.

Instead, I am stuck in a level of hell.

Father drones on and on about some dreary banking business. One of the ventures of our united families. Banks, Wall Street, Bonds, Golds, Mining. If it’s money, if it runs by numbers, the Cravens are behind the veil. The Sinclairs, too.

When I say our families are connected, that they are allies, it is an understatement. Our families are a tapestry, woven and threaded over centuries, millennia.

So much so that I was intended for Dray.

There was never an engagement, exactly. We were plighted, intended when we were children, a declaration that all knew.

I was raised believing I was to marry Dray. Maybe that’s the reason we were so close back then, the reason he would thread his fingers through mine, or pick me flowers and bring me sweets.

It was never a question of if , but when .

The when didn’t come. The if did.

I showed no magic. It should have been a gradual reveal. Tantrums to crack the ceilings, screams to echo in the beaks of birds, floating above my bed as I slept. And by the age of thirteen, my magic should have been resolved within me. I was meant to venture to Bluestone—and unearth exactly what my print was.

But I have no print, because I have no magic.

It never came.

I proved myself a deadblood on my thirteenth birthday. A once in a century wart on the family tree.

And that was that.

It changed for me. Friends turned foe. Brother turned bully.

Few have made it secret what they think of me, what they think of my place in their world. Most often, if anyone was to look long enough at the old books and scorched family trees, it’s easy to tell that deadbloods are exiled.

Suppose I’m lucky, then.

My family kept me. Mother embraces me, Father accepts me. I was not thrown out to the krum society, memory wiped, delivered to the door of an orphanage or a bribed family to take me in.

No matter how bad it can get sometimes, I am one of the luckier deadbloods.

Even now, here at dinner, the Sinclairs share a meal with us. They are still our family’s friends.

And they tend to tolerate me.

But when no one is looking, and I am trapped within the walls of the academy, it changes.

That will come tomorrow. I will begin my senior year at Bluestone, my last ever year trapped in that hell with my tormenters, and I clutch onto the knowledge that this is the last time.

After that, I will be brought back into the fold of my family. I will not likely marry. So I will be a home-daughter.

But I will be safe. Safe- ish .

There will be no time for the piano tonight.

A speckled darkness has wiped the sky by the time we are leaving the restaurant. I have no watch on me, and I am not allowed a personal phone, so I can’t check the time to be certain that it’s close to midnight—I just have to go off my senses.

My senses are telling me to get my ass into bed, now. Maybe that’s just my heavy eyelids, the ones I struggle to keep open.

I’m so dull about the land of awake now that it takes me some moments to feel the pressure on my back.

I frown up at Dray as he escorts me through the restaurant doors, after our parents, and Oliver strolling behind.

I look back at my evil twin.

He has no attention for me. His thumbs smack down on the glowing screen of his smartphone.

A prickle of envy disturbs my chest.

I want a phone.

Just another double standard of our world.

We part ways on the street, where two cars idle silently.

Harold shakes my father’s hand before he turns to kiss a farewell to my mother’s cheek. He keeps a reserved, curt nod of the head for me.

My knee aches as I dip into a short curtsey.

And I am glad to see them go.

Dray’s hand abandons my spine. But before he moves for the Sinclair car, he drops his head and lets a word hiss faintly from his full lips—lips I once kissed, lips that graze the shell of my ear and shoot tickles through my body.

“ Waif .”

My lashes flutter.

My throat thickens.

It’s so quietly spoken that even I barely caught it. But I did, and so did Oliver. He snorts under his breath, and though he’s behind me, I can picture the rotten smirk he wears, because I’ve seen it so many times before.

Just one more year.

I have survived many years of this. My mind remains intact. My body unbroken.

I can do this.

Just one more year—and then I will be free from the prison of Bluestone, and Dray’s tortures. Out of the academy, he can barely squeeze in a foul word my way between all of the propriety he’s designed to fake.

Soon, I’ll live my life free of torment.

I’ll have to see him forever, of course. Our families are too entwined, and the elite gatherings can’t be avoided. I’ll see him often, yes, but soon, I’ll be allowed by propriety to slip away, become a flower on the wall.

Unnoticeable .

That’s my dream.

I just have to survive this one year first.