22

“So did you read it?”

At the buffet, I grip the spoon’s handle and bring it to my tray. Fruit salad slaps into the bowl. Then I swap out the spoon for a tub of boysenberry yoghurt.

Courtney pushes down the buffet alongside me. “It’s due Saturday.”

I take a smoothie from the banana-labelled line. “Want one?”

In answer, she frowns and shakes her head.

“You should eat more fruits and veg,” I tell her. “All that grease will kill you.”

As though I haven’t said a thing, Courtney ignores the fruits and yoghurts and smoothie selection and pushes down the buffet, closer to the heart-attacks-waiting-to-happen. Piles of sizzling bacon strips and too greasy eggs and lard smeared toasts.

It’s not that I judge those foods. I eat them myself. But Courtney is always tucking into oil and fat and fried gunk that’ll clog her arteries too soon in life.

I wait for her to pile that crap onto her tray.

With the hour so early, the mess hall is peppered with only a handful of students. Master Milton and Eric are two of the three teachers who made it to breakfast before the rest of the students rise for the start of the school day.

But I can see, out of the corner of my eye, that Eric’s gaze flickers to me every so often.

I don’t look at him.

From the long, mahogany faculty table, the flutter of his gaze brushes over me. I catch it in the reflection warping the glass of the buffet. His attention comes and goes.

Where Eric’s gaze feels like a little itch, a feather or a petal drifting down my cheek, somewhat annoying, but not the worst thing, Dray’s stare is the tip of a knife, it’s the cold burn of icicles pressing into my skin, that dent that a needle makes on flesh a quick moment before it actually pierces.

I ignore them both as best as I can.

Dray watches me from the table my brother is slouched at.

He picks at his almond porridge, but the burn of his stare is ice scraping over me, and I hate that he is one of the first students in the hall this morning.

Whether he has something to do before classes begin, or he got up nice and early to find the right opportunity to take his shot at me, I don’t know.

But I had little choice in being dragged out of bed before the sun was even up.

I couldn’t let myself sleep in my own sweat and grime much longer. I needed a shower, a scrub, and something fresh to eat, not the crap that the imps brought me.

My bitterness for those grey-skinned, skeletal creatures is soft this morning, though. My saving grace over the weekend was that the imps can be bribed.

I dished out a dozen copper pieces in exchange for meals brought to my bed.

Got the idea from Serena.

Like me, she spent the whole Saturday festering away in bed. The dorm reeks of booze, of acidic potions and sweaty sheets.

Sunday came, and she unearthed herself from the blankets.

I stayed in bed.

The hangover dissipated enough that I could work on my assignments and read over the draft of Courtney’s article, but I stayed concealed for reasons other than a headache and its friend, nausea.

I hid from Dray Sinclair.

Hardly much point to it, since I’m only delaying the inevitable.

I pull away from the buffet.

Courtney’s shoes scuff on the floor as she rushes to keep up. “So did you? Read it?”

Stifling a yawn into my shoulder, I mumble, “Yeah.”

Dray’s watchful stare follows me like frost trickling through the air.

“And?” Courtney lowers her tray to the table.

I let mine crash with a clatter, one that jolts my half-sleeping brother out of his daze. He shoots me a scathing glare that I ignore.

Dropping into the chair, I hide a smile behind my coffee mug.

“What did you think?” she asks.

I shrug. “I dunno—it’s just another article about krum culling.”

It’s not even Bluestone-related, so what a krum culling article has to do with the school newsletter, I don’t understand.

Courtney flattens her hands on the table. She leans over her tray. “Their food is literally poisoning them.”

I drop my pointed stare to her tray. “You are eating the same thing, Courtney. You made the choice at the buffet not to take the healthy, filling and nutritious breakfast. You chose the poison, knowing what it is. They do, too.”

No one is culling the krums.

Not, at least, by poisoned food.

They choose to stop at those restaurants with meat patties that have no meat, with bread that never moulds, with wilted lettuce that tastes of pesticides.

Just as Courtney chooses to consume the same poison in a different form.

“I was raised krum,” she said and sinks back into the wooden chair. It creaks under her weight as she folds her arms. “Hell, we didn’t know we were witches, James and I, until our twelfth birthdays.”

A frown pinches her face; she drops, hard, into thought.

I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Of course her upbringing has affected her, the choices she makes, large or small. I just don’t think it’s that deep.

“What was it like?” I stab my fork into the perfect crunch of a watermelon cube. I bring it to my mouth. “Finding out you were witches?”

“Like everything just made sense.”

That’s all she says.

I don’t pry any more than that.

Courtney and James don’t return to their krum home outside of school. None of the made ones do.

There is choice in it.

It’s not like they are snatched up from their lives, then taken to the Home for the Misplaced in the witching village, Dean Creek.

The made ones are approached on their thirteen birthdays by the recruiters. The choice is offered. If they decline, a potion is forced into them—and they forget all that has been discussed.

Courtney didn’t take the potion. Neither did James.

Each of them took the recruiter’s hands.

And they were taken to the Home for the Misplaced.

There, they learn what it means to be a part of our world within the world. There, they learn the ins and outs of the Videralli. Well, parts of the Videralli. Their kind aren’t privy to the darker shadows, the aristos.

Come term, the made ones are sent to Bluestone.

There is no going back after that.

Fleetingly, I wonder if that has anything to do with James and his hypochondria—always avoiding class, avoiding sports and study hall, even dinner, if the opportunity presents. He avoids the world he chose at just twelve years old.

Courtney sighs, “I don’t have the time to change it.”

It takes me a moment to understand she’s talking about the article.

‘It’s just a school newsletter article’ , I want to say.

Instead, I bite down on my words with the crunch of watermelon.

“Maybe the next one,” she starts, and the frown she aims at me is familiar; she’s thinking aloud, not speaking directly to me, “I could dig deeper into the world.”

I smile around the prongs of my fork. “All the way to the core?”

“I could…” She pauses to glance around at nearby tables.

They are empty of students and trays, devoid of listening ears. The sun has barely touched the sky, so most students will only be getting out of bed now or lining up for the showers. Hence I got up so early, no queues, and I could take my time.

The nearest occupied table is across the hall, where my brother has his forehead rested on his crossed forearms, and I’m sure he’s fallen asleep.

Ice-blades catch my gaze.

Dray lifts his eyes to me, as though sensing that I looked in his direction, and he holds my stare.

A slight frown knits his brow.

“I could interview you,” she says, luring back my diluted attention. “For the next article, I mean.”

I make a face. “About what?”

“Your world.”

“My world is yours.”

The smile she gives is bitter. “No, it isn’t.”

I stab my fork into a strawberry with a touch of violence. “No,” is all I say.

“Why not?” she scoffs. “It’s just an interview—”

“Leave it alone, Courtney,” I snap.

I know exactly what she wants to interview me about. The same subject of my life, like a chapter in a book that has her too tight in a vice-like grip, that she presses me on every damn year.

The closer we get to Solstice Season, the more her curiosity prickles. No matter her introduction into our world, she just doesn’t get it. Always asking the same questions, about our arranged marriages, power over love, contracts, wealth and status, the place of women, the manner of bloodline preservations, societal gatherings and their rules and traditions.

And she starts to press too early this morning.

I shut it down, because no matter how many times we go over it, she just can’t understand. She never will.

No matter her place in our world, she was raised with the krums, with freedom that isn’t available to any of us. Even now, being a made one, she has privileges I can only dream of. She can be anything when she graduates, be her own self before she is a wife or a mother, enjoy her life in any way she chooses. No arranged marriages, no suitors, no sneak attacks, no pre-selected career, no empire to nurse.

She has choice .

A loose sigh ribbons from me.

We fall into a lull of moody quiet before, “Better watch your back today.” Courtney murmurs. “He’s clocked you.”

The change of topic is enough to lift my gaze.

I look over at Eric—and he smiles something small and perhaps guilty before he turns a pink cheek to me.

But then I really hear her words and my gaze swerves to Dray.

Still, he wears that faint frown on his brow.

She’s right.

He is staring at me. But not at my face, and not with the rage I expect.

He considers the collar of my shirt, tied with a black bow, and there’s nothing interesting about what I wear for my uniform, so I suppose he’s lost in thought, and I’m just in his way.

“Probably dreaming up ways to kill me,” I say and steal the smoothie into my hand. The glass is cool to the touch, a bit wet against my palm.

Courtney combs her fingers through her hair, lifting it into a messy ponytail with lumps and bumps. “Does your dad know?”

I roll my eyes back, an obvious disdain creeping over me.

There she goes, steering it back to the ins and outs of our society, the threads that weave an ugly pattern. No matter how many ways I explain it to her, or how many times, it just doesn’t sink in.

“My father knows Dray and I don’t get along anymore.” I twirl the silicone straw around the smoothie, watching the cinnamon powder merge with the thick yellow. “He supposes why, but we don’t talk about it.”

She hooks the elastic from her wrist over the bunched hair, then twirls it around and around until its locked in place. “You should tell him.”

My smile is strained. “If it was that easy.”

With a huff, she throws down her hands. “Well, why isn’t it?”

I run my tongue over my teeth. The look I lift to her is nothing short of a glower, and my leg itches to boot her off her chair.

I told her to leave it alone. And here she goes, trying to interview me in a not-so-subtle way.

And the answer I have for her is cruel.

I bolt the insults down.

She’s my only friend. And while she will never understand any of it, or perhaps she just refuses to accept that it is the way it’s done, then I will always feel alone around her.

Sometimes, I might just want her to listen without barraging me about how we need to change the system.

That’s how witches end up dead.

If my father even chose to do something—which I doubt he would since we’re so heavily tied to the Sinclairs—it would destroy an alliance older than this school, an alliance that feeds this world, our own and the krums’.

Our families have always worked together.

I can’t count how many hotels they own together, how many banks they run, how many trades their hands are buried in, all the corporations they hold the strings to. All of that would collapse if our families severed ties. Economic disaster that would ripple through the krum world—and our own.

My life compared to that power, that influence?

It’s insignificant.

That’s what she can’t shake about her krum upbringing.

Everyone is special, we all matter.

A load of shit.

One individual does not matter in the face of the entire world. So my life is planned for me. I am just a puppet.

The best I can hope for is that Father chooses someone kind for me, maybe a little handsome, definitely rich—and if I marry into the gentry, then I would at least want a handsome husband who loves me. I’m not tripping over myself to be poor in finances and love.

I would prefer to have both.

The thought lures my attention up to the faculty table.

Eric is gone.

Master Milton is still there, now moved some seats down and muttering into Master Lockwood’s ear.

I look to the clock.

Today’s lessons start in less than an hour.

I have a call to make before then.

“Gotta go,” I sigh and grab my backpack.

Mother sent me a new one over the weekend, a lovely white and black threaded leather bag.

Courtney just grunts her answer.

Passive aggressive bitch.

I kick out from my chair and stalk of out the hall.

Dray’s cold eyes follow me. But he doesn’t.

My stomach should feel full and satisfied this morning, but the problem with eating fruits and smoothies around Courtney is that I never get that satisfaction when I have the smell of bacon and eggs and toast and beans wafting over to me.

So I feel a starved emptiness in my gut as I push into the booth.

Maybe that’s why I’m so hard on her food choices. Maybe it’s that Mother is the same way with me and I just inherited that manner, I spread it like a poison.

The rail rattles above as I whip the curtain closed.

I slump in the booth and stuff a protein bar into my mouth.

The bar is drier than eating paper right out of a book, and the calories I’ll burn just chewing it will make up for the chocolate I had in bed last night.

A whole bar.

But that’s not my fault.

On Sunday, Mother sent me treats, and I have no fucking willpower at all.

I call to thank her.

But my fingers are slow on the phone, pressing in the numbers with too much effort, too much pressure, and my posture is too sagged against the booth wall.

I know it’ll be just a few minutes before my father forces his way onto the call—and then I’ll be at his mercy.

He hasn’t called me since the time I punched my brother, and he chewed me up and spit me out.

The thing with Father is if he hasn’t called, he hasn’t thawed.

I brace myself and, heels of my shoes bouncing on the floor with my rising anxiety, I hit the last number—and the line dials.

I force down the protein bar that’s flaked and crumbed in my mouth. I should have brought water.

The line connects.

Mr Younge answers with the name of our home. “Elcott Abbey.”

“It’s Olivia,” I say with a dry-throated cough.

“I’ll transfer you to your fath—”

“I’m calling for mother.”

There’s a pause.

I can practically hear the rolled eyes on the other end.

“I will connect you,” he says, finally.

The line goes soft for a few moments.

Then, with a slick layer of surprise, “Olivia?”

“Hi,” I say with a faint smile, one that just the sound of Mother’s voice lured out of me. “Got the parcel. Thank you.”

Mother keeps her tone light, distant , “Parcel?”

“The imps brought it this weekend. The chocolates and the fudge?”

Silence is my answer.

I frown at the wall opposite me. “You know, the treat basket?”

Fudges from seaside English towns, macaroons from France, chocolates from Belgium—all my precise favourites, and a sarsaparilla from the North Americas. A treat basket that isn’t just picked up from a store, it has to be made, each item ordered and collected and tailored to me.

“I did not send you anything,” Mother says, her tone careful. “Your father wouldn’t approve of such gifts for you at the moment.”

My mouth pushes out into a pucker. I bite down on the insides of my cheeks.

Father’s still that mad, huh?

I doubt it has so much to do with punching Oliver, but everything to do with my attempt to hit Dray in the face after pummelling him on the shoulders and chest and arms, and especially that it was all so public.

My face is a sour disappointment. “Oh.”

“Did it not come with a card?”

I shake my head. But Mother can’t see the gesture, so I mumble the word, “No.”

I just figured it came from her.

Sometimes she does that. When my father is too hard on me, by her standards at least, she’ll sneak treats into my room, or buy me a new dress, or even chide my father, which somehow strikes him silent and pale.

Just a word from her is enough to make him question his whole fucking path in life.

I aim to have that level of power over my husband.

“Well, I have to go,” I lie, because I can’t stand the stiff silence on the call. The hesitation from Mother means she wholeheartedly sides with my father on this matter.

When Father punishes me, I want to cry—but from fear, anxiety, mostly.

When Mother is quiet with me, turns her cheek to me, I want to cry—but because I feel like she doesn’t love me anymore, and that wrecks me.

So both of them against me isn’t the warmest feeling.

“Wait,” Mother starts. “Your father wants a word.”

Fuck.

Fucking Mr Younge.

He did what I asked alright. He connected my call to Mother, then went and ratted me out to Father.

Hope he slips down the stairs with a tray of hot tea.

I draw in a long, steadying breath, then discard the wrapper of the protein bar on the phonebook. Sure, I could use it in my inventive way of disconnecting the call.

But I doubt that’ll go very well for me today.

I tug at a loose strand of hair, the piece I deliberately left out from my ponytail. I tug it so hard it hurts.

The fumble of the phone passing is gentle.

Then the fumble stops, and I know Father has the receiver now. Doesn’t mess around with greeting me, no how are you , not even a hello, he gets right into it.

Father’s tone is stiff. “There have been a dozen gentry offers since I opened your contract.”

My brows raise, but only slightly. A lazy surprise, one that doesn’t dare to spring up with too much energy, what with Father’s crip tone and icy energy spearing through the receiver at me.

He adds, “I expect more after the debutante season is closed.”

“They are after my dowry,” I mumble.

“Yes, I do believe so. All but one, perhaps.”

“One?”

“An eager offer that came with a personalised letter,” he tells me, and by the clipped nature of his tone, I could almost believe he’s telling me about his latest golf game, or something equally as unimportant, not discussing my whole future.

“A letter to me?”

“No, Olivia.” He scoffs the words, and I feel like a puddle of idiocy. “Addressed to me,” he clarifies, and my cheeks are hot, “a letter detailing the affection this suitor has for you—and why he believes he will be a fair husband for you.”

I sit up straight. “Who is it?”

“Eric Harling,” he says.

My eyes bug out of my head.

Eric?

Eric put an offer on me?

No, he didn’t just put an offer on my contract. He wrote a fucking letter to my father, like an actual suitor, like he’s someone in courtship with me.

But he’s with Asta…

He’s fucking her.

And then flirting with me… And then cold towards me.

A frown twists my face.

He’s a fortune hunter, Serena said.

All the gentry are, for the most part. It’s not my money, so much, that Eric is after. More the network I come with, the connection to the Cravens. A marriage to me will elevate his whole family to our rank if he plays the game right.

But… he likes me, too.

I’m sure of it.

It’s only appropriate to send a letter of that kind if he feels affection for me.

He approaches my contract the way a courtship suitor would, not one of convenience.

So Father asks the obvious, “How familiar are you with Eric Harling?”

He knows all about our rolling around in the snow . Called me not so long ago to chew me out about that. Then of course he pays for the tutoring, so that’s no surprise to him that we are spending time together.

I use that.

“We’ve just… been around each other more this year,” I say as unsurely as I feel. “I guess we’re getting closer—I like him, if that’s what you’re asking. He would be good. Kind. He would treat me fairly.”

“Fairly,” Father echoes, not unkindly.

“Are you considering him?”

“Perhaps.”

My mind flickers with the silhouette image of a monopoly man with a comical moustache and a bulging midsection. The faceless, nameless aristos man who inquired after my contract.

“What about the aristos you said you were talking to?”

Father’s sigh is curt. “I have not had word from him in some weeks. I did tell you it was only an inquiry.”

The relief tugs a breath from me.

So this mysterious aristos has decided against me, or has forgotten all about me. But Eric, with perfect timing, has written to my father about how much he likes me, what he likes about me. Personalised .

He might have a shot.

For Father to mention him specifically, by name no less, then ask me about my relationship with him, yes, it’s fair to say Eric has become a frontrunner.

But Father will stew on it. He will take his time, consider all the consequences of marrying me off to a gentry.

It doesn’t happen often. The child of an aristos family, an empire, being demoted to gentry. Not unheard of, but strange enough that it seems Father is still tossing up the decision. Weighing pros and cons.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he just decided against any marriage for me, and simply kept me as a home daughter for the rest of my life.

He would of course accept that, if it’s what came to be. He would never throw me out.

Hell, most families would have thrown out their deadblood child to live in the krum world, memories gone, and no ties to their witching family anymore. That’s usually what happens when a deadblood is born into aristos. Banished. Forgotten.

Discarded.

Father kept me.

I love him for that.

I owe him everything.

And so if he decides I marry no one at all, that’s just fine with me. If he picks Eric, I’ll speak my vows with a smile.

And if he does send me off to be with monopoly man, then I will swallow my words and simply accept what it is, the way that Father accepts what I am.

I am just too defeated to fight.

So when he says, “I received word that you were intoxicated on school grounds”, I just let a sigh slump me.

“Yes, Father.”

“This is true?” His voice is stone. “You deemed it appropriate behaviour to be sick in public, to fall over yourself, and to then pass out on a couch in the common areas?”

“Yes, Father.”

The silence that crackles through the line is fraught with tension.

I expect sharp words, cutting punishments, shouting. I don’t expect this—

“Sometimes,” he says after a pause, and though his voice is soft, there’s nothing kind about it, “I wonder where we went wrong with you.”

My lashes shut, tight.

The pang in my chest is enough to spur a singe of nausea through me.

The sharp whisper of my mother’s voice slices through the background, “ Hamish .”

Just his name, but a hiss all the same.

She chides him.

But it’s too late.

I open my eyes, and the warmth of a salted tear falls down my cheek. “I’m sorry.” My voice wobbles. “I went to a party on the grounds—and I had too much. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it won’t,” Father says, sharp. “If I hear a single word, a whisper that you have stepped out of propriety again, I will send you to Grandmother Ethel’s for the season.”

My throat swells into a sudden, steel ball.

My eyes widen.

“Do you understand me, Olivia?” he asks, darkly.

“Yes, Father—”

My whisper barely has a moment to settle before the line clicks. Then it goes dead.

One long beep is all that comes from the receiver.

So I know that the lines didn’t drop. It would be absolute silence if interference cut the call.

Father hung up on me.

I hit the receiver onto the hanger and push up from the bench.

Swatting away my stray, stupid tears, I push through the curtains and stalk down the corridor.