Page 17 of Prince of Masks (Hearts of Bluestone #2)

We anchor near a grotto.

Here, the waters are soft and calm. My father dives in for a swim, Mother, too, and Oliver.

Dray swims the longest.

Long after everyone else has come back onboard and found their way to their afternoon teas and coffees, Dray keeps to the water, backstrokes morphing into breaststrokes, over and over.

Each time I peer over the edge to the blue ripples, he’s still out there. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll drown.

The hope doesn’t take.

I know better.

His makut is too handy a print.

But he’s ruined my mood, and in the past two hours, I haven’t been able to do much more than pick at a scratch on my leg and fiddle with the MP3 player, but not actually commit to a song.

I draw the book of compositions onto my lap as I curl up the bench.

Oliver finds his way to me. Well, not so much to me but rather to the fresh fruit platter that has been served by the steward.

He sits on the edge of the under-cabin roof and starts picking at the watermelon spheres.

“You’ve done nothing but mope this whole trip.”

I frown at the pages of my book. “I have not.”

“Were you wearing Dray’s shirt earlier or did I dream that?”

I toss a look at him. “He made me put it on.”

“How attentive.”

I roll my eyes.

Oliver has always been like that. Back when I wasn’t revealed as a deadblood, and we were all friends, Oliver loathed that Dray favoured me.

‘I loved you.’

Those words are a punch to the chest.

I choke on a harrowed breath.

“I’m not moping,” I say, and flick my gaze back to the pages of my book, even though I can’t focus on a single printed word now. “I’m bored.”

His teeth crunch down on a melon cube. “Bored on a yacht in the Mediterranean. How cliché of you.”

“How is that cliché?”

He grins around the next bite, a bloodred watermelon.

“Sad, little, rich girl. Surrounded by crystal clear seas, a pod of dolphins that way,” he gestures past the grotto to the sea’s horizon, but I don’t look, because I already saw them a while ago, “staff to dote on you, in the luxuries of a yacht—and you’re bored? ”

I scoff.

Luxuries of a yacht.

He makes it sound like we are on a superyacht or one, at least, that we own and have decked out with everything we need.

This isn’t one of those boats.

This one is a tad more—at the risk of sounding like a bratty snob—dull, frankly. It’s small, there are only two bedrooms in the under-cabin, it has no jacuzzi, no outdoor bar, and I can look up the side of the railing to see the bow of the boat.

It’s a charter.

On one of ours, I wouldn’t see Amelia and Mother up there, golden binoculars stuck to their faces as they watch the dolphins in the distance.

“It’s different for you,” I say, then peel off my shades. I rub my hands over my face before I drop them to my lap with a slap. “You have company for these things. Friends . I don’t. It gets to be boring.”

Oliver considers me, a frown knitting his brow under the flickering lights of the sun that dares dance over his olive-oil complexion.

“That’s why you wanted to come to the casino.” He decides it, doesn’t ask, just decides it to be true. “The company.”

With a sigh, I toss aside my shades. They land on my open bag, then are quickly followed by the book I wasn’t reading.

Oliver watches as I push to stand, then stretch my arms over my head. The linen pants are wrinkled around my legs, the shirt as crumpled as my face.

“I’m right, yes?”

I drop my stretch and let my arms sag at my sides. “It’s not really any of your business.”

His eyes harden, they follow me as I fall back onto the bench against the railing. “Everything you do is my business, Liv.”

I stir almond milk into my tea. “How do you figure that?”

“I’m to inherit,” he says through a yawn. “Everything. That includes you.”

The glower I shoot at him isn’t as playful as the one he is quick to return to me.

I toss down the teaspoon. It clatters on the tray.

I bring the teacup closer to me. “Not if I marry.”

Oliver’s complexion glares in the sunrays.

His face tightens into something of a grimace. “Not one of the gentry, I hope,” he says, then pauses to make an ugh sound. “Awful company to have at dinner.”

“Dinner?” I hike my brows. “I’ll be clear, Oliver, since maybe that tanning oil leaked into your eyes and clouded your perspective.”

A jolt jerks his shoulder, a chesty laugh that he doesn’t release, but his grin is ear to ear. “And what’s this clarity?”

“I won’t be around once I’m married.”

His eyes shutter, a glimmer of shade flickers over the emerald. His grin fades until he’s just staring at me with a pinched brow.

“I’m desperate for a husband,” I say and set down the teacup, “because he will be my escape. From Dray, from this aristos bullshit— and from you . There will be no dinners that you’ll suffer a gentry’s company, because I will not have dinner with you.”

There is no rage storming in his eyes, no disgust to curl his mouth, he simply frowns at me with a furrowed brow and a thick quiet wisped around him.

Oliver almost looks sad.

I snatch my tote and hoist it over my shoulder.

The look I spare him is ugly, then I march across the deck for the saloon.

The sun glares out the corner of my eye. It lures in my focus; I turn to see Dray climbing up the ladder, onto the deck.

His hands are fisted on the metal bars, his upper body glistening like polished oak. His glacier gaze pins me, fast, like he has a built-in radar for me.

Sometimes, I think he does.

Sometimes, I suspect Dray has a niggle in his mind, an inkling in his magic, the essence of his mother’s print, and it’s all aimed at me like a sword to the throat.

He draws away from the ladder and, without tearing his gaze from me, he reaches for the bar and snatches his towel.

I turn my cheek to him and shove through the glass doors, into the saloon. The relief is instant. Not only to have a space to myself, but the hit of the air conditioner is like walking onto the grounds of the academy after a sweltering day in a sauna.

I drop my tote to the floorboards, then drag myself to the bench that lines the far wall. There, I fall onto my side.

I let a nap snare me. But only for an hour or so before I wake to Mother shaking my shoulder before my body is ready.

Time for dinner.

The sun is lower in the sky, a sky painted all different shades of pinks and reds, brushstrokes of purple. With it, the cooler air has swept over the deck, so we all take refuge in the dining room.

Dinner is pleasant, but I am too tuckered after a day in the sun, and I want nothing but to lather myself in aloe-balm, then climb into bed.

I stifle the third yawn that splits me in the handful of minutes since I woke. On my second tea, and still, the fatigue is draped over me like a weighted blanket.

I’m not the only one.

Opposite, Oliver slumps in his chair.

Propriety tossed overboard, he runs his hand over his face and keeps his gaze downcast. He stares at his plate too long.

His quietness tonight is unusual, but since the Sinclairs and the Cravens are so close, and have been all my life at least, no one really bats an eye when our masks slip. It’s inevitable.

Still, I hide my incessant yawns behind my hands, and I murmur a sorry each time.

Makes me feel a touch better that Dray is as subdued tonight as me and my brother. His silence is no weighted blanket, but rather an elegant cloak as he reclines in his chair, one hand resting on the edge of the table, the other bent at an angle so that he can lean his temple on his fist.

The last of the murmured chatter fizzles out when the stewards carry in the main course. Plates and bowls are lifted and moved and swapped, and I can’t keep my eyes open long enough.

Soon, it’s only the soothing sound of forks gently touching plates, the scrape of a chair over the hardwood floor, the slosh of water in a glass, and it becomes something of a lullaby.

It's one of the things I hate about the Sinclairs. How comfortable our silences can sometimes be.

That comfort sticks to our group as we, wrapped in blankets, empty out of the dining room and onto the deck.

Whatever elemental printed witches were in Monaco, securing a swell of heat over the country, must be gone now, or they lost their grip on the warmth they brought to us. The air is cooler, too cool, and Mr Younge is only one witch capable of so much.

All magic has limits.

And Mr Younge has been pushed to his, a sweaty sheen over his face, a sickly wash to his complexion.

Now we are at the mercy of the cold.

I keep a blanket wrapped around my shoulders like a shawl as I curl up on a cushioned wicker chair.

Champagnes, whiskies, cherries, and teas are dished out by a steward, and a tray—peppered with salted fudge and strawberry-cream pastries—is placed on the table we huddle around.

I don’t touch the dessert.

But I endure Dray, once again.

Elbow pressed into the arm of his chair, he lounges in a wicker seat across from me. His thighs are spread, feet planted on the hardwood floor, and his temple is leaned on his fist.

He stares right at me.

There’s nothing malicious about his stare, though. No ill intent, merely like he’s considering me.

I only throw him a fleeting, withering look, but it’s enough to see that he’s tugged on the wrinkled shirt I abandoned on the deck hours ago.

I watch the waters turn to land.

Ahead, the lights of Monaco glitter into view.

The yacht spears directly for it.

Within a half-hour, we will be there, docking. The cars will be waiting for us. And so, within the hour, I will be in bed.

Come morning, we will leave Monaco behind and return to England. I hope some witches there decide to bring out the sun a little.

I tuck myself up on the chair and watch the lights wink at me. Cities always look so wonderfully beautiful and mysterious from a distance, like they will offer the wildest experiences of your life—and so rarely deliver.

It’s the mystique that is pretty.

That unfulfilled promise hooks my gaze, and I watch it with a hollowness in me.

And all the while, I know Dray watches me.