Page 20 of Prince of Masks (Hearts of Bluestone #2)

And if they run away with their own fantasies of unlimited wealth with no consequence, they vanish.

Everything has its limitations.

Magic and wealth included.

So I know, as I wander my gaze around the home I have seen so many times, and I flick my attention between the new chandeliers above and the gold-painted marble floors, that Amelia Sinclair might be the most expensive wife in witch history.

The old butler leads us to the party.

His steps are slow, given his greyish age, and so we wander at a medial pace from the foyer, down the wide, spanning passage lined with gold-framed portraits of Sinclairs throughout the ages, and to the rear sunroom, whose glass doors open onto the terrace.

I draw in a deep, steadying breath.

The mere sight of the crowd beyond the open glass doors is enough to flurry me with a sudden whoosh of cold panic. A dozen witches out there.

And I will have to greet most of them, if not all.

I doubt I’ll be able to slip by them and make for a private corner, since the thick of the group is standing right on the other side of the doors.

Oliver must be having the same exhausted realisation as me.

His sigh is gentle, but since he’s right beside me, I hear it, and when I glance at him, I see that he’s running his hands down his face.

“Questioning your decision to come?” I murmur.

He scoffs, bitter, an unspoken yeah, no shit .

But he says nothing, because in a heartbeat, our parents have entered the throng of witches, and we are quick to follow.

Mr Barlow is first to notice us.

He turns at the right moment, nursing a whisky, and his gaze lands on us. A grin splits him as he moves to approach.

I’m glad that my parents are in front of me, a buffer, and so he can’t reach around to shake my hand.

I’m not a fan of Mr Barlow.

“Where is Zola?” Mother asks, loud enough that her voice carries over the constant murmur and ripples of voices on the terrace. “Is she here? Is she well today?”

Others have noticed our arrival, and they are all closing in.

I ache to shrink back and run to the foyer, to hide.

“She’s down there,” Mr Barlow flurries his hand over his shoulder, a gesture to the grounds. “Having her moment of peace.”

I crane my neck to look to where he said—and there she is. Mrs Barlow, a curvy woman in jeans and a raincoat, strolls around the rock-shored pond before the steps that descend to the water feature rockpool.

Zola Barlow is another elite aristos, of course, but not from Bluestone Academy; not from the European circles. Mr Barlow met her at the Debutante Ball of their eligible season—and that was that.

My gaze cuts away from her satin brown complexion, a brilliant contrast against the yellow raincoat, and I scan the grounds instead.

The grounds of these old Tudor manors, castles , seem never-ending. Thick, lush greenery as far as the eye can see, with that fresh fragrance of wet grass in the midst of a storm. There’s something oddly refreshing, comforting, about that smell.

I draw in a deep breath on instinct, flooding my lungs with the dewiness of nature, and I squint out through the drizzled mist smearing the grounds.

The poor visibility has the rugby game closer to the stone terrace than usual. The field of wet grass (and now, torn up mud that will have the groundskeepers fuming) is squared in by thick hedges. There, barrelling into each other, I count four men.

Takes me another moment to make out their faces through, not just the wispy fog but, the mud streaking their faces.

Serena’s older brother, Dez, and Landon’s younger brother face off. A handful of years between them, but Grey Barlow isn’t lacking in the bulked muscles he spends his days crafting like a sculpture. He’s all about protein shakes and counting calories that one. Annoying company when dining out.

More witches have surrounded us; Mr Barlow pushed aside for Mr Vasile to shake Father’s hand and brush a kiss over Mother’s cheek.

If I don’t like Mr Barlow, I loathe Mr Vasile.

The feeling is mutual—he doesn’t even say hello to me, he rarely does.

Father hardly notices, he’s quick to enter a loud conversation about the finalisation of their contracts between Serena and Oliver.

I flick my gaze back to the grounds, grounds that just… go on and on and on, farther than I can see from the terrace that wraps around the rear of the manor.

Now that I consider it, then throw my gaze around the terrace, I realise something odd.

The Stroms aren’t here.

I see no sign of them.

Not Asta, her father, her mother, not even her older sister who, if it’s at all possible, is even more striking than Asta herself.

Both of them inherited that sharp blond hair that borders on silver, the soft porcelain complexion that melts into snow, the genetics that are needed for slight frames with lovely curves only at the hips.

When I gain a few, that weight doesn’t just stick to my hips, it has a mind of its own and goes wherever the inclination takes it.

I wish I inherited Mother’s genetics for weight, for body shape. Stark, tall, slender. Naturally, so.

I don’t know where I got my eat-chocolate-pay-the-price genes, but it sure wasn’t from her.

Probably Nonna. She’s a fuller woman who, in older photographs, the black and white kind, was something of a Marilyn Monroe type.

Movement brushes behind me, stealing me from my thoughts.

I can’t turn around, not while I’m cornered like this, and it feels like I’m a sardine in a tin, trapped with so many others.

So I touch my chin to my shoulder, neck craned and stiff, to see Mr Burns standing at the threshold of the double doors.

He brings a whistle to his thin lips, the sort of mouth that, for some odd reason, is never flushed with its full pink pigmentation, and so they are beige, always beige.

I cringe—

He blows the whistle.

The sharp sound is a sword through my bones.

But the whistling is curt, and it reaches all the way out onto the grounds, past the rugby game, and over to the rockpool that Mrs Barlow strolls.

She pauses her wandering, and angles her face up at us, at the manor, the terrace—then starts the hike back.

The whistle was the return call for tea and sandwiches, and it draws in glances from the field where the rugby game has hesitated.

I turn my cheek to the mud before familiar ice eyes find me and, instead, scan the crowd clustered on the terrace for Serena.

I don’t have the best angle for finding anyone, I’m still backed into the threshold, my parents shields in front of me, but shields already too deep in animated chatter with others, and Oliver has dipped off already, wandered a few paces away.

Call me a copycat, but that gives the green light, and in a heartbeat, I’m ducking under Mr Burns’s outstretched arm as he passes off a letter to Mr Sinclair, and I am shuffling around bodies to reach the barrier of the terrace.

I’m only an arm’s reach from the stairs when the metal clack of boots start to thump on stone.

I look at the stairs as Serena’s brother, Desiderio, comes jogging up them.

Just like his sister, his silvery eyes are storm-clouds wisping over sunrays, and he wears that same polished complexion, of olive oil.

He flashes a greeting grin my way—and I can only manage the stupidest sputtered smile in return.

Dez has that effect on me.

Always has.

Six years our senior, he was gone from Bluestone before I finished the secondary school portion. But no matter his age, a lot of the girls had a crush on him.

Can’t blame us, not when he looks like he’s stepped out of the glossy pages of Italian Vogue.

His wife is equally hot.

A curvaceous babe from the South Americas, and he finds her right away, tucked at the back of the terrace, sheathed in a fitted maroon dress so wrong for this weather, and her cell in her hands.

My cheeks heat at the smacker he plants on her full lips.

She receives it without much reciprocated affection, more like he is a bother to her, a nuisance.

My mouth tilts.

Dez was promised to another European aristos when he met Isabella—and he dissolved that arranged marriage for her. It just took seeing her once, and he was a goner.

Mr Vasile didn’t challenge the shift of Dez’s affections, since Isabella comes from an elite line, but I’m guessing she said yes because Dez is aristos, and that means money.

Maybe I’m just being bitter.

And a little jealous.

Envious, more accurately.

That a polished, aristos gentleman—who looks like a mahogany sculpture came to life with the pearliest, most dazzling grin of all time, and winks that make me weak at the knees—decided to use his power and influence to choose someone many consider beneath him.

Guess if I felt like looking further into myself, I might find that there is a withered flower in me, one that was foolish enough to bloom in youth with hope that one day, that might happen to me.

It never did.

And so the flower is wilted.

And the glower I aim at the couple is withering.

I cut my moody glare to the steps again as a thudding, clacking sound smacks down on them. Rugby boots, heavy and cloppy and cacked with dirt, and the metal dirt-grips grating over stone in a way that grits my teeth.

Grey Barlow runs up the stairs, jumping two at a time. His chest heaves with harsh breaths. Cheeks roar beneath scrapes and dirt, and he somehow looks younger than the last year I saw him.

In all fairness, he is only seventeen.

Funny thing about Grey is that he used to go to Bluestone with us, a while back, even if he was below us a few years.

But then he went and blew up the mess hall in a blackout dust prank gone wrong.

Literally blew it up, ceiling caved in, walls crumbling, and a couple of students were so injured they had to be sent to a witch hospital in Geneva.

Got himself expelled.

Now, he’s homeschooled with a governess.

He doesn’t look at me as he barrels into the crowd; and just as he does, Father steps closer to me.