Page 22 of Prince of Masks (Hearts of Bluestone #2)

I sway on the swing bench down the terrace, and my shadow, Serena, sits beside me.

We watch the game ahead on the flat grass field. It’s hard to make out who is who, what with the misty distance between us and that they are all caked head-to-toe in mud.

“Edward is pissed,” I say, wiping at raindrops on my breeches, “but how is Asta taking it?”

“Ask what you really want to ask.” Serena’s cherry-painted smile is knowing and sly. She presses her cheek to the wooden spine of the bench. “About that charming aspirer.”

I shrug. “Mr Strom wouldn’t want to settle Asta’s contract outside of aristos… would he?”

My father wasn’t overly excited to open my contracts to the gentry, and I am deadblood. We always knew I wouldn’t secure a high-status husband.

So Edward must be even more reluctant.

“Want?” Serena sighs. “No. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be tempted to accept the offer from the likes of Harling.”

“Why?”

Serena fixes the wrist-button of her gloves. “Mr Strom might rather have Asta married off before the wedding season, even to a gentry. Better that, than to have a daughter become an early spinster.”

I nod, faint.

Image is everything.

I have a sudden warmth spread through my chest. An appreciation for my family—my father. He considers the value of the offer, the value of the man who petitions to be my husband.

Sure, our measurements of value are different. Where I consider kindness in Eric to be valuable, Father considers it status.

But he wouldn’t sell me off to some brutish gentry just to save face.

I glance over at Father.

His mood is light today, a feather, like the kiss he brushes over Mother’s cheekbone, light as a feather . No, he wouldn’t sell me off to just any gentry, not even to avoid my early spinsterhood, and the mocking whispers that the family would earn for such a fate.

I would become a greater shame than I already am.

And still, he doesn’t throw me to the unworthy.

I turn back to Serena, my chin grazing my shoulder. “Does it change things between you and Asta?”

Asta was positioned to become a Sinclair. The top of the cherry pile, the cream of the crop. The jewel on the crown.

Now, she’s been torn down from the throne she was climbing onto, and how far she will fall, I don’t know.

Serena thinks on a moment.

Her grey eyes are fixed ahead, where the silhouettes collide. “Asta is a friend. I do find that I prefer your company,” Serena adds with a pointed look my way. “I always have.”

I scoff. “Is this your way of saying sorry?”

A frown pinches her brow. “I am sorry that you suffered,” she concedes and, with a gentle sigh, deflates into the bench, “but I did what I had to do. We don’t always get the choice to forge our own paths.”

Snakes, I know.

I am one of them.

Or I was meant to be.

They are a pit of aristos vipers. And I know aristos so well that I understand they won’t do anything that does not slot in with their own agendas.

Aligning with me doesn’t serve anyone, not at Bluestone, not for the past ten years of my life.

But now, Serena’s renewed friendship with me has a deeper meaning than simply missing my company, or preferring me to the other women.

The dynamics are fragile and complex.

Serena is to marry my brother. And I am his deadblood sister.

And so, at home, once they are wed, she would be expected to be amiable with me, friends even.

It’s only once we stepped out into the company of masks and hierarchies and prejudices and business and alliances that she would turn her cheek to me, not quite turn her back.

That isn’t the direction she is taking our friendship.

Serena is more invested in me than that.

I wonder if that is what she and Oliver were arguing about—if he made her befriend me for the sake of their shared, future image.

The thought twists my insides, then chills them as cold as the winter air fogging around the estate.

I dig my heels into the stone, then kick us back.

The bench sways.

Takes me a while of silence to summon the courage to ask a question I shouldn’t, an improper pry.

I shoot her a side-glance. “What’s been going on with you and my brother lately?”

A graceful shrug is her first answer. “Sometimes I question our love.”

My brows hike.

If any of us were in love, I thought it was them.

I know my brother loves her.

But I take another approach. “Love is a bonus for people like us. The best we can hope for is a husband who respects us, someone we can at least be friends with.”

Someone like Eric.

“Friendship,” she echoes with a small smile, “is a poor substitute for what marriage should be.”

I frown.

How can I agree?

It’s the very reason I’ve pursued Eric so strongly.

Friendship is better than a hateful marriage built on pain and lies and distrust.

Love.

It’s a lie.

A dream I can’t afford to chase.

I can afford friendship—and I can have it if I throw everything I’ve got at it. Seems like now, I might have to fight harder than I expected.

Eric might be swayed off my path and onto Asta’s.

I can’t have that.

“We live at the expense of others,” Serena says. “And I sometimes wonder at what cost—even to ourselves.”

The distance in her voice means it takes a moment for me to really hear her words, for them to really sink in.

I sigh, soft. “If I am allowed to dream… then I will dream of a husband who both loves and respects me, and… has enough money.”

“Ambitious,” she says, and there’s a lick of sarcasm coating her voice.

I turn to her, a blank look on my face. She’s pushing up from the bench, dusting off her coat, then stalking up the terrace.