Page 161 of A Heart of Bluestone

Don’t need to ask Dray if he’s planning on helping anytime soon. He won’t. The headmaster’s pointed finger only brings us here. Doesn’t force us to commit.

But I am not trying to get into even more trouble—and I expect a lot from Father when he finds out.

Oh, gods.

The exhaustion ribbons through me. I crouch by the bags of manure and drop my head into my hands.

Father.

How he must hate me, now.

Probably wishes he did abandon me when I was young.

“There it is.” Dray’s tone is clipped, it’s ice. “I was wondering when it would hit you and your resolve would crumble.”

Still crouched, hunched over myself, I feel my face twist against the dust in the air. I drop my hands and fix my stinging stare on the rubbish.

“You started something you couldn’t finish,” Dray says and steps off the stool. It creaks with shifted weight.

“Oh, fuck you, Dray.” I scoff, bitter, and stagger up to face him. “You started it.”

His brow arches. Slow, he advances.

“You started it the day we came here.” My throat is thick and slick with tears I swallow down.

I am so tired.

So sick of fighting.

Sodonewith sobbing.

I itch to claw off my own fucking face just to be done with it.

“You dare speak to me like I am your equal,” he says, his steps drawing him closer. “You are so fucking unimportant,” he advances until the heels of my boots hit the sacks of manure piled up against the wall, “insignificant,” his lip curls around the spat word, and I flinch, “that your father has to hunt for a suitorthat will take you. Even with your fortune, Olivia, who wants you?”

I can hardly see him through the milky blur of tears.

Tears are silent on my face—but not invisible.

His lashes lower as he watches a salty tear drag over the corner of my flattened mouth.

“Your father can’t even pay someone to have you, Little Life.” Still, he watches the tear, stuck. He reaches for it, then presses his fingertip right into it.

I turn my cheek to him.

“How difficult it must be for him,” he says, soft, “to love you—for the sake of your mother.”

Sometime splits through me.

A roar, a shout, a cry, I don’t know, maybe all three threaded together. I just know thatI can’t. I just can’t do it anymore.

My hand shoots out for his face, a blur of white aimed for his cheek.

It doesn’t connect, doesn’t get the chance to. Not before Dray’s eyes flash and, hard, his hands shove me square on the chest.

I’m thrown off my feet—and I smack down with a sickly sludging sound.

I land in stacks of manure.

---