Page 56 of A Heart of Bluestone

Now, she stands in my way, beefy arms locked over her chest, and a dead-eyed stare spearing right through me.

“Oh, come on,” Serena drawls. “Mildred, there is no need for that. Olivia will play, won’t you?”

My jaw rolls, tight, then—as I drag my tongue over my teeth—I slide a narrowed look to Serena.

“Fuck, marry, kill,” she echoes. “Oliver.”

My face scrunches.

Ew.

Mildred jumps over the arm of the couch and lands with a hard thump. “Landon.”

Asta glances at me with so much disinterest that I feel it, the insignificance of my existence, the sudden shame that flushes my cheeks as though I am the one who intrudes on their space, their time.

She doesn’t add a name, she just sighs something soft and tired as she turns her cheek to me.

Serena decides, a name so obvious that I think she meant to include it from the start, “Dray.”

Easy.

“Kill Dray—” I start.

Mildred is quick to cut me off with a guffaw. “That means you have to kiss your brother or marry your brother.”

I make a face. “If I could finish?”

Serena wears a lovely painted smile as she lifts her hand and gently swirls it, a gesture to continue.

“Kill Dray, kill Oliver, kill Landon.”

Asta rolls her eyes. “You have to marry—”

“I would kill them all before I had to anything,” I say. “Gut them and sell their organs on the black market, use the money to flee.”

Serena’s smile lifts into a grin that looks like she might take a bite out of me. There’s a dazzling severity to her, a refined and polished demeanour that I have personally seen shed to the floor as she knocked Melody Green over the head with a candlestick, straight into unconsciousness.

Serena isn’t someone to fuck with.

That girl can fight, even if all one might see when they look at her are diamonds and pearls and silks. She’s got a mean bite.

A wolf in Versace.

It’s moments like this that the bite reveals itself, and it’s both alluring and unsettling. It’s… nostalgic.

“Join us,” she says, and I must have intrigued her enough with my answer. If she was testing to see if I have changed in all these years of distance, she is glad to see that I haven’t.

I make a face. “No, thanks, I think I’ll go eat glass instead.”

Asta folds her arms over her full chest. “So you would kill your own brother? Your twin?”

I arch a brow. “It leaves more for me.”

Oliver’s voice freezes me, “Never took you as the kill-for-inheritance type.”

I look over at the stairwell, the one that leads to the guy’s dorms.

There, my brother comes down the last steps. His tight smile is menacing and he flattens his hand on his chest. “I’ll start sleeping with one eye open.”

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