Page 78 of A Heart of Bluestone

My own little schemes of payback.

Like the rumour I spread that Mildred eats cake, if you know what I mean. Or that Oliver has to pluck nose hair every morning. He doesn’t but that doesn’t stop the rumoursspreading through the school. My favourite is that Dray gets his butthole bleached.

I’m sneaky about it, too. Don’t just outright tell someone these lies if they don’t trust me. I tell Courtney or James, I murmur it, but loud enough that the students at the table behind me, or the ones standing in front of me in the buffet queue, will hear it… and it holds more merit that way.

That’s the pain of it all, isn’t it?

I might be ostracised, but I am just like them. Deadblood, sure, but raised to be as cruel and sneaky.

I watch the fight tumble down the hill.

Mildred does not pull her punches.

My teeth bare with a grimace.

It’s a wonder she still acts like this. She never quite grew up, did she? Mildred hasn’t changed from first year, not emotionally, not intellectually. She’s a fucking moron.

A grunt.

And I’m sure most would be surprised to learn that she’s twenty-two.

Serena looks over at me.

She’s the only one of the Snakes not watching the fight tumble down the hill. As though she waits for a secret moment, and uses it to look over at the trail—and she does something so strange that it furrows my brow.

Her slender hand lifts, gloves wrapped thinly around her fingers, and she waves. It’s a delicate wiggle of the fingers, so slight that I would have missed it if it weren’t for my stare locked onto her hand.

I make an unkind face before I pull away and stomp down the path.

It’s not a moody stomp, just the decline of the ground beneath me making my steps wobbly, my hips sway, and I pray I don’t go skidding.

Serena’s wave is a niggle in my mind as I make my way to the rockpool.

When we were friends, so long ago, I used to feel sorry for Serena. She lives so far from the rest of us. There are other aristos families in Milan, of course, but no witch children our age, in our year at Bluestone.

She used to call a lot.

Asta’s family founded the Videralli country, Monaco. They live in some fancy hotel in Monte Carlo, which isn’t all that far from Nice, where Landon’s family estate sprawls out in vineyards, then creeps onto the beautiful cliffside shores.

Veils make it easier to visit.

That’s what Oliver does when he has some days to spare on the travel during school breaks. But the travel is exhausting and can’t be done too often.

So it’s really at Bluestone and the aristos gatherings they all have the most time to spend with one another.

Still, there is no substitute for the closest bonds forged.

I see that in them, up there.

Asta sticks to Serena, who hardly glances her way.

Landon, though an aristo, has become Mildred’s shadow. She’s upper gentry, but through her friendship with him, she’s earned herself a nice key, the key to the gilded gates.

That’ll bode well for her later, when she steps into a higher role after graduation—wife. Her connections will put her in the path of other aristos men.

Melody, too, perhaps.

She seems more the type to romanticise an advantageous marriage than her sister would.

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