Page 66 of Prince of Masks
Each time I peer over the edge to the blue ripples, he’s still out there. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll drown.
The hope doesn’t take.
I know better.
His makut is too handy a print.
But he’s ruined my mood, and in the past two hours, I haven’t been able to do much more than pick at a scratch on my leg and fiddle with the MP3 player, but not actually commit to a song.
I draw the book of compositions onto my lap as I curl up the bench.
Oliver finds his way to me. Well, not so much tomebut rather to the fresh fruit platter that has been served by the steward.
He sits on the edge of the under-cabin roof and starts picking at the watermelon spheres.
“You’ve done nothing but mope this whole trip.”
I frown at the pages of my book. “I have not.”
“Were you wearing Dray’s shirt earlier or did I dream that?”
I toss a look at him. “He made me put it on.”
“How attentive.”
I roll my eyes.
Oliver has always been like that. Back when I wasn’t revealed as a deadblood, and we were all friends, Oliver loathed that Dray favoured me.
‘I loved you.’
Those words are a punch to the chest.
I choke on a harrowed breath.
“I’m not moping,” I say, and flick my gaze back to the pages of my book, even though I can’t focus on a single printed word now. “I’m bored.”
His teeth crunch down on a melon cube. “Bored on a yacht in the Mediterranean. How cliché of you.”
“How is that cliché?”
He grins around the next bite, a bloodred watermelon. “Sad, little, rich girl. Surrounded by crystal clear seas, a pod of dolphins that way,” he gestures past the grotto to the sea’s horizon, but I don’t look, because I already saw them a while ago, “staff to dote on you, in the luxuries of a yacht—and you’re bored?”
I scoff.
Luxuries of a yacht.
He makes it sound like we are on a superyacht or one, at least, that we own and have decked out with everything we need.
This isn’t one of those boats.
This one is a tad more—at the risk of sounding like a bratty snob—dull, frankly. It’s small, there are only two bedrooms in the under-cabin, it has no jacuzzi, no outdoor bar, and I can look up the side of the railing to see the bow of the boat.
It’s a charter.
On one of ours, I wouldn’t see Amelia and Mother up there, golden binoculars stuck to their faces as they watch the dolphins in the distance.
“It’s different for you,” I say, then peel off my shades. I rub my hands over my face before I drop them to my lap with a slap. “You have company for these things.Friends. I don’t. It gets to be boring.”
