Page 85 of Prince of Masks
“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 Ström 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 Ström 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.
