We help each other tie on our masks when we are out of the carriages. Mine is fashioned from a delicate silver mesh. Olive’s is made of monarch wings, matching perfectly her orange and black butterfly dress, nearly the exact same shade as her ginger hair.
The crowd parts as the six of us enter the room. We make quite a sight in our costumes. Emmy to my right is in ink black, dressed as a bat, with wings tied around her middle fingers that extend when she stretches her arms.
Marion shimmers in her mermaid costume, complete with a tiara made of shells and pearls.
But it’s Faith I’m jealous of. She’s dressed as Romeo’s Juliet. Her dress is the simplest of all, a warm cream silk that laces up the front. There’s a golden circlet on her head, and her brown curls are pulled off her face and cascade down her back.
She glares as she catches me staring.
As usual, we’re not handed dance cards like the rest of the eligible girls our age. Instead, we mingle by the champagne tower and gossip about the other attendees.
There’s a sudden pull on my arm, and I jump, completely unlady-like, into Lydia’s arms.
“What are you doing here?” I gasp.
She looks better than she did the last time I saw her. There’smore pink in her cheeks, and her hair is markedly less dull. Her costume, however, is uncharacteristically lazy. She’s wearing a lavender silk dress Mama had made for her first season, two years ago, with fresh flowers woven through her blond curls.
“Mama thought it would be good for me.”
My mother appears behind her, my father in tow.
I give them all tight hugs, surprised at how my body relaxes, a bone-deep longing for home I didn’t even realize I had.
My mother grips both my hands conspiratorially. “How have things been?”
I’m sad I can’t give her the juicy gossip she wants, and I refuse to trouble her with my fears. That’s the thing about having a mother who remembers everything. I have to be careful about what I give her to worry about.
“It’s been lovely. The other girls are so nice, and Prince Bram is such a gentleman.”
She grins, and again I remind myself that every moment of pain is worth the joy on her face.
Trumpets sound, and the doors swing open as Prince Emmett and Prince Bram come striding in.
At the sight of Emmett’s face, I feel the fault line crack down the center of my chest, the two sides of me at war. There’s the side that wants only to be a good girl, a good daughter, and to help my family be integrated into society once more, and then there is the side that is allied with Emmett, the side that’s willing to risk burning this all to the ground to build a world better than this one.
Anxiously, I twist Bram’s pearl ring around my index finger.
With my parents in front of me, I feel very much like a childagain, with a child’s heart that only wants them to be safe and whole and proud of me.
Emmett’s voice echoes in my head.You could be queen.
Viscountess Bolingbroke waves me over to rejoin the rest of the group now that Bram has arrived at the party.
Bram walks right over to us, taking in our costumes. He’s dressed as something of a pirate, in a black velvet coat and a billowing white shirt open wide around his throat.
He turns to my parents and politely introduces himself. My mother giggles like a schoolgirl, and my father looks up at him like he’s the son he’s always craved.
Bram pulls Olive into a waltz first and then proceeds to dance with us one by one. “You’re getting better,” he says as he twirls me across the ballroom.
I look into his eyes, the way Emmett taught me. “I’ve been practicing.”
The clock strikes midnight, and Bram disappears with the men to the upstairs drawing room to smoke cigars and discuss topics too worldly for our delicate ears.
It’s been hours, and I haven’t seen Lydia again. I wonder bitterly if she’s snuck home without saying goodbye.
The party shows no sign of dying down, but Viscountess Bolingbroke is snoring softly in the corner, slumped in a chair after one too many glasses of champagne.
I slip out into the garden, where torches cast long shadows over hedges and twisting oak trees, to look for my sister.
