Freya Arsov sits on top of a world of diamonds and sports cars. Her father is a billionaire, head of a world-renown company, her mother, an esteemed lawyer. She attends the most prestigious boarding school in England. She has four amazing best frien...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
✦✦✦
JULIET COULDN'T SLEEP.
Every time she remotely approached sleep, her mind would wander off to Amelie and Freya's empty beds or her parents or the fact that she was waiting on Freya's PI to get back to her about her father's mistress, and about a dozen or so other things.
It wasn't a surprise that she eventually gave up and kicked off her covers, ignoring the lit-up numbers on her digital clock on her bedside table that told her it was 4am and time to be sleeping. She didn't know what to expect but she found herself tossing a coat over her silken Olivia von Halle pyjamas, the floral pattern falling unseen beneath a dark coat. She threw her feet into a pair of Gucci slides she borrowed from Amelie since last year and hoped her toes wouldn't fall off.
She was just going to walk to the car park, to see if Matthew's car was there.
No one would see her anyway. It was late, even for the Friday night illicit affairs that went on at Arrowsmith. She knew that a fourth-year from one of the boy's dorms was having a party only because the rumour mill decided to throw it around during her last period Biology class. It was a ballsy move. The party scene on campus had reduced ever since the events at Cyan Hall, with good reason.
Even that fourth year party would have ended by now. She would hear whether or not it was shut down by headmistress Al Nassar in the morning.
Part of her hoped it had been.
Parties left her stomach sour after Cyan Hall and all that had been revealed afterwards. The type of parties her classmates liked, where Möet flowed like water and Louboutins wound up dangling from girls' fingers as they traipsed across dance floors, were breeding grounds for boys like Theodore Altringham and for lines of cocaine in bathrooms behind your friends back.
Juliet was no prude. But lately, she'd been alert, awaiting some bomb to drop.
It didn't help that Helena's party was on Sunday, and that Helena herself was a ticking time bomb. Juliet felt like she might explode a lot too actually. In fact, she felt like Ebony House might just implode with all five of them inside.
No wonder she found herself slipping out the front door on silent feet and was relieved to be surrounded by the silent night.
The forest bracketing the campus always unnerved her. In the darkened night, the trees looked like a foreboding wall of shadow that wanted to swallow her whole. She grew up in Monte Carlo, surrounded by the ocean and city lights. England, by comparison, always felt darker, colder. Her mother was born here, but even she hadn't liked it enough to stick around long. She'd left, travelling around Europe the moment she turned eighteen, meeting Juliet's father by chance in Monaco.
