by Eden Beck
It’s a sign of the gravity of our situation that Beck doesn’t make so much as a sarcastic comment at that.
Dean Withers just fixes me with a stare that should be reserved for someone who was just caught drowning puppies, before promptly beginning arrangements for some kind of lesson.
As if one day of horseback riding is going to make me the equal of the rest of my classmates, where horseback riding seems to have been just another part of their basic elementary education.
And just like that, one bet between Dean Withers and Headmistress Robin and we’re right back to where we started.
If only everyone was as tongue-tied as Beck about the whole situation.
“Tell me again why we can’t be rid of The Brotherhood? You do realize that they’re the reason everything is ruined, right?” Neville says, following after me down the hall on Monday morning. He’s on his way to class with Rafael trailing somewhere behind, while I, meanwhile, am headed out to spend the day trying not to break my neck when Beck inevitably spooks the horse I’m set to ride.
Neville must see I’m not listening, because he picks up his pace to try and walk beside me. At my current stride, it’s not an easy task.
“This was never about you, Alex. This is all them,” he says, his voice rising almost to a whine. “You’re not the only one who wants to be rid of them.”
I stop in my tracks, lifting one hand up to pinch the bridge of my nose. Part of me thinks I changed my mind about agreeing to get them expelled just to shut Neville up about it in the first place.
“Look, Neville,” I say, “Everything has changed now.”
I drop my voice down to a whisper. “Just like I told you, the dean has bet the fate of our school on whether or not I can learn how to ride a horse in one day. I can’t get The Brotherhood expelled because there will be no one to compete alongside me. You really don’t think I can win the next two challenges all by myself when I don’t even know what I’m supposed to call a horse’s tail?”
Neville just blinks frustratedly at me. “It’s called a tail, Alex.”
I throw up my arms. “I know it’s a god-damned tail, it was just a … a … metaphor or something.”
I stop for a second and catch my breath, forcing my voice back down to an angry hiss so I don’t alert the entire school—or at least, anyone who isn’t already trying to overhear. I see the way my classmates have started to slow down to overhear snippets of conversation when I’m around.
Word hasn’t exactly gotten out yet about the bet, but it’s only a matter of time. Secrets don’t stay secret for long here. I should know.
I lean in closer to Neville, grabbing him by the upper arm and hugging him close to my side. “Sure, if I got Jasper and Heath and Beck expelled, there’d be no more brotherhood to worry about. But there’d also be no me, no you, no Rafael … no college for all I know. Because who’s going to take the refugees from Bleakwood once everything gets out?”
I catch another pair of eyes flicker in our direction, and I drag Neville out of the middle of the hall and into a more private alcove.
Where has Rafael gotten off to? He said he was just grabbing a couple coffees and would be right back.
Neville, meanwhile, seems more determined than ever not to back down.
He shoots one look over his shoulder to be sure that we’ve not been overhead before he hisses back, angrily, “And you’re really going to expect me to believe this has nothing to do with the little rough-and-tumble between you and Heath in the maze?
I was about to leave him here alone, and was halfway to turning away when I suddenly stop and whirl back to face him, hair swishing and everything.
“How did you …”
I’m interrupted by not Neville’s voice, but Rafael’s.
“The drones, honey.”
Rafael chooses this moment to stroll up on us, two coffees balanced in one hand and a pair of riding boots—which he promptly shoves into my surprised hands—in the other. They look brand new, so shiny they don’t have a scuff on them … and definitely so expensive I don’t dare ask the price.
At this point, I have long since given up tallying what I owe Rafael. I owe Rafael my life.
Which is why I’m glad it’s Neville asking me to close Bleakwood by turning in Jasper Heath and Beck so they get expelled. Not Rafael. I don’t know if I could refuse him.
As gorgeous as the boots are, even the shiniest of buckles or the softest of leather can’t stop my mind from reeling about what he just said.
“The drones … I thought … I didn’t see …”
Rafael just shakes his head. “You really don’t think they caught that? It just didn’t look very good to the investigating committee, so they tried to zip away before anyone noticed. But not before we noticed.”
“Creeps,” I shoot at them, folding my arms across my chest in memory of my earlier exposure.
Rafael doesn’t even bat an eye. “Creeps. Friends. Same thing.”
I let out an audible groan and tilt my head back to face the elaborately arched ceilings.
Can’t I just have one thing go right for me? Just one.
Why does it always have to end up so complicated?
I wait a couple seconds, my face still turned towards the ceiling. “Do you think anyone else saw?”
“The better question here,” Rafael says, handing Neville one of the cups of coffee while taking a sip of the other for himself, “is who didn’t?”
I let out another, even longer groan.
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if you didn’t just like, lay there so long,” Neville says, his eyes squinting up as he looks off into the distance as if he’s trying to remember it better.
He gets a swift kick in the shins from me as a response.
“As much as your little pervert brain would like to believe otherwise,” I say to Neville, “That was nothing more than an accident. A very unfortunate accident. And one that has no bearing on my decision.”
Or, at least, I like to think it doesn’t.
“I might’ve been hasty to change my mind before,” I say after a second’s hesitation. “I might’ve been a little jealous.”
Rafael just arches up his eyebrows at me while Neville flaps his hands up in the air and storms away in annoyance.
“Whatever, Alex.”
I scowl after him. “What’s gotten into him lately? I never knew him to have much of an opinion before. Now, suddenly he’s like … obsessed with getting Jasper and the others expelled.”
Rafael just shrugs. “Can you really blame him?”
I must look at him in surprise, because he gives me another one of his looks. “I mean, look at you. You wanted to get them expelled because you’re jealous, but somehow, you feel guilty about it. Jealousy is normal. Wanting petty revenge is normal. As if anyone ever had another reason for doing anything.”
“Well, I don’t even get to be petty now thanks to Dean Withers. He had to go and make the stupidest bet possible. Didn’t he see Headmistress Robin already had all the cards in her favor? Why’d he have to go and do this too?”
“Maybe,” Rafael says, stepping over to offer me a reconciliatory pat on the shoulder, “maybe that was the point.”
I stop and consider this for a moment, but Rafael just gives me a playful slap upside the head.
“Stop thinking you’re so special, Alex,” he says. “We’re all just like you whether or not you choose to believe it.”
I look at Rafael gratefully.
“So, you get it then, why I keep letting The Brotherhood do these things to me over and over and over. Are you saying you’d do the same?”
Rafael throws back his head and laughs harder than I may have ever seen him laugh before.
“No, of course not, Alex,” he says, “Because I, unlike you, have some self-respect.”
Self-respect.
I guess it’s a little too late for that.
I watch Neville disappear down at the end of the hall with more than a
little guilt. In a perfect world, Neville would be right. I’d find a way to get The Brotherhood expelled and we’d move on from this.
But this isn’t a perfect world. Far from it.
It doesn’t matter if I’m justified in feeling the way I do. I was prepared to decide my fate, my very future based on the fact that I can’t seem to forgive Jasper, Heath, and Beck for what they’ve done.
For what they continue to do, unwittingly or not.
It was never about them finding other dates to a stupid dance.
It was about so much more than that.
Though … I think as my eyes move to spot Jasper, Heath, and Back emerge like the devils they are at the entrance to the school … if I find out any one of them is taking Olive to the dance …
Well then, let’s see if I give a fuck about my future anymore.
Or anyone else’s for that matter.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The scent of winter still cuts through the overwhelming horse smell in the stables. All around me, there’s the sound of soft whinnies and gentle pawing of the still-yet-to-fully thaw ground.
It may be spring, but from the chill of the mountain winds, you wouldn’t know it yet.
Somehow one of the boys—most likely Jasper—managed to convince Dean Withers to allow us to all take one of his cars instead of the rented shuttle that they commissioned for the weekend events. All traffic to and from the schools has been stopped outside of the event, likely to keep at least some of the hordes of angry or questioning parents away from the dean’s desk for as long as possible.
I was expecting there to be some kind of hidden stable on the grounds that I just never thought to look for, so color me surprised when it takes us well over an hour of winding through mountain passes before we emerge through a final tunnel and into a shockingly green valley.
It’s a small space winding between two of the largest mountains I’ve seen in this range, their peaks rising up into the mist so far above my head that I can’t make out whether their snow caps still remain. Even though I can’t see them, the bite in the wind tells me it’d be safe to bet that they do.
“So do you plan to ride the mountains, or are you actually going to try and greet your mare?”
I blink through the blush rising in my cheeks when I turn back to Beck.
He stands just across from the tack stand, his eyes watching me closely as his hand absentmindedly—and yet somehow carefully—brushes through the short hair on his own horse’s neck.
I don’t have to look between his horse’s legs to know the great beast is a stallion. It, like Beck, has a maniacal gleam in its eye that’s usually reserved for the male sex.
Though in all fairness, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that very look on my face when I’ve just been denied a cupcake … as I was just fifteen minutes ago when I was informed that the spread of delicacies laid out on the table were actually for the horses, not us.
From the brightness of that glint in Beck’s eye as I fumble with my own brush, he has not yet forgotten.
He’s stopped from making any further snarky remarks when Jasper strides into the barn beside the coach, his shoulders pulled back so tight that it looks like he’s just had a second rod inserted up his backside.
Whatever he and the coach were discussing outside, he’s not happy about it.
“What’s this?” he snaps, glancing around at me, Beck, and Heath still standing beside our chosen mounts. I freeze momentarily and almost don’t have time to snatch my hand back in time to avoid getting my fingers snapped by the mare in front of me.
She’s a small creature, not unlike me.
Also not unlike me, she’s far from docile.
“It’s not my fault my fingers look like carrots, it’s fricken cold outside,” I lean in to whisper in her ear, which twitches back as if she’s listening to me. “But I promise you we’ll both be disappointed if you actually end up getting a mouthful.”
Jasper bares his teeth at us and gestures at us as if he’s just caught us having an orgy and not performing basic equestrian care. “We have people for this,” he says, an edge to his voice that can’t be concealed any longer. He turns to me and fixes me with a look. “She needs to learn how to ride, not how to braid a mane.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, patting my mare’s neck a couple times, “with our luck, it’s going to turn out to be a horse hair-braiding competition on Saturday. You never really know.”
“I do know,” he snaps, no humor in his voice. “So, unless the three of you like the idea of Bleakwood closing—and our careers being ruined before they’ve even begun—I recommend you toss those brushes and fucking mount your beasts.”
Before I have the chance to say anything, Jasper is suddenly upon me. He moves with a confidence and fury that leaves me tongue tied, unable to resist even as he wraps each of his surprisingly huge hands around my waist, picks me up off the ground, and sets me neatly on the edge of the saddle.
“Hey—” I start, but it’s too late.
He’s already turned around and is headed towards his own horse, which he mounts in one swift, surprisingly graceful motion.
Compared to him, both Heath and Beck look like boys scrambling to climb atop a fence or something. Though, admittedly, that might have something more to do with the urgent glance they exchange before they do.
The stable master arrives just in time to watch me struggle to swing my leg up over onto the horse’s other side, my hands reaching for the reigns and barely reaching them before Jasper tugs his own horse’s reigns so that it canters up to my side close enough for Jasper to reach over and give my mare a pert slap on the rump.
I let out a screech as the mare leaps forward and out the door into the stable yard with an angry whinny.
Her voices carries out after us, calling for Jasper and the boys to return this instant—a command that no one pays any attention to. Not even when the coach jogs up to her side and starts adding a flurry of high-pitched whistles to her pleas.
It doesn’t really matter if they did, because by the time the boys would have been able to turn their horses around and return to the stable, I would be long since carried out of sight and into the valley by my spooked mare. Spooked, of course, by the very voice calling and swearing for us to make the return in the first place.
As it is, it’s all I can do to hold on for dear life.
Jasper gallops up to my side before pulling his horse back to a smooth stop right beside me. This time he reaches for the reigns that have long since fallen out of my hands and now dangle by the horse’s head and takes them up himself.
“Dean Withers instructed us to teach you how to ride. So that’s what I’m going to do,” he says, glancing back at Heath and Beck. “Now are you two going to be pussies, or are you going to help us with this thing?”
Both boys straighten up in their saddles, their faces taking on a stoic look that makes them look like soldiers preparing for battle. It’s an odd contrast to what they really are—schoolboys trying to teach a girl with two left feet and equally daft hands how to control a living creature eight times her size. Not only that, but to teach her well enough to hold her own against competitors who’ve been riding practically as soon as they learned to walk.
Still, I find myself staring at the sight of them a moment too long. It’s been a long time since I saw them for anything other than the bullies they’ve been at Bleakwood, and I’m momentarily struck by how different they look from the boys I first laid eyes on at the top of the stairs that day I arrived.
The day I was marked as The Brotherhood’s bitch.
They’re more than just a year and a half older. There’s a look in their eyes, a set to their jaws … something … something real. Something tangible.
It takes me a second, but it isn’t until I turn away and focus on the rise of the mountains behind them that I realize what it is.
Faced with the destruction of their school, their reputation, their futures … they ca
re.
For the first time, they care about something.
I just wish that thing they cared about was me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Despite Jasper’s initial fury, he turns out to be a surprisingly gentle riding coach.
Maybe it’s the lack of eyes on us, or maybe it’s getting away from those halls where he’s a member of The Brotherhood just to where he’s just … himself … but I can’t help but notice the stark difference between his attitude down in the valley compared to who he’s made himself out to be up in the mountains.
It’s almost enough to make my resolve waver. Almost enough to make me wonder if I am overreacting to them, to their devotion to the tradition of The Brotherhood.
But that’s almost.
Not entirely.
The sky is coloring pink and orange by the time we return to the stables. I can smell whiffs of gasoline burning and see steam rising from the driveway on the other side.
I’m not the only one who notices, either.
“Looks like they’re waiting for us,” Heath says as he pulls his own stallion to a halt and slowly slips from the saddle to stand beside it in the gravel.
“That’ll just be the driver,” Jasper says. He hops down from his own horse in that commanding, sure way that just briefly makes my thighs tighten. I’m going to miss this version of Jasper, even if I only had him for a day.
Commanding yet gentle. If not gentle, then at least … less abrasive.
“Wait,” I stammer, suddenly, as Beck scrambles off his own horse to try and offer me a hand down from mine. “Just the driver? So, it’ll just be us on the drive back?”
Jasper glances back at me once over his shoulder. He tugs the leather gloves from his hands with a loud snapping sound.
“So? We’ve been alone all day,” he says, and I realize for the first time that that’s true. “Do you have a problem with that?”
I stop and consider this for just a moment.
A little further up, Heath pauses at the edge of the stable to offer whispered apologies to the stable master. I’m sure if I looked closely, I would see money exchange hands because I’ve never seen a face turn from fury to passive acceptance quite so quickly before.