Wicked Games

by Wood, Vivian

  “We’re not going to the Peach Pit,” I answer smoothly, stepping closer to Emily and putting my fingertips on the small of her back.

  Max’s eyes narrow and he nods, the movement so small it would be easy to miss it. But I don’t miss it. “You two have fun.”

  My heart pounds like I’ve thrown down a gauntlet, which in a way, I know I have. He doesn’t have to come right out and say that he’s interested in Emily. And I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how far I can take things with her, or how far I should take things with her. All I know is that I want her next to me, and not next to him.

  “I’ll see you in class tomorrow,” Emily tells him. “Are you done with your essay?”

  Max raises the notebook. “That’s what I was here for.”

  “I’m still working on mine.” She glances up at me again. “Go over it tomorrow in class?”

  “Sure.” One last nod to us both, and Max sweeps by, going out the front doors of the building.

  Emily lets out a little sigh. “He’s one of the nice ones.” She looks up at me. “Don’t you think?”

  I’ve been keeping it casual. I’ve been keeping it fucking cool. I’m determined to make this low-key, yet worthy of the woman standing next to me. But right now, my blood is singing. Does Max know? The night Asher was murdered, it was Carter and Ellis who dragged him back inside. I didn’t see anyone when I went up the back way to my room, but does Max know? The thought threatens to overtake everything else.

  “Wolf?”

  “Yes,” I say, too quickly, too loud. “But you’re here with me tonight.”

  She grins at that, her eyelashes fluttering downward. “Yes, I am.”

  “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “This is nice.” Emily’s face glows in the candlelight, which is frankly a touch I appreciate in a dining club. We’re nestled at a table for two next to the front windows, and below us, campus sprawls out. The lights dotting the darkness below remind me of torches. They remind me of that night.

  I want to keep her far away from that night.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “But Wolf...” Emily shakes her head, looking down into her plate of chicken piccata. I ordered the same thing. It’s good here. “Why?”

  “Why is it nice?” I laugh. “They charge for membership here. It needs to be nice.” I don’t tell her that this is only nice by Campbell standards. It’s not a Michelin-starred place. My parents’ vacation homes have more expensive dinnerware. But all of that is bullshit, in the end. You can be rich and popular and a bit of a dick and still end up a dead body getting dragged into Rose House by two of your friends.

  “Why me?” Emily faces me across the table, chin up, like the chicken piccata has given her a new sense of bravery. “I’m—” She waves her fork in the air. “I’m nobody, compared to you.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  She makes a low sound in the back of her throat. “You have a point.”

  “I’m kidding.”

  “I don’t have...” Her eyes travel around the little restaurant, and I see it then the way she must be seeing it—the candlelight, the white tablecloths, even the sound. The rest of Campbell College is obsessed with hardwood floors, but the dining club is carpeted. It sucks the sound of the conversations at the nearest tables down to the floor instead of shooting it up to the ceiling to echo back down on us. “I don’t have all the things that would make me belong here. I know you can see it,” she says quietly. “It’s not something that’s easy to hide.”

  “I don’t want you to hide anything,” I tell her, my gut twisting. I’m the one who’s hiding in plain fucking sight.

  “There are things I wish I could hide. It would make things simpler.”

  “How’s this for simple?” I lean in and watch her breath catch. “I want to be around you. I asked you here. And when you’re with me, you fit in.”

  “But what about when—”

  I hold up a hand and Emily stops talking, brushing her fingertips over her lips. I want my own fingertips on those lips. “Leave it behind, Emily. Whatever it is that’s making you think you’re not good enough to be here. You are, and you’re here.” And I want you. I want that fierceness that I see behind your eyes, and the way you’re so fresh and new, like springtime air.

  Thinking of springtime air wrenches me out of my seat at the table and forces my feet back to the ground by the oak tree. It had been a struggle, to move Ash’s body. It must have been so much heavier than it looked. My palms itch and I rub them on my pants under the table, willing the dirt away. There had been dirt, because there’s a part of the night I never go back to. I avoid it at all costs.

  “Wolf?”

  Emily’s voice snaps me back to the present.

  “I only meant that you don’t have to bring me here if you’re trying to be nice. I know Cass was, when she invited me over to Thistle. You don’t have to do that.”

  I let the smile on my face spread slowly, until the act of it has taken all my thoughts about Ash and drowned them. “I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. And right now, I want something from you.”

  “For me to shut up about Campbell, and everything else?”

  “For you to say more.” It’s selfish, what I’m asking from her, because it’s more for me than anything else. I have an insatiable need to know more about Emily Danes, and I can’t let it go. It has me by the throat. “Tell me everything.”

  19

  Wolf

  Wrong. It’s fucking wrong.

  The chanting in my head gets louder, and the cloak over my shoulders wraps itself around my neck. Its grip tightens. The sconces on the walls flicker at the edge of my vision.

  They’re all here. All the Skulls and Thorns. They’re here, and none of them make a single move to help me. I’m strangling in my own cloak, dying in front of them, and their masked faces are as impassive as they ever were. As they were ever meant to be.

  Et Charonis unum, they say, and this time it’s not a greeting. It’s not a sign of brotherhood. It’s a goodbye, an awful, wrenching thing—

  My muscles resist and I lurch to the side.

  Bed. I’m in bed.

  Somehow, the sheet has twisted itself up around my neck. I claw it away, wrestling my body out of bed and toward the window. It resists with a creak as I shove the frame upward with my palms, three quick hits, and then stick my head out, followed by my shoulders.

  Fresh air.

  It’s sweet and cold, filling my lungs, and I gulp it in.

  The ceremonies that night had nothing to do with Ash’s death.

  I know that. I know it because I’m the fucking leader of the Skulls and Thorns, and yes, yes, there are some things we do that would make outsiders cover their eyes. None of those things have to do with murder.

  My dreams keep circling back to that ceremony, but it had nothing to do with it, nothing.

  The memorial bench stares up at me from the back garden below and the hair on the back of my neck rises.

  I’ve been lying to myself.

  I’ve been lying to myself for a very long time.

  Our ceremony had nothing to do with Asher’s death. That’s the truth.

  But someone else’s ceremony did. Nothing else would explain the marks.

  They were written on his face, scrawled across it like it was nothing but a sheet of paper.

  I pull myself back in through the window and slam it shut. The clock on the bedside table reads three a.m..

  I sink down into the chair beside my desk, standard issue for all of the bedrooms at Rose House, and rub my hands over my face.

  I took Emily Danes on a fucking date tonight. I sat there and listened while she told me about her life, so careful to leave out the parts where she struggled for money. The hints she’d given at the beginning were as far as she was willing to go, and honestly, I don’t give a shit about that. I told her stories about my parents’ beach house on the coast, the one with a two-
story boathouse. I made her laugh. I kept her eyes glued to mine for all of dinner, and I kept her close while I walked her back to her dorm.

  What the fuck was I thinking?

  Of all of us, Max is the only one who should go anywhere near her. Carter and Ellis—no. And me?

  No.

  For the millionth time since last spring, I go over the evening in my mind. At least, I try to go over it. But the details are hazy, like I’m sprinting past a TV with a flickering screen. Now’s not the time, and I don’t need to rehash it again to know that taking Emily anywhere was a bad fucking idea.

  There’s a knock at my door.

  The sound sends a bolt of fear straight down my spine and my feet jerk out, shoving the chair back against the deck. I have to get a fucking grip on myself.

  “Wolf. Man. What’s going on in there?”

  Carter.

  He’s been busy lately, spending time at the gym when he’s not busy making his usual party rounds, plus more. I haven’t seen much of him at Rose House. I don’t know what’s more suspicious—camping out here or avoiding it. I don’t know what to think anymore.

  I stand up, cross the room, and open the door. Carter stands in a pair of boxers and a t-shirt, hair pressed up on one side. My shadow blocks the moonlight from half of his face. He’s not holding a beer, surprisingly.

  “I heard the window,” he says, the corner of his mouth lifting in a half-smile. “Didn’t know if you were trying to escape.”

  How can this person, this person who dragged a dead body into Rose House, be checking up on me because of a bump in the night?

  “I’m fine.” I run a hand over my own hair, like his is a mirror. “Nothing’s going on. I needed some fresh air.”

  “I get that.” He nods sagely. “You sure nothing’s wrong?”

  If this is some fucked-up game of chess, I have no idea which one of us is winning. It would be strange of me to start being cagey with him. Then again, he’s been cagey with me since last spring. I should keep My mouth shut, but it’s the middle of the night and my head feels like it’s floating somewhere in the stratosphere. “I’m having second thoughts.”

  Carter frowns. “About the pledges? That’s not like you, man. I think we picked an okay group, given what—”

  “Not about the pledges.” If Carter goes through with that sentence, if he says that we picked an all-right group in spite of Asher’s death, then I’ll walk out of here right now knowing that all of this has been a failure. I’m the one in charge of Rose House. If I can’t keep it together, the rest of my life is going to be seriously fucked. This will be the thing people point to years down the road to prove that I can handle things, and because my last name is Astor, they won’t be small things like the local car dealership. It’ll be bit things, like a spinoff of one of my father’s media companies. Fortune 500. Fortune 100. So nightmares or not, mild obsession or not, I will not let the Thorns fall apart.

  I will never let the Thorns fall apart.

  “The pledges are a good group.” I’ve waited too long to finish the sentence, and Carter is squinting at me, bleary-eyed and looking more confused by the second. “A woman.”

  His eyebrows lift in surprise and then a grin splits his face. “Why didn’t you say so, buddy? That shit’s easy. Buy her something nice and send her on her way.”

  It’s fucking weird, standing here talking to him about this like I didn’t see what I saw. “Who said I want to send her anywhere?”

  “Listen.” Carter leans in, even though it’s three in the morning and there’s no sign of anyone else stirring around us. “If it’s that Emily Danes girl, you know you can’t keep it up forever. It would be nicer if you ended it.”

  “Oh?”

  “She’s cute, but...” Carter purses his lips. “She’s not one of us, man. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if you went to some public university, but—” He laughs at his own joke. “You already know that. It’s senior year. You can slum it for a while, but if you’re going to take over your dad’s business, we all know how important that is. We know—”

  “I get it.”

  “She’s cute,” Carter insists, as if the thing that’s come between us is the fact that Emily Danes wasn’t born into our fucking social class. “But—”

  “What are you doing out here?” I put a smirk on my face to cover the fact that I want to lay Carter out right now. “You don’t look like you’re coming home from a party.”

  He stretches his arms above his head, looking uncomfortable for the first time in this conversation. “I had to get my beauty rest. Can’t party every night, otherwise I won’t be in my prime when the girls are calling my name.”

  “That’s not like you.” I echo his earlier words to get us the hell out of talking about Emily. “I hope you’re not losing your touch.”

  “I’d never lose my fucking touch, asshole.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “You go to bed. Stop opening windows like a freak. You’ll wake up the whole house.”

  “If I did wake up the whole house, you’d throw a party.”

  “Damn right,” says Carter, a little louder. In the middle-of-the-night silence it sounds like a full shout. He reaches forward and slaps my arm. “Get it together, Wolf.” Then he disappears back down the hallway, and I shut the door.

  Get it together.

  I turn over Carter’s words in my head. This is not the kind of man-to-man conversation we’d have in broad daylight, and even at night, he’s usually on the edge of being wasted. We all know how important that is. My dad’s business. What does he know about my dad’s business?

  I pull the sheets off the bed and remake it so they can’t strangle me to death. What Carter does know about my dad’s business is probably more than I would expect. He went to Waltham like the rest of us. Everyone’s parents are in bed with each other, sometimes literally. That’s how the world goes around—with handshake deals in the back rooms of exclusive clubs. Guys who have known each other forever.

  That’s supposed to be me and Carter, once we graduate and take our places in the real world. I’m supposed to shake his hand and trade assets with him.

  My stomach turns over.

  It’s not the first time this has happened.

  I’ve been so fucking naive.

  What happens between Thorns stays between Thorns. My dad is so proud of saying that shit, red-faced from too many drinks and stuck reminiscing about his college years. I could get out my phone right now, couldn’t I, and look up some kind of scandal from back then. I could look for signs of a coverup, and there would have been one. It can’t have been murder. How many murders can one organization be adjacent to before it gets shut down?

  They didn’t call it a murder, though. They called Ash’s death an accident. A terrible accident. And nobody knows but the Thorns. Three of them, as far as I know, and maybe more.

  I climb back into bed and pull up the sheet, then the blanket.

  Secrets and lies, secrets and lies. The words turn around in my head like the planet’s most fucked-up carousel. Who’s keeping a secret, and who’s lying? Who’s doing both?

  You, whispers the voice in the back of my mind. You are.

  I am.

  I think of Emily, that rust-colored dress like the color of fall leaves in the candlelight. I’m keeping a secret from her, though there can’t be any benefit in telling her. What’s a girl like her supposed to do with information like that?

  I need another lie.

  I roll over in the bed and flop one arm out of the blankets, a one-man show of being at ease.

  It calls for a few more lies. White lies. Lies meant to keep her safe.

  Cassandra mentioned something about getting me into Thistle House.

  Next door, our sister house sleeps in the dark. Across campus, Emily is sleeping in Rebekah Scott, which might as well be a world away. But if Cassandra has her way—and most people from Waltham are skilled in getting their way—then Emily will become a Thistle. Sh
e’ll move in next door.

  I’ll have to tread very, very carefully. The flirting I’ve already done has been a risk. The date has been a bigger risk. Because I need her nearby, but I need her at arm’s length.

  I can’t have her falling for me until all this is resolved.

  Outside the wind picks up, moving through the branches of the oak trees outside.

  Tread carefully.

  My cloak settles around my shoulders and I shake myself out of the beginning of the dream.

  Very, very carefully.

  20

  Emily

  Five thousand dollars.

  I blink. Five thousand dollars per semester. That means ten thousand dollars for the year. And that is how much I would pay to live in Thistle House as a scholarship student. I shudder to think how much someone like Cass or Alice pays.

  To be fair, I don’t think that they are actually aware of the cost. It seems like they just allow their parents to write Campbell College a check. Certainly if Cassandra even had any idea of the sheer amount of dollars it cost to be a member, I am sure she wouldn’t have suggested it to me.

  If she even thinks about money, that is. In all likelihood, she doesn’t even know that her parents paid so much.

  Crumpling the paper application and its outrageous fees, I try not to moan aloud. In the library where I just printed off the application, I dump the used paper in the recycling, angry.

  At my parents, for being the worthless deadbeats they are, yes. But also at Lily for being mean and Cassandra for being clueless. It’s not really any fault of theirs, but that doesn’t stop my eyes from misting over.

  This is my first time since coming to Campbell that I can’t do something because I’m too poor. It was to be expected; I have been walking on eggshells, trying to only get excited about things that are within my limited budget. And yeah, I’ve looked at how my friends tell stories about their trips to Aspen, the cars their parents bought them, or the designer handbags they somehow forgot somewhere with something akin to jealousy.