Academy of the Fateful (Cursed Studies Book 3)

by Eva Chase

  Trix

  Elias slid his arm around my back as he guided me toward his math classroom. I shot him a questioning look, and he only gave me a small, secretive smile. Carrying Elias’s suit jacket, Ryo met us as the other guy opened the door. The eager light in Ryo’s eyes suggested he had a better idea where this was going than I did.

  Inside, Elias locked the door—to prevent intrusions from the students gathered in the hall, presumably, since we knew the ghosts would walk right through walls. He took the few remaining handfuls of crumbled bramble from the jacket and dropped the shards along the front of the room and the wall that bordered the neighboring one. A sharp, slightly burnt scent wafted off them and quickly faded.

  Elias tossed the last few bits and wiped his hands together. “I don’t think we can count on keeping the spirits out completely, but between that and the others with shields outside, it should buy us some time.”

  I glanced around the room. “Time for what?” When my gaze settled on the teacher’s desk at the front of the room, a trickle of heat ran through me to pool between my legs. Just this afternoon, even if it felt like days ago now, I’d pulled Elias to me there and indulged in a very satisfying quickie.

  As if he’d read my mind, the math teacher touched me again, letting his fingers trail down my spine from shoulders to ass. A fresh tingle sprang up in their wake.

  “All the chaos has shaken you up,” he said. “Made you doubt yourself. But we believe in you. I thought you could use a very vivid demonstration of that.” His gaze slid to Ryo, who’d come up beside me, and then back to my face. “I’m not going to lie. My first instinct is to try to make you mine and only mine. But if you can handle more than that, why shouldn’t you have all the attention you can get? You’re worth it.”

  He met my eyes intently as he spoke, his own turned an even darker shade of brown than usual. I had the sense this offering wasn’t just about me. He was making a point to himself too—that he could share? That he could have what he wanted without needing to push anyone else out of the way? That vision of the past had shaken him too.

  Ryo dipped his head to press a soft kiss to my shoulder from behind. “I can approve of that initiative—if you want this, Trix. Maybe it’ll help you face whatever else is going to come at us tonight.”

  The heat I’d felt before was expanding all through my body now. In this moment, between two of the guys who’d been here for me and accepted me beyond anything I’d dared to hope for, all the worries and awfulness of the last few hours retreated. Those factors might not be gone completely, but damn did it feel good to let go of them even in part. To simply think about letting some other sensation take me over for a little while.

  Was it selfish of me to even consider this indulgence when Roseborne was going to hell, perhaps literally, all around us? Probably. But nothing I’d done since chopping down that rosebush had gotten us closer to escaping, and being with these guys, opening myself up to their affections and giving them my trust, had strengthened the power I held inside me before. What seemed selfish might end up helping everyone.

  At the very least, it looked like Elias and Ryo could use this temporary escape as much as I could.

  I reached up, curling my fingers into the smooth fabric of Elias’s dress shirt where the collar opened to reveal a hint of his well-muscled chest. That was all the answer he needed. He bowed his head and captured my mouth.

  This time wasn’t like before, when we’d practically crashed together in a rush of desire. He kissed me deeply, passionately, but not urgently, as if he wanted to savor the experience as long as he could. At the same time, Ryo teased his hands up and down my sides over my shirt. He kissed my shoulder again, then the back of my neck.

  The last time I’d gotten it on with two of the guys at once, Ryo had stayed in a supporting role, coaxing so much pleasure from my body while taking little for himself. He’d revealed to me that the punishment the school had dealt him prevented him from receiving much enjoyment from anything, but he’d made it clear that his positive emotions weren’t completely dead. I wanted him to get as much as he could out of this encounter too.

  When Elias released my mouth, I turned my head and tucked one arm behind me to run my fingers into Ryo’s silky hair. He eased to the side so he could catch my lips. His kiss was even sweeter and more tender than Elias’s, giving without asking anything in return.

  We could all realize that completely chucking off our clothes in our present circumstances wasn’t the wisest idea. Elias simply eased my shirt up to reveal my bra. As I kissed Ryo, the other guy stroked his thumbs over the peaks of my breasts, gently and then with firmer pressure, until my nipples strained against the thin fabric. Pulses of pleasure ran through my chest with each caress. My hips started to sway between the two guys, a deeper need kindling between my thighs.

  Ryo kissed me with even more enthusiasm, his tongue delving between my lips to twine with mine. His deft fingers glided over my bared stomach and back, conjuring fresh heat in their wake. Elias reached between us briefly to unhook my bra, and Ryo’s hands dipped even lower to run over my hips. I pressed back into him automatically, with an electric jolt of anticipation at the unmistakable hardness of his erection against my hip.

  Elias dropped his head to kiss my naked breasts. As he charted a careful but determined path toward their peaks, the flick of his tongue sent sharper quivers of bliss over my skin. At the same time, Ryo eased up my skirt. He cupped my sex through my leggings with an unexpected firmness. I gasped, grinding into him, and his breath came out in a stutter. Yeah, he could definitely feel something, even if it wasn’t everything I’d have wanted to give him.

  He rippled his fingers against me, massaging my clit with building waves of pleasure, and Elias sucked my nipple into his mouth. The combined sensations washed through me. My knees wobbled; my fingers clutched at Ryo’s hair, at Elias’s collar. I found just enough wherewithal to slide my hand down Ryo’s body to fumble with the zipper of his cargo pants.

  A soft groan escaped him when I brushed his cock through the layers of fabric. He released my sex for just long enough to hook his thumbs into the waist of my leggings and yank them halfway down my thighs, dragging my panties with them. At my wriggle and his tug, they dropped farther, past my knees. I eased my hand inside his boxers and stroked his rigid cock, skin to skin.

  Oh, God, yes, I wanted that inside me. If we never made it out of this place after all, at least we’d go with happy memories.

  Elias had turned his attentions to my other breast, swiveling his tongue across that nipple while his fingers kept teasing the other. He tested his teeth against the sensitive skin, and I couldn’t hold back a whimper. As I shifted my legs farther apart, he trailed his hand down. Just as Ryo aligned himself with my slit from behind, Elias pressed down on my clit. I moaned and bucked backward, and Ryo plunged into me as if he’d been built to meld with me.

  I grasped Elias harder to steady myself as I rocked with the other guy’s thrusts. Elias glanced up from where he’d crouched before me. Whatever he was searching for in my face, he must have found it. He sank lower, all the way to his knees, and then bowed his head even more. With my next sway toward him, his mouth replaced his massaging fingers over my clit.

  The shock of pleasure of his lips suckling me on the outside and Ryo’s cock filling me from the inside sent me soaring. A demanding growl I hadn’t known I’d had in me reverberated up my throat. I wanted, and wanted, so fucking much, and somehow the colliding waves of bliss were too much to bear and not enough all at once.

  Ryo drove into me at an even better angle, and I shattered between them, clenching and gasping. Elias smiled against my sex. He kissed my hip and my belly, easing his way up, until I regained my wherewithal enough to push him back toward the ground. I intended to pay some of that pleasure back.

  We all sank down to the floor together, Elias sitting, me and Ryo on our knees. Even with the aftershock of my orgasm still quivering through me, the caress of R
yo’s hand over my thigh and then slipping around to finger my clit set off new sparks of longing. He plunged into me again, and I rocked into his thrusts. They sped up, flooding me with a delicious burn.

  I kept just enough awareness of my intent to grasp the fly of Elias’s slacks. His cock pressed stiffly against it. He let out a strangled groan as I freed him, his arms braced to keep him upright as his head lolled back. I dipped down to take him into my mouth.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, so raw and unlike his normal straight-laced self that I practically came again just hearing it. His musky flavor filled my mouth. I let Ryo’s rhythm guide the bobbing of my mouth, my tongue slicking around Elias’s cock, all of us moving together in a mass of rising bliss.

  Elias reached to tangle his fingers in my hair, not controlling my movements, only following them. The friction against my scalp made me hum as I sucked him deeper. He swore again, his hips bucking up.

  “Trix, I can’t— I’m going to—”

  Good. The haze of ecstasy was seeping through me too. My awareness seemed to spiral up into the air on that rush, my lips closed more tightly around Elias, and he came with a salty flood in my mouth.

  His groan set off a chain reaction. I clenched around Ryo with my second release, a shudder running through me, and he groaned in turn. His thrusts turned erratic. Then he tensed above me and sagged as he found his own peak.

  In the afterglow, we managed to gather ourselves enough to sit up, leaning against the back of the desk with me nestled between two of my lovers. For the first time in all the make-outs and hook-ups since I’d arrived at the school, the ones I remembered clearly and the ones I’d only retained glimpses of, not even the smallest pang of guilt hit me.

  I was happy. They were happy. We’d made a moment that was kind of beautiful together, even if plenty of people would have thought there was something weird or deviant about it. I didn’t give a shit about them. All that mattered was the warmth of these two bodies next to mine—two guys I cared about and who cared about me more than I’d believed was possible just a day ago.

  No surge of power had formed in my chest. I guessed our intimacy hadn’t provoked much in the way of the sort of energy I needed to tackle the school’s former staff and its other terrors. But I did at least feel grounded, calmer, ready to take on everything else we were facing.

  Which was a good thing, because as we pulled ourselves to our feet, tugging our clothes back into their proper places, the bits of bramble Elias had laid down along the front wall twitched. A gap opened up between two of the larger pieces, and then the ghostly figure of a slim, middle-aged woman seeped through the wall, making use of that gap.

  Beside me, Ryo stiffened. He took a step back and then held there as if he wasn’t sure whether to run or brace himself to meet his fate. His breath spilled ragged from his mouth before he managed to speak.

  “It’s my mom.”

  Chapter Nine

  Trix

  Seeing the anguish on Ryo’s face, I couldn’t think of anything except finding a way to free him from it. As the translucent apparition of his mother approached him, I dashed to the front of the room and grabbed as many of the broken brambles as I could scoop up in one motion.

  “Maybe we can get it to back off—get you out into the crowd where we have more defenses—”

  Ryo was shaking his head. His jaw had clenched, the tendons in his neck flexing. “It’s okay. You’ve all had to make your amends, right? I’m the last person who should be exempt.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to argue or to try to intervene. Instead of waiting for the ghost to cross the last short distant between them, he stepped forward, toward it. The filmy woman raised her arms and caught him in the eerie embrace I’d witnessed too many times already.

  Ryo’s head slumped, his eyelids falling shut. He swayed backward to lean against the desk behind him. Then he was deathly still, locked in the apparition’s hold.

  A lump rose in my throat. My fingers tightened around the brambles, barely registering the prickle of pain their sharp edges provoked.

  Elias touched my arm. “I think he’ll be okay. Out of everyone at Roseborne, I’ve always gotten the impression he recognizes his past mistakes pretty clearly.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking of the ways Ryo had talked to me before, his acknowledgment that he’d screwed up, hurt people, that he couldn’t see himself as better than me no matter what I’d done. So much shame had roughened his voice when he’d owned up to his drug addiction and the awful places it had led him.

  But I knew how badly I’d fucked up too, I’d never have tried to justify it, and I still wasn’t sure I could handle a confrontation with Sylvie. Jenson and Elias had both struggled in the visions I’d found them in, and I wasn’t sure those figures had meant as much to them as Ryo’s mother had to him. He’d been thrown right into the deep end of this sadistic test. It was harder to say the right words, to snap out of old habits, when you were right smack in the middle of your horrible history in full vividness.

  “If you think he might need the help, you can go after him,” Elias pointed out. “I’ll watch out for both of you.”

  I glanced up at him, taking in both the professional authority of the young man I’d first gotten to know as my teacher and the passionate vulnerability I could now identify underneath. My mind slipped back to the affection that had shone so clearly in his eyes when he’d made his proposition not long ago and when he’d talked about everything he believed I deserved.

  “Another of those things could come for you.”

  He shrugged. “Then I’ll do my best to make my own way out, and if I can’t, I’ll hang in there until you can come save me too.”

  His voice turned wry with those last words. I thought about my hesitation to follow him into his own vision of the past. The uncertainties that had gripped me then felt much more distant after the way the three of us had just collided in unity and desire, but I had to ask anyway, “It didn’t bother you that I intruded on that moment with your friend?”

  Elias’s mouth twisted, but in a way that looked more pained than annoyed. “I’d like to be able to take care of my own problems. But I’m not sorry you saw some of that argument. I spent… too much of my life letting myself decide I knew better than everyone around me, that my opinions and desires trumped everyone else’s. If you’re with me, I want to know it’s because you decided to be here knowing the full picture, not because I’ve hidden parts of myself that would have changed your mind.”

  Hearing him express that sentiment made me choke up even more. This was why Roseborne was so sick, why the staff were so wrong. Elias had changed enormously from the guy he must have been in the scene I’d stumbled into. He could be generous and loving, and he wanted to be.

  Maybe the college’s tortures had helped him get to that place, but they didn’t leave him any room to be that changed person in a meaningful way. There was so much he—and Jenson, and Ryo—could have done to actually make up for the harm they’d caused if they could have gone back into their regular lives with their new perspective. Why was it better to just keep torturing them until they were drained of any life at all?

  That didn’t help anyone, other than maybe giving the spirits who ran this place a malicious satisfaction.

  “And that’s why I do want to be with you,” I said to Elias.

  The light that lit in his eyes was even fonder than before. His hand rose to my cheek. He turned me toward him just enough to lean in to kiss me, softly but intently enough that the gesture sent a quiver of pleasure through me.

  After, he tipped his head toward Ryo. “You want to be with him too. We’re all in this together. I’ll be right here waiting.”

  I stepped toward Ryo’s hunched form, a momentary hesitation coming over me. But I didn’t even have to ask whether I should go ahead, did I? Ryo had told me to my face that he’d want me lending a hand if he ended up in this situation and I could join him. He might be wondering what was taking me
so long—or worrying about what might have delayed me instead of focusing on his own challenge.

  Drawing in a deep breath, I touched the ghost that gripped him. My hands slid into its cool aura like the ones before, and I gave myself over to the falling sensation that would transport me into his vision.

  The room I landed in hit me with an unexpected brightness. Warm sunlight gleamed through broad windows in a living room that was all pale wood and tasteful linen fabrics. A thrum I thought might have been a dishwasher running carried through the wall.

  Ryo stood at one end of the room, a few steps from where I’d arrived. He was facing not just his mother but a similarly aged man who must have been his father and a teenage boy who looked like a younger version of Ryo—his brother, presumably. They formed a cluster by the arched doorway to the dining room, his mother’s hands braced on his brother’s shoulders as if she thought she might need to defend him.

  “Your grandmother,” she was saying in a tone of horrified disbelief. “It’s bad enough when you take things from here. This can’t go on any longer, Ryo. Please, you have to let us help you.”

  How had the Ryo of the past responded to that plea? Denials, anger, pretended remorse that was really just biding time? From my birth parents to a couple of the people I’d hung out with in high school, I’d gotten plenty of experience with the addict playbook.

  Now he simply gazed back at them with a slumped posture like the one he’d fallen into back in the math classroom, regret tightening his features, shame radiating from every angle of his body. His obvious remorse brought an ache into my chest. I wanted to reach for him, but I had to give him a chance to say whatever he felt he needed to. I couldn’t pass these tests for anyone else, only offer what support I could when needed.

  “I wish I had,” he said to his family. “I can’t tell you how much I do. You have no idea how much I’d give to be able to really see you again and apologize properly. Every day, I remember the crap I put you through and think of all the things I should have done differently.”