by Sofia Daniel
I leaned forward, twisting my brows in a faux-confused expression. “Why would I do that? Geraldine’s intentions are good, aren’t they?”
Her eyes narrowed, and she flared her nostrils. I glanced at Leopold, who rolled his eyes. The entire situation smacked of someone missing her best friend and was bored with the current clutch of sycophants who wanted to create a further rift between Cormac and me.
I folded my arms across my chest. If she wanted to report back to the boy she was playing, she’d have to do it without my input.
Since Geraldine had nothing further to say, I picked up a small jug and poured honey on my porridge.
“I have a message for you,” she drawled.
My head snapped up. “Is Bianca awake yet?”
“From Mr. Byrd.”
“Not interested.” I picked up my spoon and stirred my breakfast.
“You should be,” she snarled. “Because of the pack of lies you told the police, her ten-year-old sister has been taken into protective services, and her mother has moved out.”
The spoon slipped from my fingers, and I raised my head. My lips parted, and shallow breaths moved in and out of my lungs. Had someone questioned Bianca’s little sister? Social services wouldn’t break up a family on the word of a stranger who lived three hundred miles away.
“Good for them,” said Leopold.
She curled her lip and turned back to me. “Mr. Byrd says—”
“Not interested,” I snapped. “And I don’t understand why you’re helping him.”
“Bianca’s my best friend. If anything bad was happening in her home, I’d be the first to know.”
“If your source of information is Mr. Byrd, then it’s going be biased. You should focus on your friend in hospital instead of blaming me for what’s going on in the Byrd household.”
“T-they’re saying she might never walk again.” Geraldine’s voice trembled.
The blond clone shook her head. “Why did you push her?”
“Bugger off, you three,” said Sebastian. “Willow has an alibi.”
Cormac strode through the double doors and stood at Geraldine’s side. He placed an arm around her quaking shoulders. “Is everything alright, darling?”
“I’m too upset about Bianca to talk.” She shook him off and stormed out of the room with her two sycophants hurrying after her.
Cormac’s face fell, and his lips tightened with frustration. It made me wonder if Geraldine had tired of the game, now that Bianca wasn’t around for the inevitable pigging.
I shook my head and picked up a bowl of blueberries. It was great news that the police had followed up on my statement, and it had led to an investigation that had taken Bianca’s sister away from Mr. Byrd. But it was disturbing that the man was now in contact with Geraldine. Perhaps it started with a promise to update her on Bianca’s health, but it looked like he was telling her inappropriate things to garner sympathy.
“Willow.” Cormac rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ve made some progress with the diary. Shall we meet to discuss it?”
“I’m free this afternoon,” I said.
Later, I sat next to Cormac on a sofa in the scholars’ common room with Corrine’s diary on my knees. Cormac placed my computer on his lap and plugged in his memory stick. He didn’t have his own laptop, as the academy’s computer lab leased the most up-to-date machines and was open all night. We’d finished dinner early to work on deciphering the rest of the code, and other scholars streamed into the room to play board games or make cups of tea.
“What’s the latest with Bianca?” I asked.
“She’s awake but can’t feel her legs.” Cormac tapped the keyboard and frowned.
My chest tightened, and I dropped my gaze to the leather diary. “Does she remember who pushed her?”
“According to Geraldine, Bianca says it was a dark figure wearing the same cologne as her father.”
“Right.” I chewed my lip, wondering why Bianca still wanted to protect that monster after everything he had done.
“The police are giving her time to piece her memories together.”
I nodded. “Much like the police did the night I ended up in that accident on the mountainside.”
Cormac leaned forward, his eyes bright. “Do you remember anything?”
“About the accident?” When he nodded, I said, “Every so often, I have a flashback about being chased through the mountains by a maniac in a dress.”
Recognition flashed across Cormac’s face, then it twisted, and he lowered his gaze onto my laptop’s screen.
“What?” I asked.
“Long black hair, and a pale complexion?”
My breath caught. “How did you know?”
“Have you seen the Japanese horror movie, Ringu?”
“Is it anything like The Ring, starring Naomi Watts?”
“Ringu is the original.”
I shuddered at the recollection of a long-haired girl crawling out of a TV set. “I had nightmares about it for months. It wouldn’t surprise me that I’ve incorporated her in my fractured memories.”
Cormac explained how he had adjusted my program to search the dictionaries of every foreign language Corrine had ever studied. He had also created a database of the most common words in the English language translated into Corrine’s numerical code. Every so often, Cormac would stop at a string of numbers that translated into either an English word or one that meant something in another language. Once we read through the sentence, it wasn’t too difficult to piece things together.
I shook my head and marveled at how Ashley had been able to translate large chunks of text without the use of a computer. The girl had wasted her natural talents by trying too hard to fit into a crowd that despised her.
After reading several passages of the diary, Cormac rubbed his temples. “I knew Corrine was unhappy, but I had no idea that the girls were that vicious. She didn’t tell me about half these encounters.”
“Does it change how you feel about Geraldine?” I asked.
He paused, eyes lowering to the screen. “I’m not surprised by the revelations. Geraldine told me she had bullied Corrine, and I’ve seen how nasty the girls can be through your experiences.”
I had my own opinions about his relationship with one of the girls responsible for Corrine’s breakdown, but I remained silent and waited for Cormac to elaborate. He kept his head bowed and continued typing into my laptop.
My shoulders slumped, and I exhaled a frustrated breath. Had the girl overridden his good sense with her pretty face and figure? I shook my head and waited for him to translate the next part of the diary.
“Geraldine’s becoming distant,” Cormac murmured.
I stilled my expression. Without Bianca and the knights to applaud her grand pigging of Cormac, she probably no longer wanted to continue the game. “Oh?”
“At first, I thought it was because she lost her friend, but she seems more interested in exaggerating her sadness to garner sympathy.”
My hands closed around the diary. “Why do you like her?”
“Because I’m a stupid guy who thinks with his dick.”
“Cormac!”
“She’s so pretty and knows how to get a guy excited. It’s addicting.” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re only sipping cups of tea with the kings. I’ve seen how Brunswick salivates over your boobs.”
A flush crept over my cheeks. I would have said it was different, but on the outside, our situations were exactly the same. He thought the kings were playing me but stopped talking about it to maintain our friendship, and I thought the same about Geraldine.
A tiny voice whispered that the knights had played Ashley from the start. It reminded me to look at what happened to her, but I shook it off. Even if Geraldine might be playing Cormac, it didn’t mean the kings were playing me. Too much had happened between the boys and me for their affections to be fake.
I leaned across the armchair, reached over, and squeezed Cormac’s ha
nd. “Please, be careful with Geraldine.”
He squeezed back. “And the same to you about Kashaayah, Brunswick, and Garraway.”
Annoyance flickered across my skin. Geraldine went out of her way to cause me grief, while the kings mostly ignored Cormac. I was about to remind him that our situations were different when a voice interrupted us.
“Miss Evergreen?” Mr. Blunt stood over us with his cap in his hands. “Mrs. Benazir says you have an important phone call.”
The last time I entered the headmistress’s office on my own, someone had bludgeoned the back of my head and dumped me in the same cave the police had found Corrine’s dead body. I wasn’t about to visit the woman without a trusted escort. Cormac walked me down to Mrs. Benazir’s office and waited for me outside.
As soon as I stepped into the lavender-scented room, the headmistress’s lips thinned. “Thank you for coming down,” she said with a rebuke in her tone. “In the future, please give your callers your direct number. My office is not a telephone exchange.”
My brows drew together. Who could possibly be calling me via Mrs. Benazir? And why would they wait so long on the line for me to walk down from the east tower?
The headmistress beckoned me over and gestured at the phone.
I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Miss Evergreen,” said a smooth, cultured voice. “I trust that Geraldine spoke with you today.”
My stomach dropped, and my heart tried to gallop out of my chest. Mr. Byrd! “What do you want?”
“Is that any way to speak to a school governor?”
Now he sounded like his partner in perversion, Miss Claymore. I slowed my breathing in an attempt to calm myself and waited for him to speak.
“Retract your statement,” he said. “More people are being hurt than you realize.”
My stomach hardened with indignation. If social services took away his daughter and his wife had walked out on him in disgust, this was his doing, not mine. Not to mention what he did to Bianca. Nausea swirled in the back of my throat as I considered how far he would be prepared to go to silence me.
Miss Claymore only wanted me dead because I stood in the way of her and a boy who she knew never loved her. Mr. Byrd stood to lose his family, his firm, and his freedom. Right now, he was probably the most pressing threat, considering how much was at stake.
An impatient huff sounded from the direction of Mrs. Benazir, which got me clenching my jaw with annoyance. “You want me to lie to the police about what I saw? Don’t crimes like that carry heavy sentences?”
His angry breaths reverberated through the receiver, making a thousand imaginary centipedes crawl over my flesh. This entire conversation was futile, and it was time to hang up.
“I have something of yours,” he said.
“That’s doubtful,” I spat.
His low chuckle made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “I went to great lengths to fetch it, or rather fetch—”
With a silent ‘fuck you,’ I hung up. He could play games with someone else. My only irreplaceable possession was Mom and Dad’s house. Now that Ashley had signed her share over to me for a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, no one could take it away.
Chapter 15
I spent the rest of the day with Cormac, getting the software to cycle through foreign language dictionaries to identify the mistranslated words in the diary. We reached a passage that said:
Is it strange to love and hate the same person? That’s how I feel about el Sol. When he answers a calculus problem, I can only admire him, but when he sits with el Moreno, el Rubio, and las Perras, I hate him so much. It’s like he’s living a double life, torn between loving me and standing by those who mock me.
Cormac ran a hand through his hair and blew out a breath. “But she dumped Kashaayah weeks before that.”
I scrolled back up the diary entries and pointed out a passage I had skimmed earlier. “That’s because Bianca told her Prakash was planning to parade her through the hallways dressed as a pig.”
He frowned. “I skimmed over that.”
Because Cormac was too busy looking for incriminating evidence against the kings. Biting my lip, I glanced away. Right now, we were both on opposite sides. I wanted the diary to prove Prakash’s innocence, while Cormac wanted to prove his guilt.
We scrolled back down to another entry:
He’s fallen for it. We’re meeting in his room tonight for one last time. It’s going to be even more delicious because of what I’ve planned. By the time I’ve finished with him, he will regret ever having toyed with my heart. He will never forget the name Gibbons. And neither will el Moreno or el Rubio. Both of them are as bad as him, and both of them will regret their association with el Sol.
Triumph surged through my chest. It expressed a similar sentiment to the passage Ashley had translated and proved Prakash’s innocence.
Cormac placed the computer on my lap and stood. He turned with his back to me and rubbed a hand over his mouth.
I glanced up. “Are you alright?”
He shook his head. “This makes for hard reading. Last year, when she came crying to me about what they’d done to her, I believed every word.”
A lump formed in my throat. I wouldn’t ever want to read through Ashley’s private thoughts, and I couldn’t imagine how painful it was for Cormac to dredge up Corrine’s. “That’s what big brothers do, isn’t it?”
Cormac nodded and sat at my side while I scrolled down to an entry describing Prakash’s ‘sweet and masterful lovemaking.’ Clenching my teeth, I read through an accurate description of what he was like in bed. Cormac’s nostrils flared, and he clenched his fists as he read. Normally, I would have skipped over such a personal account, but I really needed Cormac to understand that Prakash had not hurt Corrine beyond starting a relationship under false pretenses.
“There you are,” a whiney voice snapped.
Geraldine strode through the scholars’ common room with her nose in the air. Everyone, including the groups of people at the chess tables, stopped what they were doing to gape at her.
Cormac stood. “Geraldine.”
She ignored him and held out her smartphone. “I’m here for Pigsty. Someone wants to speak to you.”
I snapped the laptop shut and glowered up at her. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
Her mouth gaped open. “Are you dumb?”
“No,” I snapped, “But I’m starting to believe you are.”
Her doe eyes widened, and she turned to her left to look at the sycophants who usually accompanied her, only to find a common room full of gaping scholars. When no one rose to her defense, she turned to Cormac. “Are you going to let her speak to me like this?”
“We’ve talked about it before,” he said in a tone so weary, I couldn’t help but wonder how many times they had argued about this. “Willow’s my friend and a person worthy of your respect.”
“Whatever!” She turned to me. “Are you going to speak to him or not?”
“Not.” I stood and placed my hands on my hips. “And I can’t believe a friend of Bianca’s would side with her greatest enemy.”
Her cheeks darkened. “That’s slander!”
In a low voice, I said, “If you want to help Bianca, stop running errands for Mr. Byrd. The next time he calls saying he has something of mine, tell him he can stick it up his ass!”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Says the perv who coerces other girls to perform oral sex on her,” I said in a voice loud enough to carry.
Her cheeks turned bright red. “Lying slut!”
I shook my head. “Keep insulting me, and I’ll spill all your dirty little secrets.”
Her gaze darted to Cormac, who stared between us, seeming not to know if we were trash-talking or hurling truths out of spite. I pulled back my shoulders and dared her to continue. She stuffed her phone into her pocket and stormed out of the common room. Like a love-struck fool, Cormac ran after her.
Hopefully, he would uncover Geraldine’s dirty secrets and realize that she was bullshitting him about the upcoming marriage in Gretna Green.
In English class, in the dining room, and in the hallway, Miss Claymore treated us like we were invisible, but I took her lack of overt attention to mean that she would become more stealthy in her attacks. Leopold, Sebastian, and I continued sleeping in Sebastian’s room with our camera phones positioned in case Miss Claymore developed another of her late-night yearnings.
Late one night, a few weeks after her return, the sound of a key turning in the lock yanked me out of my dream. My heart exploded into action, and I reached under my pillow, picked up the smartphone, and set it to record a video.
“Three-thirty-seven, Saturday the first of June, three weeks into the return of Miss Claymore,” I whispered into the smartphone.
The door opened about four inches and caught on the stop we had left to jam its progression.
“Bloody hell,” muttered Miss Claymore’s dry voice.
Keeping the phone directed at the door, I placed my hand over Leopold’s mouth, our signal to wake up quietly so as not to scare Miss Claymore away. When his eyes blinked open, I gave Sebastian a gentle kick in the side.
With a groan, Sebastian sat up and stretched.
“Seb!” she hissed. “Open the bloody door, or I’ll make things worse for you.”
Excitement surged in my chest, making my heart skip several beats. I tried to calm my breathing, so the camera didn’t pick it up. This footage was priceless. I gave Sebastian a nudge, encouraging him to give our movie a little context.
“How many times do I need to apologize?” he said. “It’s over, and I don’t want to have sex with you anymore.”
“I just want to talk,” she said in a wheedling tone.
“At three in the morning, Miss Claymore?” said Sebastian.
“Let me in,” she snapped.
“We can speak at breakfast,” he replied.