Mitch leaned away from me. “You don’t need to be telling me this, January.”
“You walked in on us while we were in the shower, Mitch, you already know.”
He looked confused again, and his gaze darted around the space. “What the fuck? I forgot about that—I carried up your dog—we talked, and I passed out in your—”
“Shh…” I held a finger to my lips. “Damn it… I need to tell you so much. We have to go back to the party.”
“This’ll be fun…” With a groan, he got to his feet.
The party was raging when Mitch and I returned. We scoped out the area first, but neither of us spotted Justin in the pool house or outside of it. My heart raced as we reentered the throng of people, but no one even noticed Mitch or me squeezing through the packed bodies as we made our way back into the house. The overwhelming scent of sweat and astringent spilled booze assaulted my senses as we waded into the crowd. Almost everyone was dancing in the center of the pool house. I couldn’t help but notice Char, my ex-best friend, had her bikini top untied and draped over her breasts as she ground her ass back against Spineless Corey’s front.
I turned away, feeling like a creeper for just spotting them like that.
Mitch leaned close, and I could feel the warmth radiating off of his bare skin. “Okay, we got to do this quick. Who called you today? How did they get in contact with you? What did Parker tell you that you couldn’t tell me out there?”
Leaning even closer, I told Mitch everything I knew from the interactions I had with the Alderwood students. I explained how they broke into my room. I cupped my hand around my mouth and brought my lips to his ear before whispering every name that I recognized on both lists. If Mr. Yates was going to throw me into Alderwood to eliminate me as a threat, at least one other person would know about the network of informants at Blackburn. At least I knew that Justin and Mitch would still be fighting—even if I wasn’t part of that trio. Maybe they’d patch up their relationship once I was out of the picture.
I didn’t say any of that, though. I just told Mitch what I knew and stepped back. When I did, I noticed that he was holding his hands just inches to either side of my arms, but he dropped them.
Leaning in, he called down, “What if the lists are bullshit?”
“What?” I asked, surprised. Mitch was the most cynical person I knew aside from my mother. “You think the HG wouldn’t have informants?”
“Fuck yeah, they do, but what if the info this Gabriel guy is giving you is bullshit. Amber’s on the watch list, and her kiss-ass best friend Charlotte whatever is informing on her? What if this guy got the lists and switched names around—making us think that our friends are informants to throw us off?”
“It’s possible,” I said as I looked off into the crowd. I would have loved to believe that Amber and Patrick were informants and Charlotte and Braiden were innocent. “But I’m getting a feeling that Parker and Gabriel and the other Supernaturals are contacting me for a reason. All of them are telling me that I’m about to be thrown into Alderwood, they’re not even telling me why. I think they want me to do something or find something out before the hammer comes down—and I’m guessing it has something to do with this threat that’s affecting them all.”
“Did Parker say what this threat is?” Mitch asked as his gaze drilled into mine.
“No…” I touched the paper from my back pocket and ignored the buzzing sensation on my fingers. “But I’m guessing that the letter my father sent Justin will shed some light on that… I’m just not sure how to approach Justin. Is he drunk?”
“He doesn’t drink,” Mitch said.
I knew that… but he wasn’t himself earlier. The more I thought about what happened the less I believed that Justin would have turned on me not twenty-four hours after we first had sex in some sort of jealous rage. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that I could be that wrong about a person—but my gut was telling me that something else was going on.
“I think we should find him—together.”
“We already did.” Mitch pointed to his split lip, which was already healing. “Justin flipped the fuck out, and he was violent last time. If he has the sheriff drag me out of here, January, I don’t have anyone to bail me out. And you’re fucking broker than I am, so don’t tell me that you’ll do it.”
He was right. I didn’t have a penny to my name, and his parents were supposedly on the run from the HG. “Then I have to go alone.”
“Fuck that,” Mitch whispered, so quiet that I could barely hear him over the roar of the crowd. “January—I thought he was going to hit you.”
I stepped back a little. The words hit me really hard, not because of what Mitch was saying, but because of the response I was going to say back. I was about to tell Mitch that Justin would never hit me. It was the exact same conversation I’d had with my mother a dozen times, except I was the one warning her that her current boyfriend was on the verge of violence, and she was the one telling me that I’d misread the situation. To date, I’d never once misinterpreted the warning signs.
“You’re right, Mitch—I’ll wait until Monday at school or something, after he cools off.” This whole situation made me feel sick to my stomach. I had trusted Justin with everything I was, and now I was comparing him in my head to my mother’s abusive ex-boyfriends. But that vacant, rage-filled look in his eyes was still haunting me. “What if we test out this informant thing—we plant evidence for an informant to find, and then we see if it gets back to the Hawthorn Group.”
He tilted his head to the side and lifted a brow. “How’d we find out?”
“Parker. She says she owes me a small favor. We plant the evidence, we give the informant time to report, and then we ask Parker to retrieve the intel that the HG has on me.” I swallowed hard. “An informant is coming to my house tomorrow for movie night.”
“Braiden.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. Damn, I didn’t want it to be Braiden. The guy had saved my life. He’d only ever been nice to me, and all of that could have just been a front. Braiden did it because it was his job to get close to various students. When I thought about it, his reputation as an insufferable flirt could have just been because he used his good looks to get close to potential targets. I shook my head. “I hate having these thoughts about people I like.”
“We’ll do it—yeah. I’ll go sleep in my truck, and—”
“No, Mitch. Just come crash out on my nana’s couch. I’ll wash your shirt in the sink and throw it in the dryer so you don’t give her a heart attack, and we can drive back to the dorms with Bailey in the morning.”
Mitch looked like he might object, and after a second, he said, “It’s not a fucking dog car,” he growled, as he always did, right before he gave in about driving my dog around. “There are leather seats, and your dog sheds”
“So put down a towel,” I said, and I could see in his expression that he was agreeing.
As we left the party, my heart sank and the magicked envelope felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Parker had risked a lot to bring Justin that message. What if it was urgent? And why was my father sending messages to Justin when he could have just as easily contacted me?
CHAPTER NINE
“No!” a chorus of BBC voices hollered at the television as Susie cast her vote to pick the live-action Beauty and the Beast.
Every chair and table in my dorm room had been pulled over into the living room area around the television set, and bodies were piling together on all of them. People were even sitting on the floor, to the delight of my dog Bailey who had draped herself over Braiden’s legs.
Somehow, the movie night had tempted every member of the BBC along with a few girls I didn’t know. One of which introduced themselves to me as Braiden’s girlfriend, albeit a little stiffly, before she took a seat on the floor next to my dog, who had claimed all of her boyfriend’s attention.
I’d ordered every snack in the menu from my fancy-ass refrigerator as well as a couple of pi
zzas, and I even baked a tray of peanut butter brownies for good measure. If I was planning to watch the movie alone, I’d be eating the peanut butter straight out of the jar, and this was my way of hiding my obsession with the nutty goodness in public. Unfortunately, Mitch consumed half of the precious squares while I was in the shower and promptly passed out with his head on my table.
When the crowd arrived, I’d told them to ignore the guy sleeping on my snack table with half of a brownie sticking out of his mouth and to help themselves. They’d been surprisingly cool with that.
I sat in a Baldwin brothers sandwich on my couch, staring at the TV as the group debated over hundreds of movies that I’d never seen but they all had opinions on. Some sucked, others were amazing, most had half of the room saying one and the other half claiming the other.
All the while, I marveled at the fact that twenty-four hours had passed since Justin broke up with me, and it still didn’t feel real.
He hadn’t called.
He hadn’t texted, and I had fought the urge all day and resisted reaching out to him. Mitch hadn’t said a word about the fight that went down last night, either. It was like we weren’t acknowledging the elephant that had already trampled us and was still just standing there in the room.
“Hey, January?” Braiden said as he maneuvered out from under my dog. “Mind if I head in and use your restroom?”
“Of course not,” I said while pushing a smile on my lips as the words “don’t be an informant” repeated in my mind. “It’s right over there, through my bedroom.”
I forced myself not to look back as Braiden headed around the couch. The only piece of contraband with any true value that I had in my possession was my phone and the magic letter to Justin, and they were both safely ensconced in my oversized sweatshirt pocket.
“This is stupid,” Zack called from beside me. “Richard, pick a movie, or I’m going to let your girlfriend choose.”
“Heaven forbid,” Richard said through a chuckle, making Susie make a sound of protest from where she curled up next to him on the couch.
The fact that Susie was sitting between Richard and Zack was such a beautiful thing, and I wanted to rejoice about it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Braiden was in my bedroom, alone.
“Here, everyone loves Stephen King’s Carrie… especially with prom on the horizon,” Richard said.
“In like four months,” Mia called with a laugh from where she sat in a chair backward with her arms draped over the backrest. She adjusted her gold nose ring, making it blink in the light. “Let’s do Carrie. Otherwise, we’ll spend all night debating flicks.”
Carrie was actually a movie I’d both seen before and read the book of, which I was grateful for because I couldn’t even come close to paying attention.
Lucas squeezed an arm around my shoulders. Thankfully he smelled like soap and freshly applied deodorant because I was pretty much at his armpit level. The twins were the tallest people I knew by a long measure, and most of the students of Blackburn were giants compared to me. Both of the Baldwin boys were over seven feet tall and built like professional linebackers. They had buzzed their dark hair recently, making them both look like super-soldiers of the future or something.
“This is great,” Lucas said. “I’d say we should make this a Sunday night tradition, but don’t you usually hang out with your grandma?”
“We did breakfast and lunch instead,” I said as I leaned back into his arm. “But yeah, I’d love to turn this into a tradition. I don’t think Nana would mind making our standing date a lunch thing. It gives her more flexibility to hang out with your aunt.”
The Baldwin’s Aunt Pam and Nana had only been dating for two months now, but they both had steady, calm personalities, and they were exceptionally well matched.
As if to confirm my thoughts, Lucas said, “I think Aunt Pam is getting serious about your nana. She hangs out with us now more than you do.”
“And that’s a damn shame,” Zack said from my other side, clearly listening in on our conversation.
“Sure is,” I said. “I’d love to have a set date where I see all of you weekly.”
“Well, you will…” Mia said from where she sat across the room. “You’re still going to do the hybrid meetings, right, January?”
A tense silence fell over the room as all eyes fell on me.
I licked my dry lips. “You’re still planning on going forward?”
“Fuck yeah, we are.” Mia rocked forward on her chair. “We’re just planning on figuring out what we are. They can’t stop us from investigating our genetics, that’s our right.”
Braiden reentered the room a second later, retaking his seat of the floor next to the girl I didn’t know.
“I’ll be there,” he said, and it made ice run through my veins.
Mia nodded. “What do you say, January, you in?”
“No pressure or anything,” Zack drawled. “You’re asking her to risk expulsion, and she’s not even a hybrid. She’s an Elite.”
Mia turned her ferocious gaze on Zack. “Yeah, but this is exactly the time where Elites need to stand with hybrids. If January can get the powerful students at this school to stand with us, they won’t be able to kick us out.”
“I don’t know what kind of sway you think I have with these guys, Mia, but I can tell you it’s not much. I have one Elite friend.” I hooked a thumb over my shoulder. “And he doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to.”
“And your one friend had enough sway to get you nominated for senior huntress on your first week at school, almost costing Amber Davenport her nomination.”
“At the bequest of his brother in a plot to kidnap and kill me.” I shook my head. “Mia… my position here at Blackburn is tenuous right now. They’re letting me stay with the scholarship I was granted by Sebastian Holter, but I don’t know if they will take all that away if I start breaking the rules.”
“I was really depending on your help here,” Mia said. A muscle ticked in her jaw as she turned back to the flat screen.
“Mia, you’re not being fair,” Susie leaned past Zack and tapped my hand. “January, you do what’s right for your life.”
“Well, I’m still texting you the details when we set up the next meeting,” Mia muttered with her gaze still directed at the screen. “You’re welcome to ignore it.”
Zack leaned in closer. “You can start by just ignoring Mia now because no one wants to risk your scholarship in order to help us. No one would expect that of you.”
“It’s fine. Mia can feel how she feels,” I said to Zack, but it definitely wasn’t fine. The fact was that I wanted to know everything about hybrids, and I planned to find out, but there was no way that I could support their quest if the BBC had an informant in the heart of their group. Gods above, I hoped I was wrong about Braiden, but as it stood, I wasn’t even sure that I could talk to Mia without risking it getting back to headquarters.
Guilt churned in my gut as I turned back to the TV, but within seconds, a knock came at my door.
We all glanced around.
“Are we missing someone?” Mia asked, as her brow wrinkled.
“No one I invited,” I muttered as I wiggled my way out from between the Baldwin brothers.
Mitch was somehow at the door before me, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, still looking half asleep.
“Morning, sunshine,” I said to him as I grabbed for the handle. My heart fluttered as I realized who must be behind that door—Justin. I didn’t even know what I was going to say to him. The rough metal scratched on my hand as the handle turned, and then I opened the door to find a solemn-faced Mark Yates.
The rockstar looking guy was leaning into my doorframe in a button-down silk shirt that showed half his chest. He’d applied almost as much after-shave as his father, and the acidic smell made my eyes water. Mark grinned, and I couldn’t help but notice that he was not only extremely good looking, but it was a sort of polished-
jewel type of handsome—like he’d had a team of stylists just waiting in his dorm room.
With a half-smile that looked a little sheepish, he held up a pin with three stripes on it. “I’m delivering these to the students on our floor. It means you’re a level two officer.” He grimaced. “Sorry, I thought you’d at least be a three.”
“It’s fine. I’ve only been at this school for a month and a half.” I took the pin and held it up with as much of a grin as I could muster. “Thanks. I won’t keep you...”
He leaned closer. “You’re actually my last stop… which I did on purpose because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh, yeah?” I glance back over my shoulder to where Mitch had returned to the table. “You know, Mark, right now—”
“Last night was awful. I was pretty drunk, but I remember what happened, and I just want to say that everyone agrees that—despite where you both come from—you’re a class act, and Justin is trash.” He leaned even closer, pushing his shoulder against the door. “My dad has a getaway up on March Hill, overlooking Brightside, and I’ve been thinking about starting get-togethers there, starting next weekend—only chill people who don’t start fights or throw shit fits if you know what I mean.”
“Mark—”
He held up his hands. “I’m not asking you out. I know you’ve only been single for a morning, and I made you uncomfortable last time that you and Justin broke up, but I wanted to extend an invitation to my party next weekend.”
“Thank you, Mark, though if Justin and I break up, I wouldn’t want him to be excluded on my account.” The words hurt on the way out as the realization hit me that things might really be over. They might have to be over because I couldn’t be with someone who acted as volatile as Justin had last night. I’d let myself believe that everything had been an act because that was what I wanted to believe.
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