by Eva Chase
The walls stared blankly back at me. Maybe “counseling” worked like some kind of sensory deprivation? If I sat here long enough, would the boredom of it all leave me shaking and crying?
I turned my head—and the wall beside me seemed to flash with the brightness of headlight beams. My pulse lurched automatically. When I looked at it straight on, it was just the same plain wall it’d been before. My mind was playing tricks.
More tricks than just that. As I scanned the room again, the impression of falling snow tickled the edges of my vision. Then the glint of broken glass. My muscles started to tense. Then—it must have come from the back of my head, but it sounded like it was coming from beyond these walls—the distant bark of a dog reached me.
Okay! Obviously whatever this room was normally used for, it was stirring up unfortunate associations for me. Or maybe those impressions were another sort of punishment for overstepping the school’s boundaries. Either way, I’d had my fill. I sprang out of the chair and ducked out into the hall.
Outside, surrounded by the now-familiar dark wood paneling and the murmur of students’ voices from around me and above, my nerves settled. My gaze slid down the hall past the professors’ rooms to the door at the end. Bushfell. The one with its flight of stairs and the padlocked door at the bottom.
I should focus on that. It was the largest mystery I’d encountered in this place and the only one I hadn’t been able to explore at all.
My fingers itched to fully distract myself from the unsettling flashes in the counseling room by riffling through the dean’s office again, but I’d managed to get caught at that even in the middle of the night. He was probably in there during the day. And besides, I’d done a pretty thorough search the first time and not turned up any keys.
If he carried the one that opened that basement padlock, he must keep it on him. Or else in his private room? How much trouble would I get into if I managed to sneak in and poke around in there?
I didn’t have time to find out right now. Checking my phone, I realized I’d ended up lingering in the counseling room for longer than it’d felt like. This week’s Composition class was starting in five minutes.
I hustled up the stairs, looking around in case Delta might have recovered enough to emerge from the bedroom. I wasn’t sure if she even had this Composition class with me too. It definitely didn’t seem like it’d be good for her health to talk about some other horrible experience from her past. No doubt it was too much to hope that today we’d be writing about rainbows and kittens.
If Delta was supposed to be in the class, she didn’t make an appearance. Professor Hubert made no remark on any absences as she surveyed the classroom from beneath her pile of brown hair. I inspected her clothes as surreptitiously as I could, checking for any hint of a key she might be carrying on a chain or in a pocket. Did the staff go down into their secret lair a lot?
Nothing revealed itself. Hubert rubbed her hands together and gave us a thin smile. “I wanted you to work on your next assignment with me here in class because many of the offerings last time left much to be desired. I don’t want to see us become complacent. Let us plumb those depths! For today’s theme, I’d like you to write about something that broke, whether through your actions or someone else’s.”
Glass shattering. Shards slicing through flesh to provoke that horrible wet gasp. My pulse stuttered, and my fingers clenched hard around my pen.
No way was I writing about that. She wanted something painful? Well, I’d watched a hell of a lot of things get broken over the years. I just had to narrow it down to something else.
My mind slipped back through time to the hand-me-down Barbie doll I’d treasured when I was six, even though her previous owner had chopped her hair close to the scalp and doodled all over her legs with permanent marker. It’d been the only toy that was actually mine back then.
I’d been playing with her in the living room when my foster mother had yelled at me to come help her cook dinner right that second, and I’d returned to my foster father’s reddened face as he stomped his foot down on the doll.
We don’t leave our things lying around on the floor—or we lose those things. Crunch. Snap. Face bashed in. Limbs snapped in half. Yeah, I had some depths to plumb there without touching on anything still raw.
I dove into those depths with the determination to milk the event for every drop of angst I could. I’d made it through a page of my school-issued notebook when Professor Hubert came up beside my desk.
“May I look over what you’ve got so far, Miss Corbyn?” she asked in a way that wasn’t a question but an order.
I handed the notebook over and spun my pen between my fingers while she read. Maybe she’d think it was inconsequential because the broken thing had been a toy, even though I’d emphasized how meaningful it’d been to me to set up the horror that came after. Hopefully she’d give me a little slack on my first time going through this process.
The professor set the notebook on my desk with a humming sound I couldn’t decipher. “You have a solid grasp on dramatics,” she said. “But I can’t help feeling there’s a larger story you’re avoiding here.”
A shiver ran through my chest. “That’s the whole story that has anything to do with the toy getting broken,” I said.
Hubert gazed down at me steadily with her piercing eyes. “No,” she said. “I mean there are other broken things that still have their hold on you, Miss Corbyn. We’ll uncover them as we go.”
She moved on to the next desk, leaving her words hanging in the air like a promise and a threat wrapped into one.
Chapter Sixteen
Ryo
Trix frowned at the row of windows along the north side of the school. She bobbed up on her toes to peer through one, but she didn’t look any happier about it than before.
“It’s too dim to make out much,” she said, dropping back down and sweeping her orange waves back from her face. “And it doesn’t look like there’s any way to get in through those, short of breaking the panes—at least from the outside. Do you know if the windows open at all? Do the professors air their rooms out in the summer, even?”
“I can’t remember,” I said, which was true but also only a portion of the truth. After my first few months here at Roseborne College, I’d started to realize that the season never really changed. It was always this damp, gloomy New England mid-spring. I couldn’t say I missed the snowy Pittsburgh winters a whole lot, but every now and then I still got a pang of homesickness for those bright summer days when the sun baked you where you stood.
There were certain comments that just wouldn’t come out, though, even if I’d thought it was a good idea to say them. They could form in my head, but there was a barricade somewhere between my brain and my throat, let alone my tongue. We weren’t allowed to explain or discuss what we’d determined about the college’s workings with any specifics, even with other long-time students. This place liked to leave us in the dark in more ways than one. The newbies eventually figured out the basics for themselves.
“I don’t think trying to sneak into their space would be the best idea anyway,” I added, hoping I didn’t need to say more than that. Trix had faced the staff’s punishments already. And they had an uncanny ability to know when certain boundaries were crossed, at least within the school building. Out here in the open air, I felt safer—but only a little.
“I know.” Trix’s hands clenched as if she’d have liked to give the brick wall a punch or two to express her frustration. Instead, she let out the emotion with a rough sigh and turned to face me. “Have you ever noticed the dean or any of the professors carrying a key? On its own, or a whole ring of them, or whatever?”
I raised my eyebrows. “They’re not going to be keen on you going in with a stolen key either.”
“I’m not thinking about the offices. There’s—” She cut herself off with a wary glance toward the building that told me she’d also learned to be cautious of how much the staff might perceive even
when they weren’t present. “There’s something else I’d like to check out. I think it must be particularly important to them. Of course, who knows in this crazy place?”
“It’s definitely got no shortage of secrets. But no, I haven’t noticed any special keys.” I wasn’t sure what the “something else” she was talking about could be, but chances were it would get her into more trouble rather than less. I hadn’t even been completely convinced by Elias’s certainty that Trix could get free of Roseborne if she tried. The chances of her beating the staff at their own game seemed a thousand times less likely.
But of course that didn’t stop her from giving it her all. This girl had nothing if not an iron will.
Case in point: At my remark, her mind had already leapt to another mystery she’d clearly been stewing over. She tapped my chest. “You said you have counseling sessions, right? I went into the room this morning—it was pretty barren. What, do you just sit in that chair and one of the professors talks at you?”
“Something like that.” My gut tightened. If the room’s effects were a conversation, then mine in there were always disorientingly fraught. I tried not to think about it at all when I didn’t have to.
“Which professor handles the counseling? I didn’t see any of them going in or out.”
I wasn’t sure how much I could manage to say about that. “I’m not sure,” I said tentatively. “The way the sessions are set up, we don’t really see them while it’s happening. It might be more than one of them handling it.” I assumed someone made an executive decision about what to throw at us any given day. The imagery I got always seemed to be whatever would hit me hardest right then.
How much did they glean from our assignments and our classroom behavior, and how much were they outright reading our minds? Who knew?
Trix’s forehead had furrowed with confusion, and I didn’t want to dwell on this subject. Trying to shed light on the school’s strangeness was only going to make her more invested, lead her down those dangerous paths. Whatever Elias said, it was a hell of a lot better for me to distract her than to play along with her sleuthing.
“They’re nothing all that special, really,” I added, and grabbed her hand. “Come here.”
I tugged her over to the old carriage house that stood across the lawn from the main college building. Way back in Victorian times, the structure could have held three carriages plus horses in its stalls. These days, from what I’d seen, it wasn’t used for much of anything except on rare occasions. Which made it perfect for a brief escape from the school’s prying eyes.
Trix followed me with a quizzical expression, but as I kicked the door shut behind us and nudged her up against the wall in the shadow-strewn space inside, a spark lit in her eyes. When I kissed her, she looped her arms around my neck and pulled me closer.
Being this assertive didn’t come naturally to me, but she liked it when I took a commanding air—it brought out something more urgent in her too. I liked that, even if my own enjoyment of the moment shone only faintly through the numbing layers woven through my body. When I kissed her hard, she kissed me back in kind. When I dipped my hand up under her shirt to cup her breast, she swayed into me with an eager hitch of breath and a fumbling to lift up my own shirt for her access.
She came alive, lit up with desire I could appreciate even if from a sort of distance. I could do that for her. I could bring something good into her existence, focus on someone’s happiness other than my own for once in my miserable life.
“I guess this is your way of telling me you’re tired of all the lurking and speculating?” she said with a chuckle.
I pressed my mouth to her neck, drinking in her spicy, citrusy scent and the thrum of her pulse. “All work and no play isn’t good for anyone,” I murmured. “I consider it my duty to help you switch things up. No point in getting bogged down in frustration.”
“So you figured you’d offer different sorts of frustration?” Her laugh turned into a gasp when I pinched her nipple.
I slid my other hand down her leg and tucked her thigh against mine. One little heft against the wall and I could have her flush against me, my hardened cock against her sex, just a few layers of fabric between us. “Who says you have to be frustrated?”
“You’re getting ambitious today,” she teased, but from the way she yanked my mouth back to hers, she didn’t mind at all. She traced her fingers over my chest, streaks of muted heat, and I wondered how far we might lose ourselves this time. Distant or not, I wanted it all. I wanted everything. I—
Fuck.
Was I thinking about her happiness more than my own? Or was this just a Russian doll of selfishness, the veneer of a larger purpose hiding something so much smaller and pettier. I wanted to feel her bucking against me; I wanted to know I’d taken her mind away from her quest with these temporary pleasures. What did she really want?
I knew the answer to that question without even having to think about it. She wanted to find her brother, to screw over the people who ran this hellish college, and to bring the whole artifice crashing down. She was only letting me divert her because she was frustrated and didn’t know where to go from here.
Maybe she wouldn’t ever get what she wanted, but who the hell was I, really, to decide I knew better?
Or rather, to decide that the approach to the situation that let me feel like I was acting out of generosity while also getting my rocks off however much I could was better than any of the other options I could have taken? Jenson’s comments yesterday stung just as much if not more than Elias’s did.
If there was any chance at all that she could get free of Roseborne, shouldn’t I help her try for that? Instead, I was giving her reasons to stay, painting over the pain with these little interludes so it wouldn’t rankle her as much as it should.
The guilt wound up through my chest and made my lips falter against hers. I eased back from Trix, my heart thumping, my hands still braced against her body.
As her fingers went still against my abdomen, she peered at me with her head cocked. A hint of tension had already come into her stance. She knew how to read that something was wrong even if she couldn’t have guessed exactly what.
“Ryo?” she said.
How the hell could I tell her? Every muscle in my body ached to push the doubts aside, lean in, and get right back to the kissing and wherever it would lead. Like a pang of withdrawal that could turn into throbbing agony in no time at all.
And that was exactly why I had to stop.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” I said.
She outright stiffened at that, shoving me farther back. My hands fell to my sides.
“And you just decided that all of a sudden?” she said, but there was no humor left in her voice. It’d gone taut with more emotions than I wanted to think about—nothing like the happiness I’d wanted to offer her.
“It’s not because of you—it’s nothing you did—”
“You aren’t seriously giving me the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ speech, are you?”
I didn’t know the right thing to tell her. I should have figured this out before—I should have realized I’d been wrong before.
I sucked in a breath and forced myself to look her in the eyes. In those lovely, light green eyes that stared back at me now full of nothing but betrayal. I’d provoked that emotion plenty of times before, but not lately. Never in her. This was going all wrong.
To hell with it. I’d be as honest as I knew how to be.
“It isn’t me,” I said. “Believe me, I want you, so much. But I’d be the biggest jackass alive if I convinced you to stick around for my benefit when— You’ve seen what this place is like, Trix. Half of the reason I want you is because you’re by far the best thing I’ve found here. The rest is shit. You don’t deserve to be dragged down into that crap.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, her gaze still accusing. “I’m here now. And you have no idea what I deserve or don’t.”
“I think I do.
You’re not like us. Just the fact that you came here because you wanted to help someone else, already knowing something wasn’t quite right, proves it.”
“So, what are you saying, exactly?”
I swallowed thickly and motioned toward the building outside. “I’ve been a distraction. I’d like to be more than that for you. I don’t think you’re ever going to beat the powers that be or fix everything that’s wrong around here, but there’s a chance we can at least fix how wrong it is that you’re here. We can figure out the best way to convince the staff to let you leave—”
“That’s what this is about?” She stepped away from me, toward the door. “Even you want to kick me out of here now? If you decided you just weren’t that into me, you only had to say so. I didn’t ask for the fucking moon.”
I blinked at her with the uneasy sense that she was responding to more than my words, to past hurts that I hadn’t realized I would scrape up against. “I know. I swear to you, it’s not that. I want to see you get out of here so you can have an actual life.”
“I have a life,” she snapped. “It’s with Cade. I’m not leaving here without him. So if you actually want to be helpful, you’ll tell me how the hell to find him or what happened to him.”
My throat constricted. I couldn’t tell her, not exactly. And what good would it do if I tried to? He was as trapped here as the rest of us. If she got a hold of even that thread of hope, she’d never leave, no matter how hopeless the situation actually was.
“Trix,” I started.
Her expression shuttered. The refusal must have come across in my tone. “If that’s the best you’ve got, I’ll take care of it myself. Thanks for nothing.”
She stalked out of the carriage house with a slam of the door behind her, leaving me more alone than I’d ever felt in my life.
Chapter Seventeen