“You’ve never acted like this before, either,” Quinn shot back. “What’s wrong, Trey? Why couldn’t you finish the deed, then? What’s your father going to say when he finds out?”
I didn’t have time to contemplate Trey’s words, because Quinn scooped me into his arms and stomped away. I could feel my limbs being poked and jostled as he shoved his way through the crowd.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry, Hazel,” he murmured. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Let me down,” I begged. His touch burned. The full fury of what happened rolled over me. I nearly died. I wanted to die.
I’m messed up. This school is breaking me.
Quinn kept walking, wobbling down one of the narrow paths. I kicked my legs, raking my nails at his face. “Let me down!” I yelled.
“All right. Here, let me help you.” He tried to hold me up, but I scrambled away. My legs still wouldn’t support my weight, so I crawled on my hands and knees down the narrow path.
“Hazy, wait!” Quinn’s voice bounced off the cliffs, but I kicked out at his shins and kept crawling. I leaned against the cliff and managed to haul myself to my feet. With every step, fresh agony splintered my body. Keep going. Find the cave.
Horrible, disjointed thoughts pounded against my skill.
This isn’t a game anymore.
Trey could have killed me.
He wanted to kill me.
And I was going to let him.
The cold crept into my bones as I pulled back the vines to expose the cave entrance. I hugged my arms over my body, but I couldn’t keep out the cold. The flame inside me had died.
I felt like a ghost – invisible, cursed, shunned.
This is the last time I fall for the Kings of Derleth and their crap.
I will have my revenge.
Chapter Fifteen
As I crawled back through the mirror in the pitch black, the hardness of my resolve settled over my heart.
Trey’s words echoed over in my head. We’ve never had one like her before. He meant scholarship student. He was saying that what they were doing to me – all the shunning and taunting and bullying – they had done to others. How many others suffered because Trey and Courtney and the other monarchs wanted to maintain their positions at the top?
They were all in on it. Trey, Quinn, Courtney, Ayaz. I balled my hands into fists as I thought of the kiss in the grotto, the kiss that left me breathless, my body on fire. Of course Quinn had done that as part of the plan. Of course. How could I be so stupid as to think it meant something to him?
And Ayaz? He warned me about Trey. Why? Was that part of the plan, too? So I could feel stupid for ignoring him? Well, it succeeded. I swallowed hard, my throat aching from where Trey’s arm had pressed.
I paused outside our bedroom door, listening to the rats circling over my head. Adrenaline still surged in my veins, and my whole body ached from being thrown around the rocks. I pulled my key from around my neck, turning it over in my fingers. I knew if I went inside, Loretta would be in bed. If I knocked on Greg’s door, he’d want to talk about the party. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to go to sleep. But I had nowhere else to go—
A light moved past on the landing upstairs, casting brief striped shadows across the corridor. Odd. Everyone was at that party, so who was upstairs walking around with a light? Did someone come back early?
Did someone come back to try and catch me?
Curious, I crept up the staircase, listening hard. I could hear quiet voices, footsteps moving through the dorm. It was more than one person, and they were moving quickly in the direction of the main academic wing.
I poked my head up and peered between the railings. My heart leaped into my throat as I saw Dr. Morgan striding down the hall, a black robe fluttering around her legs.
“We’ve checked all the rooms,” she told Headmistress West. The headmistress appeared even more formidable than ever in a high-necked black velvet dress beneath a set of elaborate robes edged with gold trim. She clutched a tall silver candelabra – the flickering candlelight highlighting her sharp cheekbones and pale, porcelain skin. “They’re all either at that party, or sound asleep.”
“And the scholarship students?” she snapped, a note of distaste in her voice.
“No one stirs,” Dr. Morgan said.
“Very well.” The headmistress spun on her heel and swept down the hall.
Interesting. I had no idea they conducted this nightly inspection. Greg hadn’t mentioned it, either. And what was with the robes? Was it some kind of official academic dress? Were they off to a staff meeting?
In the middle of the night? On a weekend?
Curious now, I waited until all the teachers filed out of the dorms then crept down the hallway after them. I hid behind one of the stone columns flanking the entry, peering along the corridor as they walked past the empty classrooms. I expected them to head across the atrium to the faculty wing, but instead, they turned off into a small stairwell. Boots clanged on metal stairs. Candlelight flickered along the rows of lockers.
They were heading down to the gymnasium.
My curiosity piqued further, I crouched low and skirted along the wall, pausing at the top of the staircase. I’m not supposed to go down there, but I have to know what they’re doing.
I dropped down low and peered around the corner, just able to see their flickering light from the top of the stairs. What were they doing down there? I slunk down the first step. I have to find out—
A hand clamped over my shoulder.
I jumped. My mouth flew open, but a hand over my face muffled my scream. On the wrist, I could just make out a small runic tattoo.
“Don’t cry out,” a familiar voice rasped in my ear. “If they hear you, you’re dead meat. And I’m not talking metaphorically this time.”
“Quinn?” His name came out as a muffled squeak against his hand.
“The one and only.” His grin was just visible in the dim light. “I’m going to take my hand away, but you can’t scream, okay?”
He sounded so frightened that I nodded. He dropped his hand and started tugging me back into the hall, back in the direction of the dorm.
“You’re hurting me,” I hissed. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to give these back to you.” Quinn dropped my arm and held out my clothes, rolled into a ball. I took the stack and felt for the shard in my jacket pocket. It was still there. “You can’t follow them down there. It’s not allowed.”
“Since when did you get such a hard-on for the rules?” I demanded. My finger flew to my wrist, pressing at the dark smudge to remind myself not to think about the kiss, not to fall for this guy’s bullshit.
He ran a hand through his hair. It stuck out on one side of his head in this disheveled, totally gorgeous way. “I don’t. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Why would I get in trouble? What are they doing, anyway?”
Quinn focused his eyes at a spot over my shoulder. “They have to go down and run air tests in the gymnasium, to see if the toxicity has gone down enough that they can open the wing again. That’s why they check we’re all sleeping like good little students first. If any of us are caught down there, they’ll be sued.”
“Uh-huh.” Dr. Morgan said all the students were at the party. They knew we were all breaking school rules, and they didn’t care. But did Quinn know that? I thought so, but I wasn’t sure.
“I’m begging you, Hazy.” We crossed over the covered bridge and Quinn held open the dormitory door for me. “Go to bed. The others are starting to head back from the party. If they see you walking around in their dorm…”
“They’ll what?” My hand rested on my throat. “They’ll try to kill me again?”
Quinn winced. “That was never supposed to happen. Trey got carried away. There’s so much you don’t know—”
“Yeah, whatever. What I do know is that I should be filing assault charges against your friend. Agains
t all of you.” Tears pricked at my eyes, but I was too angry to cry. “Don’t pretend you weren’t under orders to get me to that party, or to kiss me like that so I’d let my guard down. You let them steal my clothes.”
Quinn’s face told me everything I needed to know. “I didn’t know he’d do that,” he said.
I shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. If Trey tells you to throw me off a cliff, you’d do it. You’re just his little errand boy.”
Quinn’s lip curled up. “You don’t know, Hazy.”
I snorted. “Yup. That’s the truth. And I don’t want to, either. I just want to get my diploma and get out of this fucking place.”
“That’s what we all want.” Quinn squeezed his eyes shut, and such an expression of pain wrote itself across his face that even though I fucking hated him, my arms itched to slide around his neck and pull him close.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor behind us. Drunken laughter bounced off the walls. Quinn glanced over his shoulder. “Go,” he hissed, shoving me down the stairs toward my dorm. “Sweet dreams, Hazy.”
“Rot in hell, Quinn.”
I crept back down the stairs just as Courtney’s trilling laugh blasted overhead. I shoved my key into my room and slipped inside, my heart pounding.
I felt certain that Quinn was lying about what the gymnasium. The way he wouldn’t look at me, the fact that the teachers were all wearing those black robes and carrying candles, and that flash of pain in Quinn’s face when he spoke about graduating, told me that something was off. Something was going on at this school, and it had nothing to do with bullying.
What were the teachers really doing down there?
Chapter Sixteen
I had to bide my time for revenge on the Kings. The first step was to enlist Greg’s help. That was easy – I told him what Trey had done at the party, how Quinn had got me there, and how Ayaz had known about it but chose to give me a feeble warning rather than stop his friend. Greg agreed that the Kings had to pay.
I didn’t tell him about the teachers’ late night foray to the gymnasium. Something about Headmistress West’s face, about the fear in Quinn’s eyes as he dragged me back from the staircase, told me this was something that could put my friend the hopeless gossip in danger.
“So we’re doing this,” Greg whispered from across our library table. He whipped his head around to make sure no one was in earshot before adding, “How are we doing this?”
“Can you get access to the chemistry lab for unsupervised experiments?” I asked. I wasn’t taking chemistry, but it was Greg’s top subject. He said that he might want his own makeup line one day.
Greg screwed up his face. “Not normally, but Mr. Ellery has a fondness for me. I can probably swing something. What do you have in mind?”
I leaned forward. For the first time since we nailed our audition, I was excited about something at this school. I’d thought long and hard about how to make the Kings and Queens pay without getting in trouble ourselves. I didn’t want either of us to lose points over this. “Do you remember what you told us about the rose hips being the active ingredient in itching powder?”
A slow smile crept across Greg’s face as I outlined my idea. With our plan set, all we had to do was set it up and wait for the perfect time to use it. When we weren’t studying or rehearsing, Greg and I were walking around the gardens, picking the last of the fruits before winter hit in earnest.
It was weird, but ever since the party, the monarchs had been… nicer isn’t the right word. Courtney and her friends still hissed at me in the halls. I still caught Trey and Ayaz looking at me with contempt. But they seemed to have pulled back on the bullying. Quinn still openly flirted with me, even though he seemed to be back with Courtney. Ayaz and I even had a couple of semi-pleasant conversations while working on our history project.
I thought about calling off the revenge plan. This new peace was nice. I wasn’t constantly looking over my shoulder. My stomach unknotted itself. I could concentrate more on my schoolwork and the production. I’d even managed to earn 450 points. I didn’t want to go back to having to constantly worry about when they’d strike back.
But Trey had nearly killed me. I couldn’t let him keep believing he could treat another human like that. All the monarchs thought they could get away with anything because they were rich and powerful, and they needed to know that wasn’t true. I needed to believe that wasn’t true.
I wasn’t just doing this for me, I was doing it for Loretta and Greg and Andre and all the other scholarship students they’d tortured.
My opportunity for revenge came three weeks after the party. In homeroom, Mr. Dexter announced that Saturday was our first parents day for the year. Parents were allowed to visit the academy at any time of the year, but I’d noticed very few of them did. I guessed they were all too busy with their perfect rich-people lives.
Twice a year, Derleth held a parents day, where the school would put on special activities. All the parents came, and then went to a big catered alumni party in the evening, with an open bar, so they could all relieve their school days.
It seemed to be a day especially concocted to torture poor orphaned scholarship kids, but it would also give us the perfect stage for revenge. In order to hit the Kings where it would hurt most, we couldn’t destroy their property – we had to make them feel small. And in front of their powerful parents was just the place to do that.
Both of us had full jars of rose hips hidden under our beds. Greg secured his lab time to process the hairs inside the fruit into a powder. As he passed my locker to collect me for rehearsal, he lifted the flap of his bookbag to show me two jars of dark powder nestled between his textbooks.
“I hope this works,” he said. “I’m ready to see Trey Bloomberg squirm.”
Members of the maintenance staff drove the official school vehicles down to the bottom of the peninsula to pick up the parents from the fancy hotel in Arkham where many of them were staying. Some parents decided to brave the journey in their own vehicles, and a steady stream of Maseratis, Porches, and Lamborghinis rolled into the visitor parking lot.
Derleth Academy pulled out all the stops with a busy schedule of activities throughout the entire day, starting with a Champagne breakfast, then a tour of the school – including demonstrations and presentations of recent student projects – followed by a catered lunch in a tent on the grounds, where many of the music and drama students would provide entertainment. The day would finish with a centuries-old tradition where the lacrosse team would play a team made up of past alumni. All men, of course, because feminism clearly hadn’t yet visited the hallowed halls of Derleth.
At breakfast, the scholarship students took our usual table. I tried not to give the monarchs the satisfaction of staring at their rich, perfect families, but curiosity got the better of me. I watched over the top of my orange juice glass as Trey’s parents shoved their way to the head of the monarch’s table.
“My other son, Wilhem, is interning at my company,” the man who I guessed was Trey’s dad – Vincent Francis Bloomberg the Second – told Courtney’s mother, his voice booming across the room. He looked like an older version of Trey – the same brown hair that changed color under the light, the same ice eyes flecked with gold, the same self-satisfied smirk. “He’ll be taking an executive position within the next six months, that’s for certain. But then, I’m not surprised. He inherited the brillaint Bloomberg mind. Trey here takes more after his mother.”
I understood that comment was a veiled insult by the way Trey’s whole body stiffened. It was weird, because Trey was many things – a bully, an asshole, a manwhore with an incredibly hot body – but he was not stupid. I’d seen him answer enough questions and present enough assignments to know he was top of our class for a reason. His father continued talking as if Trey wasn’t there, while his mother was deep in conversation with several other women wearing identical beige pantsuits.
Meanwhile, Quinn was cracking jokes like they were going out of style. He
had a slim, beautiful woman on his arms with identical emerald eyes, and he looked at her with a serious reverence I’d never seen in him before. He clearly loved his mother a lot. It was kind of nice to see, given how he treated all other women like they were disposable.
A few people down the table, the man I’d identified as Quinn’s father leaned over Tillie’s mother, his hand practically brushing her cheek as he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, lingering for longer than necessary. He had Quinn’s dirty blond hair and handsome face, but there was a cruelness in the tug of his mouth that was chilling.
Interesting.
Between his two friends and their families, Ayaz sat with a stiff back and blazing eyes. He didn’t have anyone with him, although Trey’s father kept leaning over and nudging him into the conversation. Ayaz would always smile for a moment, then return to his stony brooding face.
I remembered that Trey’s parents put up most of the money for the scholarship program, and that Quinn had said Ayaz was a scholarship student, and that the two of them were like brothers. Maybe Ayaz had some private arrangement with Trey’s family. Vincent Bloomberg II certainly seemed to have some hold over him.
A hand waved in front of my face. “Earth to Hazel,” Greg called out. “What’s going on in that head of yours? You’ve been drinking from an empty glass for the last five minutes.”
“Nothing.” I slammed my glass on the table and focused on my rapidly cooling breakfast. A few moments later, my gaze slid back to their table, drawn by Trey’s dad loudly discussing his eldest son’s achievements at college. It’s weird the oldest son wasn’t called Vincent, too. Why was Trey given that honour instead of his brother if his dad didn’t care about him? Vincent Bloomberg II kept leaning over to Ayaz and talking about which medical schools he should apply for, but he never said anything to Trey.
Shunned: a reverse harem bully romance (Kings of Miskatonic Prep Book 1) Page 13