by Lucy Auburn
Kill or Be Killed
Cain University 2
Lucy Auburn
Contents
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Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
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Also by Lucy Auburn
About the Author
Copyright 2019 Lucy Auburn.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Author’s Note
This book contains explicit sex, as well as blood and gore.
The Black Serpent kidnapped me. He thinks we're destined to change the world.
I think he's destined to have my foot up his @$$.
But he says Cain University has secrets, and I can't disagree. Returning to campus with my Conduits, I discover not everything here is as it seems.
The man who killed my mother might be closer than I think.
And my powers demand I let my Conduits close so I can kill him... or be killed myself.
Cain University is an adult academy series, similar to The Magicians and Villain Academy. It has blood, gore, mature scenes, laugh out loud comedy, and a reverse harem enemies-to-lovers romance that will scorch off the pages. For readers 18+ only.
Chapter 1
Whoever invented that Beauty and the Beast bullshit is gonna get a knife to the stomach the second I track them down, because let me tell you right now, there is nothing about wearing layers upon layers of skirts that makes a girl feel hot and bothered for a strange dude.
Creepy castles full of cobwebs in the corners and hidden passageways? Not sexy.
Infantile men kidnapping you and dressing you up like a doll? Very uncool.
"Elllll-en!" The Black Serpent has a singsong quality to his voice when he wants something from me, which is literally all the time. It's only been a few hours in his lair, and already I've heard him say my name in that sickening sweet tone of voice enough times to want to punch his teeth out. "You're taking a while in there. You do know that there's no escaping from the window, right? Put all the sheets and drapes together and climb down if you'd like, but there's nowhere to go but here."
I ignore him, staring at myself in the mirror. The dress he insisted I wear has big bell-shaped skirts and smells faintly of mothballs. This whole damn castle smells vaguely like someone died in it and they only recently got around to removing the body—it's slightly damp, but somehow also dry, and every time I breathe in I want to puke a little.
Not as much as I want to puke when I look at myself in the cloudy mirror in my new bedroom. The dress is a deep, obnoxious purple, and it clashes with my blonde hair and pale skin. A tight bodice pushes even my modest boobs all the way up towards my neckline, looking like they want desperately to escape from the top layer of silk and jump out the window. I don't blame my boobs—I'd want to get away from the impossibly puffy sleeves on my shoulder too.
I've spent the past few hours trying to escape from this place, ignoring the Black Serpent, yelling at him and cursing his name, and even, at one point, tried laying down on the ground and refusing to move. That almost worked—the man has clearly never raised a toddler. But finally he just picked me up, put my over his shoulder, carried me up here, and set me on the bed.
"This," he declared, as a cloud of dust went up on the quilt he'd just put my ass down on, "is your new home. Your room will be this one—I'm a gentleman, after all, Ellen. I know how to wait for the right girl. There are gowns, beautiful gowns in the closet. Tonight I want you to wear the purple one." He stroked a finger across my cheek, which I promptly bit, making him sigh and shake his head even as he drew the finger away. "You'll see. You'll soon understand. We'll be better together—the world will be better with us together."
"Fuck off, Cuntface McGee."
He wrinkled his nose at this. "Oh dear. What a mouth. We'll work on that too, now that I have you to myself." Surveying me, he declared, "Dinner will be served promptly at six. Remember, Ellen: the purple one. Everything will be easier if you just do what I want." With a wicked smile, he pulled a knife from one of the sheaths on his back—my knife—and motioned towards me with it. "I'm a gentleman, but I'll cut your clothes off and wrestle you into that dress if I have to. This moment has been waiting for a long time. It won't be ruined."
So now I'm wearing the dress, because once it came down to it, giving into this one thing seemed like the safest option. Staring at myself in the mirror, though, I can't help but think that maybe purple taffeta is a fate far worse than death. And the Black Serpent hasn't said that he'd kill me—just that he wants me to be his wife, something that's a little incompatible with being dead, unless you're into screwing corpses.
That's what he said when he first brought me here. He told me his plans, and they were horrifying enough to make me scream. Maybe that was a little dramatic of me, but sometimes you just gotta let the terror out.
"Oh, Ellen." He pulled me against him and ignored my struggles, barely seeming to care at all what I did to him. "You don't understand this yet, but you and I were meant to be together. We're fated in so many ways—your father made sure of that. He promised his firstborn to me, so many years ago, when we were still brothers-in-arms. Did he ever tell you that? We were betrothed before you were even born. Vincent knew that you would be special, and he knew I needed someone special. Someone to calm the voices in my head and keep me safe. Someone like you, Ellen, and everything you have inside you."
I spit on him, but he just wiped it off, barely seeming to notice. That was the scary part—how he lived in a completely different world, one where everything he said made sense. "You don't get it now, but you
will." I tried to slap him, and he grabbed my wrist, twisting it down with ease. There was an arrogant smirk on his face, and I hated him for it. "The feisty spirit that makes you want to rebel against me so much is the same spirit that will draw you to me, in the end. I'm going to make you mine. I'm going to love you and marry you. You'll never want another man again once you've given into me."
That was when I kicked him in the balls and ran away. But this place is his—it bends to his will. After the third time I ran away, only to come back here again, he grabbed me by the hand and brought me around the castle. I gave in and let him lead me, because by that point I was hoping maybe I'd catch a way out if he showed me all of it.
But no. There was no way out. Just a lot of rooms that he told me horrible things about.
"This room is the solarium. It will be yours, for you and your ladies-in-waiting, who are on their way here. You may read here, and spend your days thinking of me."
"Once it's cleaned up, this room will be a nursery. And what a lively nursery it'll be! The babes you will bear me will be healthy and strong—I'm sure of that, Ellen."
"Oh, this room has seen better days. It's in disrepair, and I apologize for that. But soon it'll be a wonderful library. I hope you like books—if you don't, well, you'll learn to like them. This place has no internet connection."
Yeah. Terrifying, right? There's nothing worse in this world than a madman who wants a long-term commitment. Especially when that commitment doesn't come with a little bit of online porn viewing on the side.
If the Black Serpent gets what he wants, I'll never see another dick again, except for his—and I shudder to think what that one looks like. He may seem like a normal, even handsome man on the outside, but he's clearly more than a little whackadoo. For all I know he eats asparagus for every meal and likes long handjobs. I just don't have the stomach, or grip strength, for that kind of sex life.
So maybe I should do my best to turn him off. An idea enters my head, and I smirk at the mirror. Since he's into purple puffy things with too much silk and lace, boobs pressed up into the neckline, and a skirt long enough to skim the ankles, I'll give him the exact opposite.
"Ellen. Don't tell me you drowned in the lavatory."
I roll my eyes. "I'll be out in a minute."
He tests the door, only to discover that I've pushed the dresser in front of it. It's no flimsy particle board dresser that you build yourself, either—the thing is such solid old wood that I nearly broke my back shoving it across the room.
"Ellen." I can hear the frown in his voice. "You do remember what I said about trying to escape?"
"I thought you were a gentleman," I shoot back. "Trying to see me in my pantaloons, are you? How uncouth."
"No, no!" The protest bursts from his mouth, and I hear him take a step back. "Just... don't take too long. Dinner will be served at precisely six o'clock."
I make some kind of sure-whatever noise in response, and his footsteps draw down the hallway, though not too far. He doesn't have any kind of a British accent, but the Black Serpent sure does talk like he thinks we're in some old story. Maybe that's just part of his obvious obsession with fairy tales—this is straight out of every one of them, down to the kidnapped woman falling for the asshole with the castle. We're probably supposed to dance after dinner, the voluminous skirts swirling around me, candlelight in our hair.
Fat fucking chance.
Searching through all the dust-covered shit in "my" new dresser, I find what I'm looking for: a sewing kit. It's old, and half the stuff in it is rusted, but it does the job. I use the seam ripper inside to hack at the dress until it makes a little more sense, then step back and smirk at my far better reflection.
Purple still isn't my color—it never will be. But without the impossibly puffy sleeves, the dress looks far better. Grabbing the shears from the sewing kit, I cut a narrow V-shaped slit down the front to give my girls room to breathe, and pull the bodice up a bit. Then I bend at the waist—a little huff of air going out of my middle as the corseted waist squeezes at me—and cut the skirt all the way across and around.
It doesn't look like a finished dress when I'm done, but at least I don't feel quite so sewn in and bloated at the edges. In fact, I look pretty hot—too bad the only person to see it is a psychopath. Done with the dress, I slip the shears down the V between my boobs until they nestle against my ribs between my skin and the tight corset. I probably won't get the chance to use them, but it doesn't hurt to show up to the dance armed and dangerous.
Six chimes ring out, the grandfather clock in the corner declaring the hour. People must not have slept well in centuries past, having to listen to that shit go on and on all through the night. I get the feeling Mr. Serpent is going to get all antsy if I take any longer, so I suck it up and decide it's time to make my fashionably on time appearance. Using all my effort, I push the heavy wooden dresser away from the door, grab the doorknob, and yank it open.
The psychopath himself is standing right on the other side. It's all I can not to yell holyfuckingshitballswhatthefuckman. Instead I grit my teeth and mutter, "I thought you'd gone downstairs."
"Yes, well." He rocks forward on the balls of his feet, staring at me openly. "Pitching sounds is a little trick I learned. I see you changed your dress."
"I did." I flip my blonde hair over one shoulder and smirk up at me. "What's the matter, was it expensive?"
"On the contrary—everything here is inherited, so it cost nothing at all." A bland smile curves up his handsome mouth, and I narrow my eyes as I imagine what it'd be like to cut that smile in two on either side until his face is all bloody. "If the dress was too small for you, then of course it needed alterations. I want you to be comfortable."
My plan to make him angry by rebelling against his desires didn't work. Narrowing my eyes, I slam the door shut in his face, but he just shoves his goddamned boot out and catches it without wincing.
Cocking his head at me, he frowns, a menacing expression crossing his face. His voice goes low and serious as he says, "Ellen. I've been good to you. I expect you to be good back."
My heart starts running a mile a minute as I'm thrown back into the past. I know what those narrowed eyes and too-serious voice mean. This is just like when Jack, my abusive boyfriend, was alive. The Black Serpent's logic makes no sense—he's kidnapped me, not done me some kind of fucking favor. But since he hasn't maimed me or raped me, he expects some kind of gratefulness from me.
This ain't Sweden, though, and I'm not getting Stockholm Syndrome. Too bad for him. The unfortunate thing is, I do have to figure out a way to get free of this shithole, and he's my only access to the rest of this place.
Maybe if I'm simpering and submissive during dinner, he'll show me around the castle more, and I can find a way out.
Oh, who am I kidding—I'm Ellen Arizona. I can't simper. The closest I get to it is the face I make when I'm trying not to pass gas. So I just grit my teeth, glare at the fucker, and tell him, "I'm not playing along with your little game. If you want me to be nice to you, let me out of here. Trapping women isn't the way to get what you want."
He frowns at me, like I've just said something that makes no sense. "We needed somewhere private to discuss our destiny. This was the only option I can think of. Unless you had another pocket dimension in mind? I can bring you elsewhere, if you'd like. Simply tell me the location."
"A pocket what-now."
"Pocket dimension?" He cocks his head to the side, dark hair curling over his ears, looking genuinely confused. "Don't you know? You've enrolled at Cain University. The entire campus is in a pocket dimension, just like this house is. It's a kind of alternate reality, but itty bitty." The Serpent draws his hands together until they're really close, as if to demonstrate. "It can contain small villages and large buildings, but little else. Thus the word pocket. If you walk to the edge of the grounds there, you'll wind up back at the school again after a few miles spent in the woods.”
"Oh."
&
nbsp; I guess I'm less curious than I realized, because I never went to the edge of Cain University's campus. I just figured: grass, trees, horizon, no thanks—I'll stay inside, where the food is.
Speaking of food, I can't remember the last time I ate. That whole thing with Bernard happened sometime in the afternoon, and before that there was my meeting with Headmaster Shu, and in the morning all I ate was one of Eve's stupid fruit bowls that she thinks are so healthy, but how can something that makes you hungry again in thirty minutes be healthy, so now I'm really—
My stomach grumbles, as if on cue. Through the space in the door, the Black Serpent raises a brow, and offers his elbow. "I can escort you to dinner now. We should hurry. Some of the seven courses are best served cold, but others, well... they won't be tasty for long."
Resenting my gut, I check to make sure the shears are in place by wiggling a little. This just draws his eyes to my general bosom area, which is gross—he looks at them for way too long. But at least he hasn't gone full Jack yet or started yelling at me, so maybe I can play him a little instead of stabbing him to death. In fact, maybe my acting skills could come in handy here. This won't be the first time I've had to play along without the lines in front of me. I just hope I can be off book tonight.