I want to feel special. I want to be the only one who can make him feel the way I do about him. The only one who can give him what he needs. I love him. I want him to love me, too.
I just didn’t hear him say it. He only said I was his.
But does that mean the same?
I bite my lip, and Hunter’s brow arches up. His lips curl up into a coy smile. “What are you thinking about?”
I stop biting and look at him, feeling caught in the act. “Nothing?”
He laughs. “I can tell when you’re lying. You always blush.”
Of course, I can’t stop my cheeks from reddening now.
“C’mon, tell me,” he says, placing his hands on my hips and pulling me closer.
“Do you …. Do you love me?” I say, hesitantly.
It’s quiet after that. Hunter just stares at me. The silence is deafening.
It says enough.
Averting my eyes, my heart drops into my shoes.
“I …” he stammers.
“No. Don’t,” I say. “I don’t want you to feel forced to say it. Then it’s not real.”
Hunter puts a finger on my lips. “I don’t feel forced. I’m just baffled. But if I say it now, you’ll think it is.”
“Why are you baffled? It’s not weird, is it?” I ask, swallowing away the lump in my throat. Oh God. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. This is embarrassing.
“No, of course not.” He pulls me closer and puts his lips on my forehead. “I just can’t imagine someone could.”
I frown, confused. “But you’re Hunter Bane. Everybody …”
“Everybody what? Loves me? No. They only love my attitude, my looks, or what I offer. They don’t know me. They don’t like my personality, they don’t want to know about my problems with school. And they definitely don’t know anything about my family or my past.”
“And I do?”
He gazes down into my eyes with a look that could stop hearts. “A bit. At least, I hope you do enjoy my company.”
I chortle. “Of course I like you. I meant about the ‘past’ thing.”
“Right, about that … I still need to tell you something …” he clears his throat, and I suddenly feel anxious. “Remember those guys at the restaurant?”
“I don’t want to remember them, but I have no choice, really.”
“It’s been bugging me for some time now. I didn’t want to tell you this, because I was afraid you’d hate me for it. I just can’t live with it anymore.”
“What?” I say, chewing on my lip.
“I was there for a reason.”
I knew it couldn’t have been a coincidence he was there to save me.
“I was supposed to do an exchange with them,” he says with a sigh.
My eyes widen. “You what?”
“They’re customers of Alpha Psi. I was waiting for them to finish their meal, and I didn’t notice them leaving until I heard your scream.”
I’m shaking.
“Please don’t be mad,” he says, grabbing my arms. “I didn’t know they were going to do that. I would never have let them leave the restaurant if I had. And I refused to have anything to do with them after it happened.”
“I can’t believe it …” I stammer.
“Yeah, me neither. They’re probably pissed as hell after what happened. It wouldn’t surprise me if they got their revenge sometime soon. Especially when the boss finds out what I did to them.”
Hunter lifts his finger and brushes a strand of wet hair from my face, gently caressing my cheek.
“I will never let anyone hurt you,” he says. “Even if it means getting my ass whooped.”
I chuckle at his comment.
“So, you’re not mad?” he says.
“Maybe a little …” I say with a devilish grin and a squint. “I mean, you should have told me sooner. But I’m glad you did the right thing.”
Half a smile forms on his lips, and then he pulls me closer so he can kiss me on the forehead. “Good.”
Suddenly a gut-wrenching scream fills the halls.
Hunter’s eyes skid through the bathroom. I’m on high alert. We’re both looking at the door. My eyes widen.
Oh God.
I recognize that scream.
Evie.
Chapter 23
Unforeseen Casualty
Every bone in my body screams. I need to get to her. Now.
I almost want to run out naked, but Hunter holds me steady. “Put something on first,” he says.
“It’s Evie!” I yell.
“I know. I heard it too.” He turns off the shower, while I’m already grabbing the towels.
“I have to go to her!” I throw the towel to Hunter and start rubbing my own skin fairly hard, trying to get dry as fast as possible. “I’ve never heard her scream like that. Something’s wrong.”
I barely have my robe on before I run out the door looking for her. “Evie?” I shout her name, but she doesn’t respond. I look around the hallway and the notice the faint sound of her whimpers. She’s in the bathroom.
My breath hitches as I run down the hallway. Rushing to her, I pull open the door and call her name again. She stops crying for a second.
“Autumn?”
When I hear her voice, I let out a sigh of relief. At least I know she can still talk. “What happened?”
Squatting, I check each of the stalls until I find her feet, and then lean up against the door. She doesn’t say anything. She’s completely quiet, and it makes me scared.
“Evie? Open the door,” I say.
It’s silent for a few seconds, but then I hear her fiddle the door and I scramble back when she opens it. Tears are rolling down her cheeks. Toilet paper is crushed between her fingers, and her face is red all over. She looks miserable.
“What’s wrong?” I say, coming closer.
She blows her nose and throws the paper in the toilet. Something really, really bad has happened.
She almost never cries.
“C’mon, you can tell me,” I say softly.
Trembling, she lifts her head, her eyes watery and horrified. It looks like she’s seen a ghost. Or something worse.
I’m not even sure I still want to know.
But I have to be there for her. She looks terrible, and I know there’s something wrong. I have to brace myself for it.
I put my hands on her knees and caress the caps, trying to soothe her.
“I-It’s S-Scarlet …” she says, catching her breath. She’s having trouble breathing because of all the crying.
“S-she’s …. Oh God.” Her voice sounds croaky.
“What?” I say, grabbing her hands.
“I have to puke.”
She turns around, pulls the seat up and throws up right away. I turn to grab a few pieces of toilet paper so she can wipe her face. She sighs, barely able to keep breathing. I seriously start to wonder what happened.
“Please tell me what’s wrong, I’m worried about you,” I say, patting her back to calm her down.
“S-Scarlet. H-her room. D-dead.”
My heart stops. My breath is caught in my throat. All light disappears in front of my eyes. I can’t speak.
I just stammer. “W-what? What are you saying? Dead?”
Her eyes scream out in agony as she sinks to the floor, bawling her eyes out above the toilet she just puked in.
“G-go look,” she stutters.
I turn my head toward the door. Hunter’s standing there in his sweatpants. His eyes are big and his face is darkened. He heard it too.
I swallow back the bile rising up in my throat. It can’t be true.
No …
I run for the door, Hunter going in front of me. We both rush to Scarlet’s room. As we step inside, my blood turns frigid.
Scarlet’s lying in her bed. Her arms hang down over the bed. On the floor is a syringe. Empty. Below her face is a puddle of vomit mixed with foam still partially inside her mouth. Her eyes are dark, hollow. Life h
as left her long ago.
The true horror of what happened sinks in, and I collapse underneath my own weight. Sinking down to the floor, I hold onto the doorframe to feel grounded. It feels as though the world has been taken away from under my feet, and I’m falling into an endless pit.
“No …” Hunter mutters, walking closer.
He turns her body gently, inspecting her eyes, her face, her limbs. He’s careful, but I still can’t believe he actually has the courage to touch her.
Her. The body. The corpse.
She’s no longer Scarlet.
It’s just an empty shell. A nothingness.
I swallow away the rising bile, and try not to think about it, but seeing her body there, lifeless, is almost too much. It’s shocking. I can’t believe this is really happening. She’s dead.
And oh God, Evie found her.
I crawl back up.
“Where are you going?” Hunter asks me, raising his eyebrow like he’s still too busy with the examination.
“I need to be there for Evie,” I say, and I rush out the door, not realizing she’s already halfway across the hall. “What are you doing?” I say, confused, as I see her hold the wall as support while walking forward.
She doesn’t answer, but falls into my arms instead. Crying, she breaks apart. I shush her and caress her back. “It’s going to be okay.”
“No,” she whimpers.
She holds on so tight I can barely breathe. That, and I really feel like I need to throw up, too.
“Yes, it will. You have to keep it together.”
“She’s dead!” she screams. “I found her, dammit. I wasn’t sleeping here last night … I only came back this morning. I didn’t even know she was d …” Her breath gets caught in her throat. I pat her back to make her feel better, but of course I already know it won’t do any good.
I guess I’ll just ignore the fact that she just spilled that she slept at some other place last night. This is not the time and place to be asking about her relationships.
“I’m sorry …” I say, trying to concentrate on her sadness.
I don’t know what else to tell her. There’s nothing I can say that will make this all right. Scarlet’s dead. She’s never coming back.
I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t feel like I need to cry. All I am is shocked and horrified. That’s it.
But seeing Evie like this reminds me that she had a much stronger bond with Scarlet than I previously thought. It seems as though she really lost a friend. And I feel sorry for not knowing, for not being there in her place to find out about this so she wouldn’t have had to witness it on her own.
God. How she must have felt seeing Scarlet in that state. By herself. With nobody to lean on.
“This isn’t good …” Hunter mumbles, picking up the syringe from the floor carefully so as not to touch the needle.
I’m still calming Evie down, so it’s hard to look at what he’s doing.
“Fuck …” he says.
“What?” I say.
“Drugs.” He holds up the syringe for me to see, but I’m too far away to see what it means. I don’t have to; I believe him if he says it’s so.
“She OD’ed?”
He lets out a huge breath. “Yes and no.”
“Which is it? It can’t be both,” I say.
His jaw tightens, and he purses his lips. Hunter just stares at me, then flicks his eyes at Evie, and then back at me. He doesn’t even need to speak to let me know what he’s thinking. He wants to tell me something, but he doesn’t want her to hear.
“Evie …” I mutter.
She looks up, her eyes swollen and red. I don’t want to hurt her. She shouldn’t have to watch this. She shouldn’t have been here at all. It’s all my fault. If I’d been a good friend, she would be sleeping in her own bed in our room, and she never would have witnessed this.
“You should go back to our room.”
“B-but …”
I squeeze her shoulder. “It’s better if you’re somewhere you feel safe. Make yourself a cup of tea and crawl under the blanket.”
She just gazes at me, her lips pouty. She sniffs.
I smile at her to make her feel at ease. “It’s okay. Hunter and I will take care of it.”
“W-we can’t leave her like t-this,” she stammers, and she briefly glances at Hunter.
“We’ve got it covered,” I say.
“You should rest,” Hunter says.
After a few seconds of staring her down, she gives in. Nodding, she turns around and walks to our room, still holding onto the wall. This has devastated her.
Dammit.
Hunter covers Scarlet’s body with a blanket, careful not to leave any traces of him touching the evidence, except the syringe, which he places on the cabinet beside her bed.
I check to see if Evie’s gone into the room before turning around. Holding my arms, I brace myself for the news he’s about to share.
“That wasn’t just an OD,” he says.
I just wait for the next blow to come.
“She couldn’t have gotten this drug from us. We never, never, sell this.”
“What is it?”
“Heroin.”
Holy shit. Heroin? That drug that turns people’s lives completely upside down, scarring them for life?
“Maybe one of your guys made a mistake,” I say.
“They’re not my guys and they didn’t make a mistake,” he hisses.
“But she wouldn’t do that, would she?”
“No. She only used the drugs as a means to escape. It was a one- or two-time thing. Nothing big. She wasn’t an addict, and trust me, I know it when I see one; she wasn’t one of them.”
My breath is getting more ragged by the second. “Was she experimenting or something?”
“I don’t know …” he says.
“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe she took too much,” I whisper.
“No, absolutely not. She’d never take too much. She told me she had too much to live for, I remember her telling me at the party when I asked her if everything was okay. I needed to check if she wasn’t taking them to … you know …”
Suicide. He doesn’t want to say the word, but I know exactly what he’s thinking.
“She knew the risks perfectly well,” he continues. “She wouldn’t do that.”
I sigh, leaning against the doorframe. I still can’t believe she’s really dead. It’s so unreal.
“Something’s wrong. This isn’t even our product.” He points at the syringe. “We only deal in powders and pills.”
He checks her body, probably to see if he can find anything else, a mark of the needle or something, I don’t know. I have no clue why he’s doing it. As if it’s going to change anything about the situation. Scarlet is dead. It was drugs. They’re dealers.
The cops will inevitably get involved. And Hunter might go to jail.
No, not might. The question is when.
“She has bruises all over her body,” he says, and I’m ripped away from my thoughts.
“I thought you said she OD’ed? Bruises don’t come with that, do they?”
“They can, but this isn’t drug related. Look at the marks,” he says, pointing at her neck.
“No thanks, I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind.”
“Nobody would shoot heroin straight into their neck. Plus, these are really weird marks. They go all the way around her neck, centering on her esophagus. And they’re on her wrists, too,” he says, holding up her arm like a doll.
God, I feel sick to my stomach.
“Stop messing with her, please,” I say, holding my hand in front of my mouth. “You’re making me want to throw up.”
“Sorry,” he says. “But that’s the least of my worries right now. This should be a concern to everyone.”
“Why?”
“Because this wasn’t accidental. She was drugged with a dose far beyond normal.”
“Are you saying …” I can’t s
peak. My vocal cords are clamped shut.
“Someone forced his hand on her. It killed her.”
I shake my head. No. I can’t believe this. This can’t be true.
Someone couldn’t have murdered her.
Chapter 24
With Bad Comes Good
I’m staring at the carpet, oblivious to the people passing me. My mind is astray, memories of that day repeating over and over in my head. Scarlet’s contorted face. Her limp body. The puddle of goo drizzling from her mouth. The syringe. It’s just too much to deal with.
And I feel bad for feeling only half as much as all the other people who are here. I don’t even know what to feel.
Her friends are consoling each other, crying on each other’s shoulders. One of them is staring at a photograph standing on a pretty decorated cabinet, uttering words I can’t hear from so far away. I don’t even want to hear them.
As if talking to her photograph is going to make her magically come alive. As if it makes up for what some bastard did to her.
Misery. That’s all this room is.
I never imagined the dorm lounge could turn into the perfect room for a funeral reception.
It’s morbid, really. Knowing what went on here. Parties, drugs, probably some fucking, too. This couch I’m sitting on disgusts me, but I have nowhere else to go. Evie’s not here. She couldn’t take it. She really got close to Scarlet, which I didn’t see before. All those times they were studying must’ve opened her eyes.
And now it’s too late.
Well, at least she liked the girl. I don’t really know what to do, and every second I wonder what I’m doing here. I feel guilty for not crying, but I just can’t. I don’t feel anything. Just emptiness, hollowness.
Terror.
It sucks the life out of me like a light bulb blowing up, darkening the room. Too many horrific things are happening all at once, and they’re all connected. It’s terrifying the shit out of me.
Suddenly, I feel the need to run out and never look back. But it would be silly to do that. I have to be here. Somehow it feels like an obligation, my duty.
But spending one more minute on this couch will kill me.
Where else can I go? I don’t want to stand alone, looking like a goofball. It’s too crowded, and I feel uncomfortable just looking for an empty spot.
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