by Lucy Auburn
The Pawn
Coleridge Academy Elites: Book One
Lucy Auburn
Copyright © 2019 by Lucy Auburn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Author’s Note
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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
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
50. It continues…
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Also by Lucy Auburn
About the Author
Author’s Note
This book contains triggering content, including suicide, past physical abuse, bullying, mentions of an off-page sexual assault, a sexual assault attempt, and some sexual content.
Reader discretion advised. Please read with care.
This book ends on a cliffhanger.
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Chapter 1
There are wolves at Coleridge Academy.
Four of them, in fact. They live in a large enclosure that’s fenced on three sides, the fourth side jutting up against the back of the visitors center to give people a better view. Children and adults alike press their noses against the glass to marvel at them.
There’s something macabre yet poetic about housing four apex predators on the same grounds as the rich and spoiled teenage children of this country’s most corrupt CEOs and politicians. If there was any justice in the world, they’d leave the doors open and let the wolves tear through the whole flock of them so we could start anew.
“They look bigger than I thought they’d be,” Wally says, standing just behind my shoulder, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “I didn’t get the chance to see them when I came here last time. This place was under construction.”
“The enclosure?” My mother, on my other side, clutches her purse tight beneath her arm, frail body even frailer than it was just a month ago.
“No, it was the visitors center they were working on. Apparently the wood floors and marble countertops are new.”
Mom doesn’t look very reassured. “I hope it’s safe to have them here, so close to the dorms. They can’t get out, they?”
“I don’t think so, Mom.”
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” a voice chimes in from behind us, male and pleasant with a European accent that’s both French and British. A shudder goes through me at the sound of it, starting at the base of my spine and rising to the backs of my arms until all my hair is on end.
I know this voice.
“The wolf enclosure is regularly inspected, and the wolves themselves are kept well-fed. They’re captive bred and born, used to humans and gentle in nature. One once licked my head. The worst thing about them is their breath.”
We turn towards the voice. I steel myself, heart already in my throat, fingers curling towards my palms. It’s an effort to remember to be calm, stuff my instant reactions down, and force my face into neutral curiosity instead of scowling like I want.
Any average girl who saw Lukas Dupont in person for the first time would be taken aback by his handsomeness. At an improbable six feet tall, with light blonde hair long enough to be pushed back from his forehead, steady honey-brown eyes, plush lips with a cupid’s bow, a perfect strong jaw, and flawless pale skin, he looks like he walked off a runway to Milan on his way here. The designer sweater and cuffed dark wash pants he’s wearing over his Coleridge-Academy-issued collared shirt only add to the impression.
I’m not an average girl, so I don’t quite swoon, but even I find myself struck by him. I’ve seen Lukas Dupont in a hundred well-lit social media photos, watched videos of him in the background of his diplomat father’s appearances and in advertisements from Harrington Foods, boasting their five generations of running as family-owned business. Seeing someone through a screen is different than meeting them in the flesh, though.
The excitement I feel must be what rushes through a predator’s veins as they stalk prey. Of all my targets, Dupont is the most elusive, the most private of the Elites. His family knows how to avoid rumors and scandal from spreading. If you cut him open, he would bleed the bluest of blues. That’s why I know so little about him, and why he intrigues me so much.
My quickening heartbeat and the way blood rushes to my face and neck when he looks at me has nothing to do with his incredible attractiveness or charm. And the subtle smile he flashes, the way his eyes take me in, is a façade—he’s not really seeing me.
Boys like him, born into privilege and cocooned from hardship, never see anything truthfully at all. There’s too much wool over their eyes and money in their veins.
He may be handsome. He may even be polite, charming, and easy to be around. But I loathe him.
I loathe him so much that I wish for nothing more than the freedom to reach out and strike him down, right here, right now.
The hardest part of pulling all this off will be the waiting. Coiled, unmoving in the grass, preparing to strike when my prey is in reach.
“Lukas Dupont,” he tells my mother, holding out a broad hand that she takes in both her thin, frail ones. “I volunteered to be your tour guide today when the student who normally gives them fell ill.” His eyes travel to Wally, then me. “You’re the two other students who missed ori
entation, then?”
“Oh, no,” Wally says quickly, or at least as quickly as his thick Virginia drawl will allow for. He shoves out his hand, and I wince at how calloused, broad, and thick his fingers look as Lukas amenably accepts the handshake with his own smooth hand. “I’m Wally Johnson, friend of the family.”
“My daughter is the incoming student,” my mother says proudly, putting an arm around my shoulders even though she has to reach up to do it. “She got in at the last minute. Delayed enrollment. Brenna here is quite the clever girl.”
I am, I admit, just not in the way she thinks. My grades have always been terrible. If my mom had paid attention to things like report cards instead of leaving so much of our lives up to my now-absent father, she would know this.
The truth is, I’m here at Coleridge Academy because an anonymous stranger somehow got me enrolled so I could act as a kind of firsthand observer of what’s going on here on campus and enact my revenge. I’ve got a list of boys, the privileged, shitty, rich as sin kind of boys, and I’ll be marking them off one by one as I expose them publicly for all their misdeeds. I’ll use Legacies, the long-running blog devoted to shining a light on boys like them, to do it—once I dig up all their dirty secrets.
It won’t make my brother Silas come back to life, and it won’t change what they did to him—or what, ultimately, he did to himself.
But it will snuff out the fire that lives inside me now, the one that threatens to burn me alive if I don’t find fuel for my hatred and anger.
“Let me look at my paperwork,” Lukas says, pulling out his smart phone, which is of course the latest model. I watch him closely, hungry to know everything about him, to pull him apart like he pulled apart my brother. “Ah, here you are. Brenna Cooke, transferring from Wayborne High School in Virginia, 3.7 GPA.”
“That’s me,” I say, ignoring the pained expression on Wally’s face, the way my mother twists her fingers together. I made both of them agree that I wouldn’t be a Wilder girl while I was here; being known as Silas’s sister would blow my cover immediately. Not that they know about my ulterior motive. “Are we waiting for someone?”
“One other student,” Lukas says absentmindedly, his eyes on his phone screen. “We were supposed to have three, but apparently our third dropped out completely, so it’s just you and one of our legacies. He should be here in a bit.”
The whole time he speaks in that smooth European accent, Lukas doesn’t take his eyes off his phone screen for even the barest glance in my direction. I bite back the desire to tell him to look at me, pay attention to me, see what you’ve done to my family. I’m not here to be noticed. I’m the snake the grass.
By the time he feels my bite, it’ll be too late. The fangs will have pierced his veins and left poison behind in his bloodstream.
It’s the least he deserves for the part he played in my twin brother’s death.
“Brenna?” Wally frowns and puts his hand on my shoulder, squeezing just a little too tight for comfort. “You need another headache pill?”
I give him my best nothing-to-see-here smile. “I’m fine. The migraines are gone, I swear.”
He’s frowning still, every bit the hen-pecking worrier that my own mother has failed to be. “Well, if you need any, I have plenty of Advil in my jacket pocket. And I packed some in your suitcase, along with your prescription.”
Of course he did. Wally has put every bit of energy he has into keeping me alive, ever since that fateful day after the storm when we cut my brother down from that tree and laid his body on the wet ground, never to get up again.
“I’m fine,” I tell him again, my smile growing tight. I ignore the way Lukas looks up from his phone to raise his brows at us; I also ignore the fact that my mother is drifting off, her attention moving back towards the wolf enclosure, ignorant as always of what’s really going on around her. “You should worry about yourself. That truck of yours might not make it back to Virginia in one piece.”
“Ol’ Bess will be fine.” He waves my concerns away. “She was just acting up in front of you to make me look bad. As soon as I get her started and point her towards home, her engine’ll purr like a newborn kitten.”
“Fuck.” The voice from behind us is deep, crude, and louder than our quiet conversation. “Lukas, if I ever start to sound like that much of a hick, tell me.”
The source of the voice moves past us towards Lukas, who reaches out a hand to shake only to be pulled into a full-blown tight hug. Wally frowns in the general direction of the new student who just shit-talked his accent, and I don’t blame him.
Based on everything I know about Tanner Connally, he’s the biggest, most obnoxious asshole of the Elites. As four rich boys who rule over their peers, they’re mostly put-together and quiet, but not Tanner. It’s a miracle he’s even one of them.
Everything he does is loud, dangerous, against the law, or all three. His Instagram has thousands of admirers who follow him just for the shirtless selfies he takes when stripping off his mud-covered shirts after off-roading, or diving into the pool in his family’s Kentucky ranch, or just when he doesn’t feel like wearing a shirt. He has a devil-may-care grin and a wicked penchant for profanity and cheating that would’ve gotten him kicked out of his last boarding school if his dad weren’t a senator.
A fool might believe there’s enough dirt on Tanner to bury him forever. But based on what I’ve discovered about him in the research I did prior to coming to Coleridge, he’s impossible to destroy. Everything rolls off his back; every story about him gets buried. Of all my targets, he’ll be the hardest to pin down.
And the one, next to his ringleader, I’ll enjoy destroying the most. It’ll be easy, too—everything I’ve found out about Tanner has revealed that he’s a complete idiot.
He didn’t have to work hard to get here.
Not like Silas did.
Tanner Connally is a know-nothing rich boy. And it shows in the way he looks down on us.
Wally grumbles, “I didn’t realize my accent was that heavy.”
“I’m just fucking with ya,” Tanner says, holding his hand out towards Wally. “It’ll be nice to have a kid like you here at this stuffy Yankee school with me. I swear half these fuckers pretend like they don’t know what ‘y’all’ means.”
Though Wally shakes his hand amenably enough, his smile is tight and forced. It’s clear that Tanner was making fun of him and is barely putting any effort into pretending otherwise. “I’m not actually going here. That’d be my pal Brenna. And you are...”
A smile bright enough and charming enough to win half the votes in the state of Kentucky breaks out on Tanner’s face. It makes the dark freckles stand out on his tanned skin and emphasizes his light hazel eyes, which are set off by the shaved dark hair on his head. “George Connally, but everyone calls me Tanner on account of how badly they want to skin me and turn me into tanned hides the instant they meet me.”
Lukas sighs, the sound long-suffering. “Most people don’t get that joke, so I wish you’d stop telling it.” To me, he says, “Tanner is his given name.”
I force myself to ignore the tingle that breaks out on my skin at Lukas’s gaze, or the way I feel when Tanner looks over at me, bright hazel eyes alight with mischief. I can see the amusement in their expressions and know what it means.
They think I’m some backwoods, ignorant hick.
They think I’m nothing.
“I know what a tannery is,” I say, feeling defensive. “I’m not an idiot.”
“None of the scholarship student kids here are stupid,” Tanner says casually, pricking me with the fact that his rich, privileged eyes saw through my department store outfit the instant he walked in the room. “Y’all have to actually get in here through merit, unlike the rest of us, who will booze our way through school. And throw the best parties.” Absurdly, he winks at me, and even more absurdly I feel a blush rise from my collarbone to my cheeks in response. The angry fire in me burns higher. “Which is mostly what y
ours truly brings to the table, so don’t expect to see me in the library.”
Despite myself, I respond, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I mean for it to come out acerbic, but I pull back at the last second and it turns into teasing. Tanner chuckles, and an instant later bile rises in the back of my throat. I hate myself for making him laugh. I hate myself even more for how hot my skin is and how fast my heart beats in the presence of just two of the four boys I’ve vowed to destroy.
As the fire burns inside my chest and threatens to turn itself against me, I reach over and squeeze the base of the thumb on my right hand as hard as I dare, until pain flares in the two scars there. The pain centers me, cools me, and reminds me of my purpose.
It’s one thing to get along with them enough to learn their secrets.
It’s another thing entirely to actually enjoy their handsome faces, the musky colognes that swirl around them, the way their non-uniform clothing falls on their impossibly muscular bodies. These boys may look and act like perfect runway models, and they may have impressive bank accounts and promising futures, but I know them for what they truly are.