And…yep. Just fucking great.
There is only one open seat available, and it just so happens to be right next to the brooding, dark-haired asshole who’s burning hand I can still feel cuffing my wrist. He didn’t tighten his grip on me. He didn’t pull me after him. He did nothing but close his fingers around my skin, but it feels like he fucking branded me with his touch, and now I’m forever doomed by his mark.
His tall, ridiculous frame is too large and unwieldy to fit behind his desk; his legs stretch out into the aisle, his body set at an angle as he leans back in his chair, his eyes sparking with curiosity, tinged with the faintest suggestion of malevolence as I walk toward him.
He doesn’t breathe a word—way worse than if he was openly hostile. Slinging the straps of my backpack over the back of my chair, I grab my notebook, trying to override the churning dread in my stomach. My classmates have all been learning French for years now. I haven’t even heard the language spoken since my mother died. And I could never understand it even when she was alive.
“Alright, students,” Madame Fournier projects from the front of the class. Where were we? Simone, if you could continue—”
The teacher directs a girl on the front row to continue reading, or conjugating a verb or something. I can’t pay attention, because I’m suddenly accosted by a pungent, overpowering odor that hits the back of my nose and my taste buds all at once.
Oh…
Oh my god. It’s disgusting.
What the fuck is that?
I can actually taste it.
Musty, rotten, and vaguely fishy, the smell is so rank I have to fight the urge to lean over the edge of my desk and vomit.
How is no one else reacting to this stench right now? Quickly, I look around at the students sitting closest to me. None of them are paying attention to Madame Fournier. They’re all tensed, looking at the floor or at their hands, or sightlessly staring at their worksheets in front of them, unusually tense. The girl sitting to my left looks like she’s about to explode, her cheeks and the very tips of her ears burning a bright red.
Another wave of the fishy bouquet hits me, and…
Oh, for god’s sake.
It’s coming from inside my desk.
Everything falls perfectly into place. Obviously, someone’s put something disgusting and fetid inside my desk to fuck with me, and I know precisely who is responsible. Of course it was him. He knew I’d be sitting here. I wouldn’t be surprised if he forced whoever normally sits beside him out of their desk, so he could have the pleasure of a front row seat when I lifted up the lid on the desk and discovered whatever rotten thing he’s dumped inside.
Mother…fucking…asshole.
What am I supposed to do now? Am I supposed to sit here and tolerate the reek coming from inside of my desk? Am I supposed to get angry? Cry?
I don’t think Wren really cares, so long as I do something. He just wants a reaction, and preferably a violent one, if I’m reading this situation correctly.
Well, fuck him. He isn’t getting shit out of me.
I lean against the lid of the desk, breathing through my mouth, listening to Madame Fournier. Scribbling away at a mile a minute, I make notes of all the exercises I need to catch up on and all of the chapters I need to read if I want to have a hope of catching up with the already advanced class.
Colonel Stillwater knows I don’t speak French. My mother always wanted to teach me, she tried to speak French at home when I was little, as well as English, but my father beat her senseless for even suggesting such a thing. And now he expects me to learn the language from scratch and attain an excellent grade, otherwise there’s bound to be horrific consequences. It’s this thought that distracts me from the putrid smell that assaults my senses every few minutes and keeps me focused on the task at hand.
And all the while, Wren Jacobi stews.
I feel his displeasure like you might feel a hand on the back of your neck, pushing down on you, trying to force you to your knees. He’s not happy that I’m avoiding his little gift. Not happy in the slightest. He wants me to open up the desk and recoil in horror. He wants to me make a scene, and all I’m giving him is a serious case of hives.
The minutes tick by painfully slowly. Outwardly, I’m single minded, focused only on Madame Fournier and the complicated, confusing nonsense she writes down on the board. Internally, I am a mess. I’m so angry, I’m vibrating with rage. Every time Wren twitches or shifts in his chair, it’s all I can do not to flinch away from the bastard.
I’m not afraid of him.
Maybe I should be.
I intend on taking my time and figuring out if he really is the enemy before I decide if I should treat him as a threat, though. By the time the bell rings, my gorge is rising despite breathing through my mouth. Carina promised to wait for me by the main entrance between periods, so I grab my papers, my pens, notebook and my bag and I bolt for the door without looking back. As I tear out of the door, my heart a clenched fist in the hollow of my throat, I can still feel Wren Jacobi simmering away on the back row.
Chapter Six
WREN
“THERE HAVE TO be consequences, man. Without consequences, how will any of them know their place?” Dashiell hits the pipe I just passed him, holding the smoke in his lungs, lips pressing together as he frowns at the naked chick undulating on his computer screen. Other guys might save their private sex cam sessions until they had a moment alone, but Dash has no qualms about enjoying the services he pays for in front of others. Dash has very few qualms in general.
His dick is hard, which isn’t out of the ordinary. He gets hard whenever he smokes pot. Some weird, fucked up wiring issue in his brain. The girl touching her pussy on the screen is purely coincidental.
Exhaling, he lets out an insubstantial puff of smoke, most of it having already absorbed into his lungs. His preppy chinos and his grey sweater make him look like he’s about to head off to church. His blood shot eyes make him look like he just arrived, fresh off the boat from hell. “I don’t think Carina likes me.” He points the end of the pipe at me. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but whenever I enter a room, she always seems to be leaving it. If I were a suspicious guy, I’d think I might have upset her.”
Hah. Sick bastard. Yeah, Dash definitely upset Carina and he knows it. These mind games he likes to play are so deeply engrained in his very id that he sometimes forgets that he doesn’t need to play them within the walls of our home, though. I grab the pipe from him, angrily packing the weed down into the bowl. When I touch the flame of the lighter to it, I pull too harshly, sending a jet of scalding hot, thick and highly potent smoke scorching down the back of my throat.
I need to cough, but I won’t. I refuse to let myself. I force myself to ride out the maddening, desperate need with a sour-feeling grin plastered on my face. My eyes sting when I eventually breathe out. “Think you’d better give that one a wide berth before you decide to fuck with her again,” I advise. “Carina’s fiery. She’ll clip your balls for you if you’re not careful.”
“Aww. You worried about my balls, Jacobi?” Dash ruffles my hair, fucking up the hap-hazard, behind-the-ear tuck I had going on. I growl half-heartedly. There are certain things Pax can get away with, like eating on my fucking bed and getting food everywhere. He wouldn’t live to tell the tale if he tried to fucking ruffle my hair, though. I have very specific dynamics with both of my friends, and I don’t like one to bleed through into the other. That’s how shit gets confusing.
“Your balls are of no concern to me, jackass. They’re probably gonna rot and fall off of their own accord any day now. I’m more concerned about keeping a low profile. Last thing we need is Harcourt siccing her minions on to us again.”
Dashiell throws himself back against the couch, absently grabbing the end of his dick through his pants and giving it a squeeze. He frowns at the girl on his laptop, who’s now fully fingering herself, trying to incite some sort of a reaction out of him. He scowls, irritated. S
napping the laptop closed, he slides the MacBook across the coffee table, nearly knocking over a fake potted plant he bought last week in an attempt to ‘brighten up the place.’
“Fine. I’m bored of women, anyway,” he announces. “You ever fucked a guy, Jacobi?”
That’s none of his damn business. However, I have no reason to hide anything from anyone. I’ve been calculating and careful about every single move I’ve made since I was nine years old. It’s exhausting, having to plot and plan absolutely everything you ever do, but it also means I have very few regrets. How can I regret something if I’ve weighed all of the consequences and deemed them acceptable before taking action? “Tried everything at least once, Lord Lovett. No sense in leaving any stone unturned, right?”
If he asks me if I liked having a dick thrust up my ass, I’m prepared to break my ‘no need to lie to the friends’ rule, just this once. Or at least bend it a little. He doesn’t ask that, though. He nods, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a look of surprise as he arranges himself against the couch cushions. “I might give it a shot,” he says. “Might liven up the rest of the year. My mother’d have a fucking heart attack if I brought home a boyfriend.” He laughs maniacally, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his throat as he closes his eyes, throwing his arm over his face. “Don’t take this personally, but I can’t see that fucking you would be any fun, Jacobi. You’re too moody. You look like you bite.”
I huff out a sharp bark of laughter. “You bet your fucking ass I do.”
Dash raises his arm, opening one eye so he can peek at me through the crack. “You fuck angry, too, don’t you? Must be terrifying to have you looming over a person, all fire and brimstone and death, knowing you’re about to be destroyed from the inside out.”
“I’ll have you know I’m a very tender lover.”
Dash nearly chokes to death on a scathing fit of laughter. “Bullshit. You wouldn’t know tender if it leapt up and knocked out your front fucking teeth.”
“That’s exactly the kind of tender I’m talking about.”
He smiles, flashing two rows of very white, very straight teeth. If Lord Lovett Snr and Lady Lovett had cared for their son in the littlest bit, they would have spared him the torture of braces when he was a kid and left his teeth a little crooked. With the set of perfect pearly whites on him now, he’s completely flawless. Makes for a classically handsome profile, but it’s also stripped his face of anything really interesting to look at. “Whatever you say, Dark Lord. Is that how it’s gonna be with your little French girl, then? Caresses that bruise? Kisses that bleed?”
Kisses that bleed?
I nearly drop the pipe I was about to use but manage to close my hand around it just before it crashes down onto the glass coffee table. The image that phrase just brought to mind has me practically panting, my lips burning, the roof of my mouth tingling like mad. I don’t enjoy the taste of blood, but the thought of biting Elodie hard enough to break the skin…
“No. I’m not interested in that with her.” I say it like I mean it. I sound convincing as hell. So then why does it feel like I just dumped a shit load of good MDMA down my throat, and the anticipation is building inside of me as I wait to start rolling? Makes no fucking sense.
Just like always, Dash grunts, making it clear that he knows me better and he doesn’t believe me for one hot second.
“Her father’s top brass. I’d be careful if I were you,” he says, firing the warning I just gave him right back at me. “You know what’ll happen if your father finds out you’ve soiled one of his college’s precious daughters. There’ll be hell to pay and then some.”
Since I think through all of my actions so thoroughly, I’ve obviously thought about this. I’ve done plenty of research on Colonel Jason Andrew Stillwater, and I’ve gotten a decent lay of the land. Luckily for me, Elodie’s father is not a well-liked man. My own father, when I briefly mentioned Colonel Stillwater during a phone call last week, called him a self-righteous, overbearing cunt. And my father likes everyone. Apart from me, that is.
“Don’t worry that pretty little head of yours, Lovett. I got everything under control. I know when to say when. I’ll have my fun and then I’ll call it a day. Got college on the horizon, anyway. We’re all better off saving our energy for when the real adventures begin next year.”
“Wren. Be realistic,” Dash chides. “You’re already in it up to your neck with this girl. The way you’re brooding around her is classic Jacobi obsession material. And she didn’t open the desk, which I know is just driving you insane.”
I wish he wasn’t right about that. I shouldn’t be so bent out of shape over the fact that Elodie didn’t discover the mangled frog’s legs I planted in her desk. It was a schoolboy tactic, childish as fuck, but I took one look at her the other night and I knew she’d be squeamish. If she hadn’t figured it out beforehand and she’d just lifted the lid on that desk, she’d have lost her freaking mind. She robbed me of that experience, and yeah, I’m salty as fuck about it. “Don’t worry. I have a plan,” I say.
“Fucking hell. Sounds ominous,” Dash groans. His accent always makes cursing sound way more fun. “You’re not planning on breaking into her room, are you? Because the last time you did that—”
I light the weed in the pipe, sucking the thick, sweet smoke into my mouth, then blow it at Dash, who sits up, alert. He holds his hand, gesturing for a hit of his own. The guy doesn’t know how to be embarrassed. If he did, he’d do something to hide the tent his erect cock is making out the front of his pants. And I’m not talking two-man adventure racing tent. I’m talking a palatial eight-man tent with a separate fucking living area. His dick must be fucking killing him. “You can’t change the subject with Mary Jane,” he admonishes, taking a deep, heavy hit from the pipe. “My short-term memory’s bomb proof. I remember the shit you got yourself into the last time you broke into a girl’s room. And that room? God, you’ve gotta be fucking insane. If you wanna fuck the little French girl, then do it and get it out of your system, post haste. Anything else, and, well…” His eyes roll back into his head, his eyelids fluttering closed. “Anything else would be an unmitigated disaster for you, my friend. You know it’s true.”
Chapter Seven
ELODIE
NUN ELIZABETH MARY Whitlock was hanged for suspected witchcraft in the rectory of Wolf Hall’s tiny gothic church in 1794. I learn this on Wednesday, while exploring the old tumbledown building with Carina after our last class of the day. We sift through piles of broken glass from the shattered windows, the shards worn smooth and opaque like colorful old sea glass, and Carina finds an ancient rosary. It’s beautiful, the beads alternating between what looks like labradorite and solid silver, and on the end a large, delicate crucifix dangles, cast in gold. We’re both too scared that it might have belonged to Elizabeth Mary Whitlock to keep it, so we bury it in the crowded graveyard at the rear of the church next to a headstone so old that the lettering carved into the stone has worn away to nothing.
On Thursday, Carina guides me to a dark, cramped crawlspace at the back of a cleaning closet at the end of our hallway and urges me inside. At first, I’m suspicious. Carina, with her easy smile and her friendly, gregarious laughter, treats me like we’ve been friends our entire lives. I’ve never met a girl like her. An ugly part of me—the part that’s been the subject of plenty of ridicule and abuse at the hands of other female students in the past—thinks she might be setting me up for some epic prank.
I decide to trust my gut, though, and I climb inside the black, tight space, holding my breath to keep from inhaling in the dust, and I scramble forward on my belly until I’m spat out inside a huge, cavernous attic with a bank of small, dirty windows overlooking the lawn and the turning circle in front of the academy.
Carina whoops, delighted, as I explore the abandoned, cluttered attic, watching me with open glee as I scavenge through travel chests and rotten cardboard boxes, amazed by the treasures I find inside.
; On Friday, the girls from the third floor—Pres, the redhead, Rashida, Chloe, Loren, and even Damiana all gather in Carina’s room, which is at least twice the size of mine, and we all sprawl out on beanbags, pillows, and cushions, and watch Love, Actually, which everyone’s amused to learn I haven’t seen before. We share popcorn. We talk about our respective countries, our childhoods, and our differing yet oh-so-similar upbringings, and everything feels both new and very much the same.
I hated the idea of coming back to the States. I despised the idea of coming to New Hampshire, away from my friends and my routine in Tel Aviv, but now that I’m here and I’m actually making friends? Fuck, I really miss my old friends, but I’m beginning to think this might have all been for the best now. I’m enjoying my classes, and even Damiana seems to have defrosted a little. The only potential thorns in my side are the Riot House boys, and not a one of them has even so much as looked in my direction since Tuesday.
Best of all, Colonel Stillwater is on the other side of the fucking world. My room is as cold and drafty as a morgue, and the lights flicker every time I turn them on. My bed is lumpy and uncomfortable as fuck, but I haven’t slept this well in…well, ever.
Wren aside, I’d say, as first weeks at new schools go, this one’s been fairly successful.
Saturday morning arrives, and my bedroom door crashes open with an earsplitting BANG! I hurl myself out of bed, heart slamming in my chest, adopting an automatic fighting stance that has Carina, dressed in a bright orange jumpsuit, arching her right eyebrow at me like I’m certifiably insane. “Whoa, now, Jackie Chan. What the hell is this all about? Are you about to karate chop my neck or something?”
I take a calming breath, straightening out of my defense stance as quickly as possible, laughing nervously under my breath. “Ahh, y’know. Military father. He used to drill me harder than he drilled his men.” This is not a lie. It’s the truth. Just not the whole truth. She’s been amazing and welcoming, but I don’t know Carina well enough to be spilling that shit just yet. Maybe I’ll never know her well enough. The only person I told my deepest, darkest secrets to back in Tel Aviv was Levi.
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