The Professor

by Alexandria Clarke

  “She’s hiding something, Nicole,” he announced over my emotional meltdown. “We’ve been married for nearly twenty years now and not once has she ever breathed a word about the Black Raptor Society. Nevertheless, I know that something is going on between her and Catherine Flynn. I see the patterns. Everything’s fine one day, and the next, she’s a nervous wreck. I know I shouldn’t, but I snoop. I’ve seen the phone calls. I’ve seen the emails. She is hiding something, and the only way I know how to get it out of her is if she sees you.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “What good is my presence going to do?”

  “She cares about you,” Henry insisted. His grip tightened around the handle of his mug. “I know it may not seem that way. I know she’s been absent for the grand majority of your life, but you don’t live with her. You don’t know her. I do, and I know that she cares about you. If she sees you and your boyfriend, she’s going to realize that whatever the hell she’s doing with Catherine Flynn is damaging to you. She will not compromise your safety. She’ll finally tell me everything she knows.”

  “Catherine Flynn killed my father,” I reminded Henry. “She tried to kill my mother. Why the hell would my mother be in contact with Catherine Flynn?”

  “That, my dear, is exactly what I would like to find out.”

  “And what makes you so sure that seeing me would make her tell you about it?”

  “Call it gut instinct,” replied Henry, peering into his half-empty mug. “It’s been pretty reliable for most of my career. This tea is terrible, by the way.”

  “Then stop drinking it. Did my aunt know?”

  He pushed the mug away. “Did your aunt know what?”

  “That my mother was alive.”

  “I believe she did.”

  I sagged against the countertop. My entire childhood had been one giant, well-crafted lie. “How much did she know? About my mother?”

  “Natasha made it clear that she was in danger, and that if you remained with her, you would be in danger as well,” explained Henry. “To my knowledge, your aunt has no idea that the Black Raptor Society exists. I imagine that Natasha kept this information from her in order to safeguard her as well.”

  I slid down the cabinet, coming to rest on the kitchen floor, my knees curled up to my chest. “My aunt told me she died of a brain aneurysm.”

  Henry nodded in acknowledgement. “Easy to explain. Quick, fatal, and inexplicable.”

  “Because a fake death should be as convenient as possible,” I snapped. The way Henry spoke irked me. His tone was always so factual, business-like almost, as if we weren’t discussing the dismantlement of everything I’d known growing up.

  The legs of Henry’s chair scraped against the linoleum as he stood up from the kitchen table. He approached me, crouched down, and took my hands in his own rough, calloused ones. “Forgive me. I know that this is hard and that the world has not been kind to you. My only intention here to to make things better, but I need your help to do that.”

  I said nothing but made no attempt to distance myself from Henry again. Despite his outwardly gruff appearance, there was a soothing element to him.

  “From what I’ve gathered, you’re in a rut anyway,” he went on. “You need a safe place to land. From the looks of it, your boyfriend could use a few days to recuperate. Our house is out in the country, not quite off the grid but close enough to keep you safe. It would be a perfect place to plan your next move against the Raptors, and with my help, we could be done with all of this strife in a matter of days.”

  The soft patter of footsteps on the staircase saved me the hassle of having to answer right away. I wiped my face, suddenly aware that my cheeks were wet, and Henry helped me to my feet. Eileen appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, clad in a night robe and fluffy slippers.

  “I thought I heard voices,” she began. She caught sight of Henry and drew her robe more tightly around her. “Who are you?”

  “It’s okay, Eileen,” I said before Eileen’s thought process could advance into panic at the notion of a strange man in her house. “He’s a friend. I think.”

  “A friend indeed,” confirmed Henry in his low rumble. “My name is Henry Danvers, ma’am. I’m Nicole’s stepfather.”

  The declaration of his title seemed incorrect. It made it sound as though we were familiar with each other, when in reality, Henry felt more like an apparition than a physical being. Despite my wariness, I waved wearily at Eileen as a voucher of Henry’s innocence.

  “I thought your mother had passed away,” said Eileen, eyeing Henry uncertainly.

  “Welcome to the club,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Mrs. O’Connor, I’m so sorry to barge into your home like this,” Henry cut in, bowing his head in a gesture of respect. “I’m simply trying to help Nicole out of this mess.”

  Eileen’s gaze drifted toward me. I simply lifted my shoulders. “We could use all the help we can get.”

  “All right, then.” The tension in Eileen’s stance dissipated, and she stepped into the kitchen. “Do you need anything, Mr. Danvers?”

  “I’m not sure, ma’am,” said Henry. He looked at me. “Do I need anything, Nicole?”

  I understood the underlying meaning of the question. He was asking again if I would meet my mother. I glared at him for a moment longer before conceding.

  “He needs to stay here with us tonight,” I said to Eileen. “We can’t leave now. Wes needs to rest. We’ll head out first thing in the morning.”

  A look of relief spread across Henry’s face, and I realized that some part of him had expected me to refuse his help. “Dawn tomorrow,” he agreed.

  As I passed Eileen on my way to the living room, I patted her shoulder in what I hoped was a comforting manner. “Go back to bed, Eileen. We’ll be fine.”

  “Are you sure, dear?” she asked under her breath, her gaze still fixed on Henry. I nodded. “All right, then. Get some sleep.”

  Eileen retreated, heading back upstairs. Henry followed me into the living room, watching as I kicked off my shoes and settled into the massive recliner at the foot of Wes’s slumbering figure.

  “You get the floor,” I told Henry, pulling the handle to flatten out the recliner. As it lay me down, I pilfered one of the hand-woven blankets that covered Wes and wrapped it around myself.

  Henry grinned, leaning against the arch that led from the living room to the entryway. “Though I thank you for your unwavering warmth and hospitality, I prefer to keep watch.”

  With that, he turned to face the window near the front door, his shoulder blades dropping as he clasped his hands behind his back in a stance that was vaguely militaristic. My eyelids drooped, the events of the day finally overwhelming me. I slipped off into a haze of dreams, where the image of Henry standing at attention lingered.

  Meanwhile, in an underground clubhouse hidden beneath the Waverly library, Lauren Lockwood paced back and forth from one end of her makeshift cell to the other, contemplating the blocked door. Once, Lauren considered this room cozy. It was similar to her own dorm room, with a set of bunk beds against one wall and a soft, downy rug to cushion the click of her heeled boots across the stone floor. She had stayed in this room when the noise and stress of student life during midterms or finals got to be too loud. It had been comforting to get away from the rest of the campus and to spend some time with her own thoughts, but now her solitude highlighted her betrayal of the society. A sturdy, wood chair—no doubt purloined from the library above—was wedged beneath the doorknob outside, ensuring Lauren’s captivity.

  How had it all gone wrong so quickly? She had always been so cautious, paranoid even, to avoid discovery, but it was difficult sometimes to lie to the people who, for the past two years, had been her closest friends and family. The Black Raptor Society wasn’t just a club. It was a community. In order to join, you had to be deemed worthy of the club’s exclusivity by the current members. Lauren had already had an in. She was Black Raptor royalty; she carried the
surname of one of the original Raptor members. She was the princess of the society. Even on her first campus tour of Waverly University, she felt the weight of the society’s expectations on her shoulders, passed on to her from her father and her older siblings. It had been her turn to accept the torch and lead her peers into their next stages of success. Instead, she’d dunked the torch in a barrel of gasoline, tossed it behind her, and sprinted off, leaving the other members of the society with a raging conflagration and no fire extinguisher.

  The Black Raptor Society was collapsing from the inside. A rift had been cleaved between the members. There were those whose only desires were to uphold and epitomize the society’s once noble pillars—loyalty, integrity, passion, wisdom, and strength—and there were those who had compromised the pillars in favor of Catherine Flynn’s crude style of leadership. Lauren’s hands trembled at the thought. From the time she was little, Lauren had feared her aunt. The woman had never exuded an ounce of warmth, and since Lauren was old enough to understand what mental illness was, she strongly suspected that Catherine’s cold, indifferent demeanor was the result of an undiagnosed condition. Catherine’s go-to method for problem solving was murder, which felt excessive to say the least.

  Lauren went over the details of her detainment in her head. With her father’s help, Lauren had managed to lure Catherine’s followers away from Nicole’s trail, feeding the Raptors false information on Nicole’s whereabouts and leading them on a fabricated raid of an abandoned supermarket west of the Waverly campus. The Raptors came up short, of course, and though Lauren faked her disappointment well enough, she did not expect her aunt’s ardent guard dogs to react quite so aggressively. Ashton Brooks, who had become Catherine’s right-hand man ever since she’d ordered the death of the previous one, had made his aggravation clear:

  “Damn it, Lockwood!” he’d growled. He kicked aside a toppled shopping cart to direct his rage at Lauren. Four other Raptors stood closely by, watching their superiors confront one another. “Where is this bitch?”

  “Get out of my face,” spat Lauren, standing her ground as Brooks loomed over her. “All of my information led to this spot. She must have set us up.”

  “Or you missed something,” he challenged. “Admit it, Lauren. You haven’t been at the top of your game lately. You getting cold feet or something? Not living up to your family’s expectations?”

  Lauren glared up into Brook’s face. “Back off, Ashton.”

  He sneered and stepped closer. “What’s your aunt going to say when I tell her that you wasted our time tonight and that Nicole Costello has once against vanished into thin air? You know, Lauren, I’m started to wonder if you’ve gone soft on us. Has the Raptor’s pretty little princess decided she doesn’t want to be royalty anymore?”

  Behind her, Lauren heard one of the accompanying Raptors snigger. “Shut up, Wickes,” she ordered without looking at the culprit. Though Lauren was younger than the others, her last name ensured that she outranked them, and she sure as hell wouldn’t let them think that they could get the better of her simply because she was a woman. “Ashton,” she said. “I highly suggest that you get off my back. Costello’s not here, and the more time we waste bitching at each other, the farther away she gets from us. Let’s get back to campus.”

  She turned on her heel and gestured for the remaining Raptors to return to the black SUV parked outside the supermarket, but as she made to follow them, Brooks took hold of her arm.

  “I swear, Lockwood,” he said, his face so close to hers that she could smell the tang of his breath. “I will not go down so easily as Donovan Davenport. If Flynn’s on the warpath, I won’t hesitate to throw you under the bus. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how fucking sketchy your behavior has been as of late.”

  It took all of Lauren’s willpower not to spit in Brooks’s face, but she forced herself to paint a serene smile across her features. “Who do you think she’s going to believe, Brooks? You or her own niece?” She shook herself free of his grasp, straightening the rumpled sleeve of her black jacket. On her way out, she looked over her shoulder at Brooks. “Don’t challenge my leadership or my loyalty, Ashton. It will be the last thing you ever do for the Black Raptor Society.”

  Lauren’s front hadn’t held steady for long enough. On the silent drive back to the university, Brooks’s cell phone pinged, notifying him of a text message. Lauren watched him in the reflection of her window, her stomach clenching when his gaze abandoned the road and lingered on his phone for a moment too long.

  “What is it?” asked Lauren.

  “Nothing,” he replied curtly.

  “Bullshit.”

  Brooks guided the SUV to the shoulder of the road, threw the car in park, and swiveled around in his chair to face the three Raptors in the backseat. The trio sat shoulder to shoulder in the cramped space. Logan Wickes gazed lazily out of his window, his breath fogging up the glass. Holden Hastings, a Waverly freshman and the son of the university’s dean, looked expectantly at Brooks for an explanation of their sudden detour. Olivia Dashwood sat wedged between the two beefy boys. She was a junior and a friend of Lauren’s. Both girls rowed for Waverly’s crew team and had bonded over the challenge of their early morning practices.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Olivia.

  “Because we have a traitor in our midst,” reported Brooks.

  And without warning, he lunged across the center console to wrap his fingers around Lauren’s throat.

  26

  In the morning, just as the sun was beginning to peek up over the horizon to send its pale, pink light through the wispy, cream-colored curtains of Eileen’s living room windows, I woke to the soothing rumble of Henry’s voice. I let my eyes flutter shut again, pulling the crocheted blanket up to my chin, and basked in the smooth stillness of the morning. Henry and Eileen had woken early, it seemed, and their subdued voices wafted in from the kitchen.

  “—take care of them,” Eileen was saying. “I couldn’t protect my husband from all of this, and he was just on the fringes. I can’t imagine what that poor girl is feeling right now. My conscience would never be clear if I abandoned her to you only for further harm to come to her.”

  “I can assure you that Nicole and Wes are safe with me,” replied Henry. A spoon clinked against a ceramic mug. “In fact, they’ll be safer with me than they have been in a very long time.”

  “Can you guarantee that?”

  “Nothing in life is ever a guarantee,” countered Henry. “But I can show you something that might put your mind at ease.” A chair scraped against the floor, as though Henry had pushed himself away from the kitchen table. I heard the rustle of his denim jacket then a beat of silence.

  “Oh,” said Eileen in reaction to whatever Henry had presented to her. “Does Nicole’s mother know?”

  “No one knows,” said Henry. “And I would prefer to keep it that way, if you don’t mind. It tends to work out better in the long run.”

  As quietly as possible, I shifted out from underneath the blanket and slipped off the recliner. I padded toward the kitchen in my socks, hoping to catch a glimpse of Henry’s secret, but in the hallway, a buckled floorboard creaked beneath my weight. Henry tipped back, balancing on the hind legs of his chair to peer into the entryway.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he said, grinning at me as I made my way into the kitchen.

  “Hey.”

  “How did you sleep, dear?” asked Eileen, her eyes crinkling with worry at my less than refreshed appearance.

  “Well enough. Are the two of you best friends now or something?”

  “Eileen was just keeping me company until you woke up,” said Henry as his chair settled back on all four legs. “Bagel? Got ‘em fresh from the bakery down the street.”

  I sat between them at the table, choosing an onion bagel and frosting it with a layer of cream cheese. I took a bite, and through my mouthful, I told Henry, “We should get going as soon as possible. The Raptors are bound to be on our tra
il by now.”

  Henry nodded, his expression shifting from a relaxed smile to a determined scowl. “Agreed. The house is about an hour and a half’s drive out of town.”

  “Super,” I said. I was not looking forward to arriving at Henry’s place. Every minute that passed was a minute closer to being reunited with my mother. The thought rattled my bones, and I set aside my bagel, suddenly nauseous.

  “By the way,” continued Henry, eyeing my half-eaten breakfast. “I already took care of the car you drove out here. I also ran the plates. What the hell were you thinking driving around in Lauren Lockwood’s luxury sedan?”

  “She lent it to me,” I growled, in no mood to defend my actions. “What did you do with it?”

  “Parked it somewhere,” answered Henry ambiguously. “It’ll take them a while to find it. Figured I’d throw them off your tracks a bit. You kids ready to head out?”

  Ignoring the “kids” comment, I stood up from the table. “Let me check on Wes.”

  In the living room, Wes was still solidly passed out on the floral couch. I perched next to him, brushing his hair away from his forehead. Before long, his eyes opened, and he let out a long, low groan.

  “God, tell me that was all just a terrible nightmare,” he said, his voice gravelly. He tried to sit up and winced. Between his broken nose and another injury to the back of his head, there was no doubt that he was in pain. “Nope. Not a nightmare. Where the hell are we?”

  “O’Connor’s house.”

  “Why—?”

  “Because I thought you were going to seize and die or something equally terrible,” I interrupted. “Wes, listen. I have to tell you something.”

  He took in my worried expression. “Did someone else die?”

  “No. Well, the jury’s out on Orson Lockwood actually, but that’s not what I was going to tell you.” I took a deep breath. “My mother is alive. She remarried. And her husband—”