by RuNyx .
A wind caressed the back of her neck, sending a shiver through her body as she stayed silent, letting him talk.
“The night I turned eighteen,” Vad finished his cigarette. “My grandfather told me about the Slayers.”
“He told you the legend?” Corvina asked, and he gave her a dark smile.
“He told me something worse,” Vad crushed the cigarette under his boot, his eyes chilling her. “The truth.”
Corvina felt her breath catch. “Tell me.”
He considered her for a long minute, just studying her, gauging her. Taking his glasses off, he ran a hand through his hair, messing it up. “My grandfather was a student here when the disappearances began. The castle had been empty for years before the school started here, and there were secret passageways, dungeons, woods that nobody knew anything about. Nobody except my grandfather, who had a map that’s passed down our family.”
Corvina encouraged him to go on.
“His girlfriend at the time had allegedly been a witch,” he told her wryly. “Or so she told everyone. I don’t think anyone believed her except him. No one knows. He believed it.”
The skies darkened a shade outside with both the approaching evening and the clouds.
“He and his friends took one of the maids at the castle into the woods because his girlfriend told them she could make her do things. They wanted to experiment. So, they took her to play with, and something happened. The girl died, they hid her body, and they got drunk on the power of it.”
Goosebumps covered her arms, her jaw slackening as realization hit her.
“They were the Slayers,” the words escaped her in a whisper, her hand going to cover her mouth immediately.
His eyes came to her. “Yes. Ninety years ago.”
Holy shit.
“Holy shit.”
“Yes, those were different times,” he tapped his fingers at his side, his gaze far away. “Full moons were nights people were wary of anyways. That’s when they went down to the village and brought someone back to the woods. Played whatever power games they had to play and killed them after. It was a high for them, he told me. Especially for him knowing he was the master of it all.”
Corvina rubbed her arms, trying to calm her heartbeats when something occurred to her. “Wait, how is that possible? The Slayers were all killed, weren’t they? How was he alive?”
Vad worked his jaw, looking out the window again. “When the school discovered what had been happening, a group of students found the Slayers in the woods and lynched them.”
Corvina nodded, knowing that part of the legend.
“He was leading the group.”
The silence after his statement was heavy. Corvina took a second to wrap her head around the fact that his grandfather hadn’t only murdered people with his friends, but he’d turned on his friends and murdered them too. That was... she didn’t even have the words for what it was.
After a long pause to let that sink in, he continued. “He told me his girlfriend cursed them with her dying breath,” his voice stayed steady. “Told him the Slayers would hunt all their killers down from beyond the grave.”
Fuck, this was spooky, especially in the waning daylight.
“What happened then?” Corvina wrapped her arms around herself as the horror of the story slowly started to penetrate her mind.
He shrugged. “He never knew. They say the hunters disappeared too but my grandfather was too scared of that curse to return to this place again, even though he wanted to keep it.”
“And the disappearances on Black Ball?” she asked.
“He believed it was the curse,” Vad gazed at her again. “He was an old man close to his death when he told me the story. He wanted to prepare me for when I got here.”
“And how did he die?” Corvina asked, remembering Ajax’s words about his suspicious death.
“That I can’t tell you, little crow,” Vad tsked, his eyes gleaming. “I will say I have no regrets about it.”
That could or could not mean he had killed him. After hearing the story, after everything his grandfather had done, she couldn’t say she felt any regret either. He must have destroyed so many lives for his own power play.
Corvina processed everything he’d lay on her, taking her time to sift through all the history, chewing on her thumbnail. “Does anyone know about what he did?” she asked after a long time.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he began to fold the sleeves of his shirt up his forearms. “He told me I was the first person he was confessing to because he wanted to keep it in the family. The Board never had any idea he was one of them.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone here know who you are?” she was confounded. “If there’s no shame with the family name, then why?”
“Why should they?” he leaned forward, his eyes hard. “If there’s someone doing something suspicious here, do you think they would let their guard down around Vad Deverell, owner of Verenmore, member of the Board if he was on campus all the time?”
He had a point. As a student and a teacher, he had better chances of simply existing on-campus and observing everything without raising any red flags.
He kept speaking.
“When I came to Verenmore, it was immediately after being told all of this. I had wanted this place but that taint was something I didn’t want. So I just got myself admitted as a regular student, wanting to know everything about this place from the ground up, especially about the disappearances.”
“And it worked,” Corvina mused. “That’s why you continued the facade of being just another person.”
“Very good,” his voice carried his approval at her inference. “The Black Ball was approaching when I enlisted the help of one girl in my class.”
“Zoe,” Corvina remembered. “Ajax’s girlfriend.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “She had grown up in town and knew the local area better than I had at the time. She’d found a shack in the woods one day and told me. I had gone to investigate, to find someone had been living there but had left in a hurry.”
The memory of a long silhouette in the shack she had stumbled upon with Troy and her friends popped up in her head. “I think I know the place.”
He paused in the folding of his other sleeve, his eyebrows slashing down. “You’ve wandered there alone?”
“I was with Troy and some of his friends,” she told him, her eyes going to the floor at the mention of the friend who was no more. She needed to stay on track. “What happened then?”
He considered her for a beat. “Zoe disappeared. I had the board order a search of the entire mountain. She was never seen again.”
“So you think whoever was at the shack is responsible for her missing case?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Even if they are, it doesn’t explain the disappearances for under a century on the same night. And now the staged suicides.”
“Staged?” Corvina whispered, blinking in shock at the way the conversation shifted gears. “You think the suicides were what?”
Vad took out a scrap of paper from his shirt pocket, showing it to her. It was the same note he’d shown her before, the ‘Danse Macabre’ he’d found on the roof after Troy.
“Troy died the exact day your paper about this was due,” he told her, his voice steady. “This was meant for me to find, and this makes me wonder what the fuck is happening at this school. How someone could get two sane, happy people to walk off a roof.”
Corvina watched the note in his hand, her mind racing with wisps of thoughts too smoky and unsubstantial to hold onto. She rubbed a hand over her face, her head starting to hurt with all the information and all the questions it posed.
“What about the bodies?” she asked, trying to stick to a linear train of thought. “The bodies of people your grandfather-” she trailed off.
“Murdered?” he stated plainly. “He never told me what they did to the bodies of his victims. The Slayers they buried somewhere in the woods.”
; “And those empty graves at the ruins?”
“Fifteen empty graves for fifteen of the Slayer victims who died there but were never found.”
That was something at least. “What about that piano there? The one you were repairing?”
“It was my grandfather’s,” he told her, his teeth gnashing. “They liked having music with their murder.”
Corvina shuddered, remembering what they had done in that place. “I can’t believe we kissed by it. That’s just so... macabre.”
Something shifted in his eyes, a side of his lips curving. “I would’ve kissed you bathed in blood, Corvina. If I had a chance to kiss you while a thousand ghosts rose from their graves, I would have kissed you. Don’t doubt that.”
Her breathing hitched. The visual from her dream returned tenfold, him fucking her as blood drenched her hair, masked people dying by exsanguinations on the sides.
He jumped off the desk and threw the cigarette in the can by the door before stalking towards her. Corvina felt her breath catch as he took her thighs in his palms and spread her open, hiking her long skirt up, wrapping her legs around his waist.
“Now I get to have you however I want you, don’t I?” he murmured, half his face cast in shadows, the other in the light from the grey, cloudy dusk.
Corvina gripped his shoulders as he tilted her off balance. “The student-teacher rule doesn’t really apply to you, does it? You can’t lose your job because you’re... you.”
His hands went under her skirt to cup her ass. “It applies as long as I’m a teacher here. And I have to be one until I find out what is happening here. This castle is mine. But so are you now, Miss Clemm. I have to clean up whatever mess this is but have no doubts I am breaking a rule for you.”
Corvina rubbed herself against him involuntarily, her body hot since the dream last night. But she still needed to clear up things.
“What did Ajax mean about the old woman?” she asked breathlessly. “About the purple eyes?”
His hand tugged the side of her sweater down, exposing her shoulder and the bruise she had from his mouth to the slowly darkening room.
“At the boys’ home, this old lady Zelda, she would prophecize shit about everyone,” he told her, rubbing her bruise with his thumb. “She told me one day I’ll see purple eyes, and when I did I had to follow it. So I did.”
Corvina frowned slightly, not understanding.
“The boys’ home I had been in,” he bent down, licking her bruise, making her insides clench. “It was called the Morning Star Lost Home for Boys before it burned down.”
“What?” Corvina stared at him in surprise. That was… a very odd coincidence.
“Being who I am on the Board, I get certain access. Three years ago,” he spoke into her skin softly, “I was in their database trying to look for details of my old best friend from the home. I lost him in the fire.”
“I’m sorry,” she rubbed at his biceps.
He nuzzled her neck. “It led me to the Institute’s data. That’s when I saw your mother’s photo.”
“Purple eyes,” Corvina whispered.
He nodded. “I went to see her.”
Wait what?
She pulled back, holding his arms, her eyes widening on him as disbelief coursed through her blood. “You what?!”
He pulled her right back in place, close to himself. The room around them got much darker than it had been before, but Corvina couldn’t look away from him, her heart racing at what he was telling her.
“I went to see her,” he gripped her chin, keeping her unmoving. “Three years ago. Just to see if old woman Zelda had been right.”
“And?”
“I talked to her,” he informed her like it wasn’t the most important piece of information he’d been holding onto. “She didn’t say much, but she talked about you. Told me her little raven girl would be all alone without her. She asked me if you’d been going to town more to see me. I think she was under a misconception that I was your lover. Asked me if I would look after you. Then she went quiet.”
Corvina felt her jaw tremble, her mind running to three years ago when her mama had just been admitted. “Then?”
He brushed an escaped strand of her hair away from her face. “Where were you three years ago, Corvina?”
Her heart stopped.
It couldn’t be possible.
No way.
No.
“Where were you three years ago?”
The Institute.
She’d been at the Institute, getting herself tested after self-admission.
A huge, hollow cavity in her chest filled to the brim, overflowing with something so abundant she wasn’t sure if it was even healthy but she didn’t care, not as the epiphany struck her.
“You saw me,” she whispered, her throat tight, her eyes burning.
“I saw you,” he whispered back, stroking her cheek with his thumb.
“You see me,” her lips trembled, the realization that this man saw her, truly saw her, and still watched her with that look in his eyes making something inside her shift.
“I see you,” his silver gaze seared her. “I’ve always seen you.”
She didn’t know what happened after, she didn’t care to know what happened after, not in that moment, not when this man who saw her demons, knew her demons and accepted them, stood so close to her. She didn’t need answers, not with his hand on her face and his eyes on her eyes. He saw, truly saw, into her moon of a soul, one with blemishes and scars and a dark side unseen and unknown even to herself.
Corvina crushed her mouth against his, pouring everything she was feeling but could not verbalize in that moment into the kiss, the fierceness of her emotions taking her by surprise, the liberation in her heart making tears escape her eyes.
He knew.
He had always known.
And he wanted her anyway.
Something she never thought she would have, not because she didn’t deserve it, but because who would have wanted a girl with voices in her head and uncertainty in her future? Things like that had only existed in the books she loved to read, not in her life.
But he existed.
He was real and warm and he had been for years that she hadn’t known.
He held her face, taking everything she gave him and demanding more and more and more until she had nothing left to give, all of it plundered, all of it surrendered, all of it his.
And Corvina knew, kissing him in that darkened classroom of an empty castle building, that his possession of her was complete, and if they were to ever part ways, he would haunt her for eternity.
CHAPTER 20
Corvina
He fucked her in the classroom that evening, sending her to the Main Hall for dinner sore and full of his seed, just as he liked it.
Now, a little after midnight, Corvina snuck out of the tower and headed towards the Faculty Wing.
Jade had never come back to their room. Corvina had gone to check in on her after dinner and found her lying in the medical room, reading their coursework. She had looked better than the last few days, so when she insisted on staying in there overnight, Corvina had agreed.
With no one to ask after her, Corvina cut through the castle gardens that ran between her tower and the Faculty Wing, the Main Hall in the middle of it. It was drizzling, and she knew with the way clouds were rumbling it wouldn’t be long before a downpour.
She covered her head with the shawl, the cold biting into her as she crossed the grounds. It was eerie how dead the castle seemed at night, completely deserted, as it must have been for decades before the school started. Imagining all the empty corridors, empty dungeons, empty halls, all dark and cold and quiet, it sent a shiver over her spine that had nothing to do with the cold.
Without a lantern – since she didn’t want to be spotted through a window – or moonlight – since the clouds were too thick – to guide her, Corvina made her way through the darkest night she’d been out on since being at Verenmore. Someho
w, with the little light from the electric torches outside the towers, she made it to the top of the stairs that began her descent towards his building.
And it was pitch black from the top of the path until the end, where the light from the building fell on the landing.
Was it really worth it to risk her neck to spend more alone time with him?
Yes. Yes, it was.
Taking a deep breath in, Corvina slowly extended one foot and felt the first stair, coming to stand on it. Her recent fear of the dark in the woods somehow didn’t exist in that moment. It was like it had always been. Darkness was comfortable, and even exciting, especially when it led to him.
Corvina exhaled, and felt for the next stair. Then repeat. Twenty-one times. She counted. By the time she was on his landing, she was sweating and shaking, from the cold, from the adrenaline, from the thrill of having made it in the dark without falling to her death. He’d been right – she liked breaking the rules.
She looked at the heavy wooden door with the demonesque knocker and no keyhole and breathed a sigh of relief.
Now, just to get to his room.
Placing her hands on the door, she pushed it open just enough to slip inside, wincing when it creaked on its iron hinges, and quickly shut it, standing in the same hall-like room as before.
Heart drumming loud, she went to the stairs, praying nobody would hear or see her as she climbed up as quietly as she could. Thankfully, both landings were empty, the light in one of the rooms on but off in the others.
She finally came to his door, saw the little light coming from the gap underneath, and bit her lip, suddenly questioning her whole idea.
Should she even be there? What if he was sleeping? What if he didn’t want her there again?
Questions ran through her mind, making doubt creep up before she took a hold of herself. He had trusted her, claimed her, risked something important for her. She was supposed to be there.
With that, she raised a fist and rapped her knuckles on the wood just once.
She heard footsteps approaching the door, her heart palpitating as he opened it, wearing nothing but sweatpants and glasses, his hair mussed, his shirtless body all hers to ogle.
