by Sofia Daniel
Moments later, Orlando slipped into the seat opposite with his top buttons undone and his tie askew. With those messy blond curls, it looked like a deliberate attempt to appear disheveled, and it was working.
A table of fourth-year girls stopped eating to gape, and some desperado from across the dining room wolf-whistled. Orlando raised his head and gave me a saucy wink. Heat pooled between my legs, reminding me that we had unfinished business.
“Did you sleep well last night?” The innuendo in Orlando’s voice made my nipples tingle.
“I’ve had better nights.” Suppressing a smirk, I scooped up some apple and porridge.
Gideon paused and frowned. He shot me a look that asked if anything had happened between Orlando and me the night before, and I raised my brows. His expression stilled, and he placed another heaping spoon of brown sugar in his porridge. Probably to mask his disapproval. I’d have to speak to him later.
I ate my apple and cinnamon porridge in silence. Forgiving Maxwell wasn’t the same as using Orlando to scratch an itch.
Chiming from the clock tower signified the end of breakfast, and I stood just as Kendrick rushed in to grab two slices of toast.
Orlando leered at me from across the table. “Have a great day.”
I glanced at Maxwell, whose expression hardened. Had he worked out I’d gotten lucky with Orlando? I snatched my gaze away, only to catch Gideon’s disapproving glower. My lis pursed. Didn’t he know a girl had needs?
Looping my arm around Gideon’s, I marched him out of the dining room and into the hallway. “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Have you become a skilled Legilimens?” he drawled.
I clenched my teeth. “There’s no need when you telegraph everything with your scowl.”
Gideon stopped and turned on me, his dark eyes boring into my mine. “Then there’s no need for this discussion.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?” He raised a brow.
Maeve, my red-haired classmate bounded up to us. “Hey, Lilah! Let’s go up to the textiles room together.”
“See you later.” I leaned into Gideon and pressed a kiss on his cheek.
A bunch of second-year girls burst into excited chatter and giggles. This time tomorrow, they’d probably construct a round of gossip involving me as the future Mrs. Adewale.
Maeve raced ahead through the crowds of students as though she’d taken up indoor jogging. Halfway down the hallway, she jumped and waved her arms around. “Come on!”
“We’ve got five minutes.” I jogged after her.
Maeve ducked into a stairwell, her red hair streaming behind her like a flying carpet. I snorted. The last time I’d seen her this jittery had been just before the fashion show. Picking up my pace, I dodged smaller students waiting in line outside classrooms, and pulled open the door to the stairwell.
With my gaze fixed on the top of the stairs, I stumbled into Maeve’s doubled-over form, making her topple forward.
“Sorry.” I grabbed her trembling shoulders, but Maeve didn’t straighten. “Are you alright?”
“I need fresh air.”
Behind the stairs stood a fire exit. I looped my arm through Maeve’s and walked her to the door. Drops of water, which could only be tears, fell onto the floor.
“What’s wrong?” I pushed down the metal bar that operated the door, letting in gusts of freezing air. Snow covered the usually manicured gardens, with paths dug around the building. Their surfaces reflected in the pale sunlight, looking like they had melted and frozen into ice.
Maeve stumbled out into the ground and fell on her face. When I tried to pick her up, she was completely unresponsive.
“Maeve.” I knelt on the ice, the cold wetness seeping through my tights, and rolled the girl onto her side. Her pale skin blended in with the wintry surroundings and her lips turned blue.
Every ounce of blood drained from my face. She was barely breathing and looking like she’d already frozen to death.
Chapter 21
When the fire door slammed shut behind us, leaving us both alone in the snow I thought Maeve would perish. Templar was a tiny village in the middle of nowhere and it would take hours for help to arrive. Dark clouds covered the sky, and a frigid wind blew down that froze me to the marrow.
But Maeve must have had a guardian angel because when I called for an ambulance, it came within five minutes. According to the paramedic, they had just finished with a patient in Templar. In a blur of activity, they wrapped her up in blankets, stuck an intubation tube down her throat, and whisked her to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
I had to sit in a waiting room, not knowing what on earth had happened to Maeve, but I texted Mr. Burgh to let him know what had happened.
About an hour later, an Asian nurse stepped into the room and led me through the maze of hallways to the Acute Medical Unit, which consisted of twelve beds separated by blue curtains. Maeve lay propped up in her hospital bed, the purple circles under her eyes making her look like she’d lost a fight.
A bolt of worry shot through my heart, and I rushed to her bedside. “What happened?”
Maeve squeezed her eyes shut and turned her head away. “It’s so stupid.”
“It can’t be worse than anything I’ve done.” I placed a hand on her gown-clad shoulder. “You can tell me.”
Silence stretched out between us, and I took the time to examine Maeve’s appearance. Her hair was the same, vibrant shade of copper with marmalade highlights, a sharp contrast to the mottled white skin that barely covered a network of blue veins.
I was about to prompt her to answer when she lay on her back and heaved out a long breath. “It’s Elizabeth.”
My stomach dropped. “What about her?”
“You know how she’s always criticizing us girls?” she asked.
“Yes,” I kept the anger out of my voice.
“She also helps us.” Maeve raised her hands and made air quotes.
“To do what?”
“Weight-loss pills.” Tears rolled down the girl’s pale cheeks. “Someone worked out last year that they were only caffeine pills, so we started buying them online and on Glasgow weekends.”
I swallowed hard, anticipating where this story was going. “Okay…”
Maeve’s tongue darted out to lick her lips, and I poured her a cup of water from the plastic jug on the over-bed table.
“Thanks,” she rasped and took a sip.
“Dealers can’t stay in business if their customers can get their product somewhere else,” I said. “What did Elizabeth do next?”
“Around the middle of last term, she let us try a blend that worked a lot better than stupid caffeine. It got rid of my cravings and gave me an energy boost.”
I narrowed my eyes. Was she talking about speed?
I bit down on my bottom lip. This reminded me so much of Sammy’s weed business. When I first moved in with him, he grew the usual shitty strains as everyone else. Then he had a botanist make him a hybrid and called it heavenly kush, which was a bitch to grow but looked, smelled, and tasted different from anything on the market.
Staring down at Maeve looking so broken was a bucket of cold water over my head. How much of our kush had gotten into the hands of school kids like her?
Returning my thoughts to Elizabeth, I asked, “Do you know what’s in her new pills?”
“She couldn’t trust us not to go out and mix it for ourselves.” Maeve raised her shoulders. “Based on that, I thought it was a mix of caffeine and something common like aspirin.”
“What about the curry?” I asked.
“It’s okay, I suppose.” Maeve sipped from the plastic glass. “A bit too spicy.”
“Does it contain the same weight loss drugs?”
“It’s a new herb she’s trying out,” said Maeve. “An appetite suppressant that changes the way the body stores fat.”
“Why does she need to disguise it in a curry?”
“It’s the only
thing that masks the bad taste.”
Before I could ask for more information, Mrs. Campbell bustled up to the bedside. “Miss O’Brian, what happened to you?”
Maeve gave her a sheepish look. “Sorry.”
The deputy headmistress shot me a concerned glance. “You should be at school, Miss Hancock.”
“I just want to make sure Maeve was alright.”
Her lips pressed together in a thin line. “That’s the job of the faculty, not something for you to take upon yourself.”
I shrugged. In her world, seeing someone faint might mean overwork or low blood sugar. Things were different where I grew up, where more people I knew died from gas leaks, murder, and drug overdoses than they did of old age. If I had run inside, looking for the academy nurse or someone else, Maeve might have stopped breathing and perished in the snow.
There was no point in trying to explain any of this to Mrs. Campbell. She was a nice woman trying to do her best and had taken a firmer line with Elizabeth at breakfast. I didn’t want to rile her up by arguing back.
“Mr. McGarr is outside in his jeep,” she added. “Do you have his number?”
“Yes, Miss.”
“He will drive you back to the academy.”
I turned to Maeve and gave her a tight smile. “Take care of yourself. And report Elizabeth to the police before someone else nearly dies.”
“What?” asked Mrs. Campbell, her face slack.
I walked out of the ward, guilt creeping up my insides for setting up Maeve’s interrogation, but it couldn’t be helped. In a few hours, the doctors would discover the substance in Maeve’s blood that had caused her to collapse, and I would bet the entirety of Elizabeth’s winnings on the horse race that it wasn’t anything as mundane as aspirin or caffeine. That girl needed cutting down before she spread her poison to the younger girls.
Maeve didn’t return to the academy the next day or the day after that. And I didn’t see Elizabeth, either. The little curry-making business also disappeared, with her business partners confined to the sanctuary at mealtimes, which I understood was the academy’s equivalent of solitary confinement.
If Elizabeth was any other person, they would have expelled her for selling dangerous crap to students and possibly informed the police. But this was her turf. I couldn’t see her getting anything more severe than a slap on the wrist.
Miss Martin stood in the front of the classroom, teaching the basics of draping, a couture technique designers used to create dress patterns. After marking up and cutting pieces of heavy muslin, she pinned them on a dress form to create the front bodice of a bustier gown.
“With twelve panels and some expert tailoring, this bustier won’t need any boning.” She made slow folds and tucks and fastenings with fingers prematurely gnarled from arthritis.
I raised my smartphone and filmed her movements. Although I had draped in my old sewing room, my technique was nowhere as polished as hers.
Someone knocked on the door, and she raised her head. “Yes?”
It was a first-year boy wearing short trousers. “The headmaster wants to see Miss Hancock in his office.”
Miss Martin’s brows drew together. “You’d better not keep him waiting.”
Dread tightened my stomach. This had to be urgent. Mr. Burgh usually waited for the weekends or dropped me a note if he needed to ask me something. I packed up my things and walked around the desks to the back of the room, where the first-year still hovered by the door, wringing his hands.
I rushed down the hallway and the spiral staircase, wondering what might have happened. If this was about Elizabeth and her diet pills, there wasn’t much I could add to Maeve’s statement. It wasn’t as though I had seen any of the transactions taking place.
At the bottom of the stairs, a figure stepped out in the periphery of my vision and yanked me by the hair. Pain radiated across my scalp, and I kicked out, hitting a bony shin with the heel of my foot. My assailant grunted and twisted her grip.
“What did you say to Mrs. Campbell?” Elizabeth snarled.
“Get off me, you freak!” I swung my elbows back into thin air.
Elizabeth slammed me against the wall and pressed her bony body against my back. “Bitch.” Her hot, pungent breath on the side of my face made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “Tell her it was a lie, or I’ll stick a lit candle where the sun doesn’t shine.”
“You little perv.” With all the strength I could muster, I slammed the back of my head into her face.
The pressure of her weight disappeared from my body, and Elizabeth hit the ground with a thud.
“You’ve broken my nose,” she howled loud enough to wake the whole of Scotland. “Call the police!”
Doors flew open, and students rushed out of the classrooms. I glanced from left to right, my insides turning to stone. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Elizabeth rolled on the ground, hamming it up like a dying fish. I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the kindergarten playbook:
When in trouble, get someone else into bigger shit.
Chapter 22
The sanctuary was a white room in the east tower that overlooked the paddocks. A table and a chair took pride of place in the middle, facing a wall holding frames containing each page of the academy charter.
I turned to the teacher, a black-haired man who had left a class of third-year math students to deal with me. “How many times do I have to tell you, Elizabeth Liddell started the fight.”
“And finishing it means you’ll stay here until the authorities arrive.”
“Where’s Mr. Burgh?”
“I’m not his secretary.” The math teacher shut the door, and a key turned in the lock.
My shoulders slumped, and I turned the knob, just in case I’d imagined the sound. They’d locked me in the tower while the crazy wench who had lured me into a fight and allowed herself to get head butted was sitting with the academy nurse, enjoying a round of tea and chocolate digestives.
“What if there’s a fire?” I shouted.
No answer.
A hot rush of frustration seared through my veins, and I slammed my fist on the door. The only person to blame for this fiasco was myself. Instead of watching my back like I might have done if this was Richley, I dropped my guard, thinking that Elizabeth had been recalled home. Selling dodgy diet pills that hospitalized girls was ten times worse than throwing a box of pins at a teacher.
I walked to the far wall and scanned the first page of the academy charter. Reading through these would be an exercise in masochism. Elizabeth had probably gotten away with breaking all the rules, but it wasn’t like I had any other alternative forms of entertainment.
About thirty minutes later, as I read through the definition of lewd conduct, a tap-tap-tap on the window broke me out of my thoughts. I turned around to find Maxwell scrambling outside with his arms on the window ledge.
A breath caught in the back of my throat, followed by the thrashing of butterflies in my stomach. I rushed to the window. “Fuck.”
Without a second thought, I twisted the metal knob that held down the sash and pushed up its wooden frame. It eased open an inch and then jammed. “Bloody hell.” My biceps strained against the stuck wood, which groaned and creaked. “Who do you think you are? Donkey Kong?”
Maxwell chuckled. “Did you say donkey dong?”
“More like monkey dong,” I snapped. “What the hell made you scale a tower?”
“To keep you company.”
“How did you get up here?” With one mighty heave, I wedged the window up another six inches before it stuck again.
“The stones on this side of the building have decent footholds.” He stretched his arm across the gap and gripped the window sill.
“This isn’t Romeo and Juliet, you idiot.”
“What can I say.” His healing face twisted into a crooked smile. “Damsels in distress make me want to be a better man.”
Warmth spread through my heart, thawing out the crevices of lingerin
g resentment. It even engulfed the part of me that wondered why he had let me get arrested at the end of last term. I still wouldn’t trust Maxwell out of principle, but he scored major brownie points for this stunt.
With the hand not holding onto the sill, he wedged the window open several more inches. Relief crossed Maxwell’s features, and I stepped aside to let him through the gap I’d made in the window.
Then he shimmied inside, a spectacle of muscles straining through the woolen fabric of his school uniform, stretched up and grinned at me as though expecting a round of applause.
Tossing my head, I feigned interest in the charter. “That was dangerous.”
He wedged the window closed, shutting off the cold air. “I needed to see you.”
“Before the police took me away for assault?”
Maxwell looked away. “You don’t know that.”
“Knowing Elizabeth, she’s found a way to exaggerate her injuries.” Peering up at Maxwell, I rubbed the back of my throbbing head and added, “It was also a hard blow to the face.”
Maxwell placed his large hands on my shoulders. “What happened?”
I shook my head. “It sounds so juvenile.”
“We are still teenagers, you know.”
A harsh laugh stuck in the back of my throat. I’d spent a lifetime worried about my own survival. If it wasn’t Billy Hancock and his violent rages, it was wondering how I would survive foster care unscathed. Shit like that could age a girl’s mind.
“What’s wrong?” asked Maxwell.
“Sometimes I forget I’m only seventeen.”
He wrapped his strong arms around my shoulders and pressed a kiss into the side of my head. It was nice, but I needed more. If this was the last time I would see him and the academy, I wanted our final memory to be something nice instead of our last encounter at the doorstep when I’d been ungrateful about his Christmas gift.
