Adam reached for my hand and held it tightly in his. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This won’t be a problem.”
“Does that mean your answer is a yes for bringing me here with you?” I asked.
He nodded curtly. “Yes.”
Adam lifted his shirt up from the ground and pulled it up over his head, only letting go of my hand for the split second that it took to shove his arm through the sleeve. And the whole of me regretted that we had been caught. Yes, Julian had looked out for me ever since I was a kid, but with Adam?
There was something different about him. Something that was more unhinged or primal. And it resonated with me in a way I’d never felt before.
Not even with Julian.
“You know there has to be an overwhelming reason to transfer.” Marta shook her head at Adam as she spoke. Her voice was harsh and condescending, and the way she looked at me made me feel like I was standing there naked, which, of course, I was not. “And of all the Goldshire girls that you could have chosen to break the rules with, you picked this one? You know who she is.”
“Yes,” Adam said. “I do. But there isn’t anything in your rules that excludes specific people. I love her, and I want her with me here.”
The single word sounded much louder in my head and made me dizzy. Adam couldn’t have loved me. It was just a game of pretend to get Marta to allow my entry into the school. Even Julian and I, throughout all the years we’d known each other and all of the things we’d been through together, never once said we loved each other. You can’t count the “love ya too” phrases that we would throw back and forth, but that didn’t mean the same thing.
I watched as Marta rubbed her temple and sighed while she paced the perimeter of her office. It was unbelievable that she was even considering Adam’s request in all honesty. He was definitely laying it on thick, but she must have had some strange soft spot for him.
“Marta, please,” he said. “Remember what you first told me when Michael brought me to your office and asked for my acceptance into Lineage? You said that we were all a family here and that family protects each other. I can’t stop my feelings for Lisette. I am in love with her, and if I can’t bring her here to be with me, then I won’t have any happiness. I know who she is and who her mother was. But the only thing that should matter now is who she is to me.”
Marta stopped her pacing and looked at him. It seemed like she was being swayed, and I wanted to close the deal, even if I couldn’t exactly reciprocate the same sentiment. I stepped forward and opened my mouth to talk, hoping that I wouldn’t end up regretting it.
“I have been devastated by my father’s reputation, which has lingered over me ever since I was a small child. With my mother gone as well, nothing is tying me to Goldshire.”
“And you would betray your parent’s legacy there in order to come to Lineage and be with Adam?” Marta asked.
I felt as though it was the final tipping-point in what seemed like an interrogation. So, I dug my heels in and prayed to any God listening that my parents forgave me.
“Yes. There is no legacy there for me anymore,” I answered.
She looked behind me toward Adam as if I were no longer in the room.
“Michael will not be pleased about this,” she said to him.
“I’ll handle Michael,” Adam said.
“And she’ll have to go through the entire vetting process…without any help or interference from you.”
I looked over my shoulder at Adam, who looked as though he had just swallowed something sour. “I understand.”
I had no idea what the “vetting process” was, but I could tell by Adam’s reaction that it wasn’t going to be something to look forward to. Regardless, it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was gaining entry into Lineage. I could deal with the rest later. Leaving Goldshire wasn’t a big deal either. If the transfer was approved, the two schools worked out the arrangements for having all the student’s possessions sent over and literally wanted nothing to do with the transferring student again.
I’m sorry, Julian. I hope you can forgive me.
Once someone deserted, it was as if they had never existed in the eyes of their original college. Grades would transfer, records would transfer, and that would be the end of it. All the rules would be reversed to the opposing school, and I would no longer be welcome on the Goldshire campus, which posed a bit of a problem with Julian, but I’d figure that out somehow too. I would feel a little bad about what I was doing, simply because it meant so much to my mother to see me graduate there but avenging her death and bringing Lineage down meant much more. Besides, I had no one left at Goldshire who would miss me or even care, except for Julian. It would be as if I had never existed in my former life.
We stood in awkward silence as we waited for Marta to deliver her decision.
“Fine,” she said finally with a giant sweeping motion of her hand that indicated how much of a burden this decision would be on her if it ended badly. “But if things don’t work out between the two of you, Lisette will be thrown right out on her ass. And I hold you fully accountable for all of her actions here starting right at this exact moment.”
Adam lowered his head toward her in a single nod of gratitude.
“Thank you,” he said. “I will gladly accept responsibility for her, you have my word.”
I felt doubly bad as he made his promise.
If Adam only knew what I was planning to do, he wouldn’t be so eager to accept any responsibility for me at all.
Marta dismissed us, and Adam took my hand as we turned to leave her office.
“You can’t go back to Goldshire again now,” he whispered as we walked out. “Not even once to get anything or see anyone. You have to stay here now and wait for your initiation to start.”
I nodded. I hadn’t really given any of this thought ahead of time. I guess I was too sure that my plan would probably fail and that I’d end up trudging back to my own campus later tonight in defeat. If I had thought it through, then I would have said something else to Julian before I had left that morning. There wasn’t any kind of chance of reaching him and telling him anything. Even my cell phone would be monitored, and one mistake would bring the whole ruse collapsing down. There was a whole lot more at stake besides just me. My actions would affect what happened to Adam and Julian too, and I couldn’t bear the burden of guilt if I was the reason either of them got hurt or expelled. Not even Adam.
“Where are we going now?” I asked him.
He tugged me along. “Let’s go back to my apartment.”
“But what about—”
“Michael,” Adam finished my sentence as we both looked up to see Michael walking into the building toward us. Michael glanced down at our interlocked hands, and his entire face turned a burning scarlet.
Guess I don’t need your phone after all, asshole.
9
Adam’s apartment looked like a war-zone by the time Michael was done throwing things up against the walls and smashing things against the table. When Marta said he “wouldn’t be pleased,” it was a drastic understatement. Michael was absolutely outraged.
Adam stood there calmly, though, watching him have his temper tantrum and not letting go of my hand. He kept his body squarely between Michael and me, however. And eventually, Michael spun himself out and flopped down onto the couch with a rage-filled pout.
“Are you done?” Adam asked.
I was hoping that he would tread lightly so that I didn’t wake up dead in the morning, but he seemed to have other plans.
“You don’t love her,” Michael scowled at him. “What a stupid thing for you to have said. She’s conning you, can’t you see that?”
For a second, I got nervous that Michael could see through my ambitions and was going to call me out, until Adam changed his mind.
“I can get a different apartment,” Adam said as he ignored Michael’s accusations. “If that’s what you’d like me to do.”
“What
I’d like you to do,” Michael sneered, “is to get rid of her.”
He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”
The two of them stared at each other for a few moments in a battle of wills.
“You’re not getting a different apartment,” Michael finally said when it became obvious that Adam wasn’t going to cave.
“What about Lisette?” Adam asked.
“Well, since you and my mother have left me no choice in the matter, I guess she’ll stay here in this apartment with us. We can both keep an eye on her.”
Adam seemed satisfied with that arrangement, but the terribly wicked grin that Michael gave me made me feel totally disarmed.
“Of course,” Michael added. “She has to make it through the vetting process before any of this arrangement becomes permanent.”
I looked at Adam, and he tipped his head toward his bedroom in a signal to follow him.
“Enjoy each other,” Michael called sarcastically as we left. “At least, while you can.”
“What is the vetting process everyone keeps talking about?” I asked after Adam had closed his bedroom door, and we had a moment alone.
He walked straight up to me and put his hands on the sides of my face and kissed me before I had a chance to take a breath in.
“What was that for,” I asked after he had pulled away.
“This isn’t a game to me,” he said. “I haven’t quite figured out whether it’s one to you yet or not, but the feelings I have for you are real.”
His words stunned me to my core. How the hell was that possible? I had known Julian my entire life, and I still couldn’t bring myself to utter those words like that to him. Even now that I knew how Julian felt, it still felt weird and unnatural for those words to roll off my tongue in his direction. So how in the world did Adam feel like that with me after only this small amount of time? It boggled my mind, and yet I wanted more.
So, so much more.
We went to sit down on the side of his bed, and he turned to face me as he explained what I was about to get myself into. But, it was hard to focus after the truth bomb he dropped straight in my lap.
“The vetting process is Lineage’s initiation,” he started as he took my hands in his. “Those that are born into Lineage families don’t have to endure it, but those of us that are brought in from the outside do. I’m not going to lie to you, Lisette, it’s brutal.”
“I’ve been through brutal already,” I said confidently. “I survived my mother’s death, my father’s reputation, and abandonment. I’m pretty sure I can take whatever they dish out.”
Adam shook his head, and I felt a pit grow in the bottom of my stomach. “No, you don’t understand. The process is designed to break you. Mentally, physically, emotionally. It’s to test your loyalty to the person who is sponsoring your transfer.”
“Sounds charming,” I said.
“There are people who have died when going through the vetting process, and countless others that wished they would have.”
I suddenly felt horrified, and Adam could tell.
“Died?” I asked. “Are you serious?”
He lifted his hand to stroke the hair that was hanging down at the side of my neck. “Yeah, unfortunately, I am.”
“How was it when you went through it?” I asked.
Adam smiled compassionately and then leaned back slightly to make room for his arms to lift his shirt up over his head. The heated memory of our bodies together in the cemetery started to crawl back into my mind again, and I felt my heart start to beat quicker. Adam took my hand and touched one of my fingers to a thorn on his tattoo.
“I got this inked after I made it through the vetting process. Each one of these thorns represents a moment during the vetting that I thought I wanted to die.”
I moved my hand to be able to see his whole chest. There were probably a hundred thorns.
“Then why did you do it?” I asked in horror at what he must have gone through. “Why didn’t you just quit and leave?”
His eyes found mine. “Because then I wouldn’t have been able to get this close to you.”
I blinked. “What?”
It didn’t make sense. Adam couldn’t have joined Lineage just to be closer to me. He would have had better luck just coming into the halfway house to see me while I was working than to go through some terrible initiation process in order to join a rival school that I wasn’t even allowed to set foot on.
Adam cupped my cheek. “That night your mother was killed, I knew you’d end up here someday.”
“How could you have possibly known that?” I asked.
He smirked. “I saw it in your eyes…the insatiable thirst for truth and revenge. I knew then that you would never let this go, and I knew that I wanted to be with you when you tried to avenge your mother’s death.”
My mind was blown. Not even Julian had been able to reach the part of me that was buried so deeply that only I knew it existed. It would have been unbelievable to anyone else, which is probably why Michael and his mother overlooked Adam’s cunning and thought of him simply as a benign adoptee.
But I saw him for who he really was…a secret weapon.
“I can’t say that I love you,” I said as I remembered his words in front of Marta. “I don’t know how I feel about anyone right now. I don’t even know if I am capable of any feelings other than anger and emptiness.”
“I know,” he said softly. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you about my anger and emptiness too, and maybe by then you’ll be able to say those words back to me.”
There wasn’t any more talk of the initiation as Adam wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to lie down next to him. I had been on the shoulders of two men, in two beds, within the last two days. And to be honest, I couldn’t sort out my feelings about either one. The only thing I knew was that for right now, at that moment, I felt safe again.
That night was the first dream that I dreamt on the Lineage grounds. I was walking alone on the campus at night, and I saw Adam in the distance coming toward me. As he got closer, Michael appeared on the path between us. It looked as though they were going to fight each other, but when Michael raised a hand toward him, Adam simply looked sadly over the top of Michael’s shoulder at me. I started to run toward him, but in my dreams, things never seemed to play by the rules of real life, so my movement was slow as if I were trying to wade through honey. Instead of striking him, Michael reached into Adam’s chest and began to pull out the roots and thorns that were now somehow real instead of just a tattoo. I watched in horror as the roots unwound from Adam’s chest and spilled onto the ground in front of him as he fell to his knees, and then finally fell forward onto the stone path. Michael turned to look at me, still holding a fistful of bloodied roots in his hand and smiled in a way that made my skin crawl.
I woke up startled and drenched with sweat, as my nightmares usually caused me to be. Adam sat up next to me and put his arm around me as he stared with worry into my eyes.
“I’m okay,” I said. “It was just a bad dream.”
But a noisy commotion came from outside the door that caught his immediate attention before we lay back down.
The bedroom door swung open, and Michael, along with several other Lineage guys, stood smiling at us in the near-dark. Adam stood up in front of me in the bed and put his arms behind him as if he were trying to protect me.
“Now, now,” Michael taunted. “You know this is unavoidable.” His voice changed into a dark, commanding order. “Stand down, Adam.”
To my surprise, Adam slowly lowered his arms and stepped out of the way. He stared at me, helplessly from the side of the bed.
“What’s happening?” I asked him in fear.
“Your initiation,” Adam answered flatly.
I’m not sure what happened next because something was thrown over my head blocking my vision and leaving me to flail around in darkness as I tried to suck in a few breaths from behind the cloth that was covering my face. I thou
ght about what Adam had said about people dying here. I didn’t want to die here. I supposed I would if I had to in order to avenge my mother, but that still didn’t mean that I wanted to.
I felt several sets of hands lift me up and try clumsily to carry me away. I felt their uneven footsteps on the ground outside jar my body as they took me somewhere, and from the length of it, it seemed a great distance away from Adam. When they finally dropped me down, my tailbone smacked against something cold and hard, and my hands flew to my face to take off whatever had been swaddled over my head. But even as I pulled it off, I still couldn’t see anything. I was somewhere in complete pitch darkness. I reached my hands around over the floor and felt a cold stone ground beneath me. I used my hands and feet to feel around until I got to the edges of the stone four walls. I was in an exceedingly small, very dark, and very cold room. The temperatures had been steadily dropping as the season approached winter, and from what I could tell, this little structure wasn’t somewhere inside. I tried to be still and calm and to gather my wits about me. Then I heard the faint sound of breathing and knew that I wasn’t alone in this place.
“Who’s there?” I called out. My voice bounced off the walls of the stone room.
How hadn’t I felt someone next to me in this small space?
I felt someone take my hand and place it to their face and was immediately relieved when my fingers ran against the smooth, cool nose ring beneath my touch.
“Adam?” I asked. “Oh my god, I’m so glad you’re in here with me. Why did they let you stay with me? I thought I had to go through this process alone.”
He didn’t answer me, though. Instead, he put his mouth on the side of my neck and kissed me gently. What I thought was an attempt to help me feel calmer quickly escalated into a sensual drag of his tongue up my neck and over my jaw, until he reached my mouth and put his moist lips over mine. If being locked in a dark box was part of the vetting process, at least Adam was in here with me to make it better. I was so intoxicated by him that the fear of where I was dissipated the further he put his tongue inside my mouth. The feeling this time was even more intense than before, perhaps it was because the only sense I could rely on without sight and sound, was the sense of touch…and the sense of taste, which I relished with him and found myself unable to resist. When he pulled the shirt over my head, I was too enthralled by the dark sensuality of the moment to hesitate.
Ruined: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 1) Page 6
