The Pawn: A Reverse Harem Bully Revenge Romance (Coleridge Academy Elites Book 1)

by Lucy Auburn

  They’re rabid wolves who’ve been let free of their enclosure, taking their sickness with them to terrorize the innocent.

  And, like the snake that left the scar on my hand, I’m waiting for them to make a wrong move so I can take them down.

  They may think they’re predators. Truth be told, they’re right; they’ve got the body count to prove it.

  But with me here, they’re about to find out what it feels like to be the prey.

  “Now that we’re all here, let’s go on the tour. I’ll tell you about the wolves first, since that’s everyone’s favorite part. Like I said, there’s nothing to worry about—the enclosure is perfectly secure, and the wolves are tame.”

  Lukas is all affable charm, utterly unaware of the fact that the glass he thinks protect him from predators is nothing but an illusion. He’s being hunted right here, right now, and he won’t see his own downfall coming.

  I swear before the semester is over, I’ll bring him down, along with his obnoxious, Kentucky-accented friend.

  Even if it means destroying myself in the process.

  Chapter 2

  “When Matthew Coleridge founded this school in 1823, it was because of his youngest son,” Lukas says, leading us through the visitors center and towards the wide path out front, which is shaded by trees old enough and tall enough that their branches brush together overhead. “You see, the young Bartholomew Coleridge—yes, that was his name, Tanner, stop laughing—felt unchallenged and lonely in his boarding school. The letters he wrote home told his father as much.”

  Tipping his head up towards the sky, Lukas looks pensive for a moment, as if he himself is traveling through time into the feet of Bartholomew himself. “He needed a new school. One that would be challenging and interesting. One where he could study ahead. Matthew Coleridge...”

  I start to zone out, because I’ve read this story a hundred times by now. Everyone knows that the Coleridge Academy was started to academically challenge high school students on their way to college. It doesn’t allow enrollment prior to the junior year because the founder wanted the students who attend to experience other types of schooling prior to the Coleridge experience.

  As wrapped up in his story as he is, Lukas doesn’t notice when my attention drifts to the other Elite. Tanner looks like he couldn’t give a fuck about his best friend’s speech; he’s got an e-cigarette hanging out one side of his mouth and is puffing out mint-scented vape.

  Of course, despite the fact that the senator of Kentucky’s eldest child and only son is currently breaking one of the most prominent rules in the rulebook I was sent as a pdf yesterday, no one even looks twice at him. Another tour group passes by us, and Tanner even dares to blow his vape smoke in the faculty member’s general direction without a care in the world.

  That’s not the only rule he’s breaking. His unlaced, designer sneakers are a bright red and custom painted with profanity up and down the sides. The short-cropped black hair on his head has a design carved into the back that trails down his neck to merge with a long-term temporary tattoo. His white button-up shirt with the Coleridge insignia embroidered on the pocket has two extra buttons unbuttoned and the cuffs pushed up to his elbows, showing off his well-tanned forearms, and it doesn’t even come close to being tucked into his jeans—jeans that, of course, are three shades too light to be regulation even on a day without classes.

  It irks me that boys like Tanner Connally can break literally all the rules and it doesn’t matter one bit. I could make an entire post on the Legacies blog pointing out all the demerit points he should be receiving, all the detentions he should have on his record, and it wouldn’t get more than a few dozen clicks at most. And all those clicks would be from fans of his with Google alerts set for his name.

  No, I have to save reviving the blog for something more salacious. Something people will care about, that will get their attention—and hopefully the attention of all the boys’ family members. Senator George Connally of the state of Kentucky may scold his only son for not tucking his shirt in, but it’s not going to get him to fly in from D.C. and punish him.

  It also won’t get me what I really want: for Tanner to be socially outcast and exiled, just like my brother was before he took his own life.

  I need to see him suffer. I want him on his knees in front of me, begging, pleas dropping from his plush lips.

  “Brenna?” I’ve drifted off for long enough that Wally has noticed; he’s frowning in my general direction, a peeved expression crinkling up the corners of his eyes. “I know he’s attractive, Brenna, but you’ve been staring at him for a bit too long.”

  I tell myself that the bright sun overhead will explain away the heat that surges to my cheeks. “You think he’s hot? I didn’t think he was your type.”

  Wally shrugs uncomfortably. “I just barely came out to myself. I don’t know what my type is.” He may be a down and dirty country boy, but Wally is, it turns out, more into Richard Madden than Sophie Turner. “Just pay attention to the tour. I think that lonely, gorgeous European guy actually cares about this thing, and we’re the only ones even semi-interested.”

  He’s right. Mom’s eyes keep wandering off, and Tanner has his eyes on his phone. Lukas is trying his best, coming up with random facts about who the benches are named after and when each of the buildings was built.

  Surprisingly, he cares about this. Which means it’s an in. If I pay attention and butter him up a bit, I might be able to learn more about him—enough to destroy him completely.

  “What about the ghost of Coleridge?”

  Lukas pauses in the middle of a sentence, tugging on the collar of his sweater. “Well, I was going to talk about Ruth MacKenzie, the first female student at the academy...”

  Tanner says, "Talk about the ghost.” He grins, white teeth flashing against tanned brown skin. “Dead Martha Hayes and the wolves are all anyone pays attention to on the tour, and you know it.”

  “But I was just about to show them to the boys’ dorms.” Lukas seems like the type to hate disruption or messiness; he has a distinct frown on his face. But Tanner’s insistent cajoling gets him to cave. “Fine. I suppose a little detour past the old chapel won’t add any time to the tour. But we can’t go inside—it’s not structurally stable.”

  “Whatever ya say, Mom.”

  Tanner bumps into Lukas’s shoulder, drawing more grumbling from his general direction, and what might be a French swear word muttered under his breath. I watch them, wondering what might tear their friendship apart, make them turn on each other as viciously as they turned on Silas, a complete stranger.

  I want to know what it feels like to see them ripped into shreds until there’s nothing left. I want to destroy everything they have, including their friendship.

  I ache at the very sight of their bond.

  It reminds me of how Silas and I were briefly, when we were old enough to stop pulling each other’s hair, before he grew tall enough that Dad started to hit him but not me. As well as we got along before he died, it was nothing compared to those halcyon days when we were arm-in-arm on the playground, roughhousing in the backyard, and speaking our own language.

  We were born together.

  We should’ve died together.

  “The legend goes,” Lukas starts, ignorant of my angry, bitter gaze on him as he leads us down a winding path lined with old Red Oak trees, “that Martha Hayes, a student here in the sixties, was in the chapel late at night when a fire started. She tried to escape—”

  “Tell them why she was there,” Tanner chimes in.

  “I was trying to tell the story in an interesting way.” Lukas sounds irritated with him in the way siblings frequently are.

  My mom speaks up for the first time since we left the visitors center. “I think it’s a positively spooky story.”

  I glance over at her. “You know it?”

  “I looked into the school before...” She trails off abruptly, voice suddenly soft. “I had to know where my baby
was going.”

  It’s not me she’s talking about. My chest aches at the reminder that before I fraudulently enrolled here, Silas was excited about coming—so excited he was willing to risk Daddy’s wrath and Momma’s sadness by going away forever.

  For years I’ve thought of my mom as a distant, uninvolved mother. It never occurred to me that she worried about Silas too, in her own quiet way.

  “The story you can read online is one thing, but there are details you don’t really get to see except in person. Part of that, of course, is the chapel—it’s not open right now, but it’s still beautiful to look at. Here it is, right around the corner.”

  The path Lukas leads us down reveals a modest white chapel with a wide deck out front, its wooden clapboard siding faded and covered in ivy that climbs up to the gabled roof. There’s a steeple in the middle of the roof that’s half-destroyed, fresh construction underway. A thick rope stretches across the path, while another blocks off the deck, which sags in the middle.

  It looks like a peaceful place, the kind of small, modest sanctuary someone could come to hear their own thoughts.

  “Martha Hayes liked to come here in the evening after dinner with her sketchbook. She must’ve enjoyed the peace and quiet.” Lukas’s words echo my own thoughts. “Apparently, she didn’t get along with the other girls at Rosalind Hall, which had just been opened to welcome in a new, expanded class of female students. The other girls thought she was strange, and they bullied her.”

  Tanner chimes in, “They put dog shit in her hair while she was asleep.”

  I feel sick.

  We’ve reached the end of the path, where the rope blocks off everything else. The temptation to push past it, to go inside, is overwhelming. If Silas were here, he would jump the thing and drag me after him, but without him I feel stymied, like half a person. I have plenty of bitterness to spare, but I lost my courage the day he died.

  “It was all very unpleasant, what they did to little Martha Hayes.” Lukas speaks in a detached voice, head tilted up to stare at the steeple that’s under construction. “So she came here in the evenings to draw and write. Eventually, things got so bad that she even stashed a pillow and blanket behind one of the pews and slept here at night instead of going back to the dorms to face her tormentors.”

  A pang of sympathy for Martha goes through me, even as the fire inside me whispers that she should’ve faced them, gotten her revenge, pushed their faces in the dirt and shown them she could give back what they gave her.

  “One night, a fire started in the back of the chapel. Inspectors decided that Martha, to ward off the cold, lit the candles at the altar and fell asleep. One of the candles tipped over, and...”

  Lukas trails off, and Tanner chimes in again. “She was burned to death in her sleep. Well,” he amends, “she probably woke up before the last of it.”

  Finishing the inevitable story, I add, “And now she haunts the places and says boo and stuff.”

  “Something like that. This world is cruel to those who have no power.” Lukas eyes my mom, who looks a little pale, and apparently decides to wind down the creepy part of the tour. “We should probably move on to the dorms now. You’ll be wanting to see where you’ll sleep. Hey, wait, don’t—”

  Tanner ducks beneath the rope and heads towards the front porch of the chapel, steps confident and daring, his semi-permanent tattoo rippling as he glances over his shoulder towards Lukas. “Don’t be a wet blanket. This is the whole raison d’être of doing this stupid tour. You and I have both seen all the buildings that we’re allowed in anyway.”

  Pushing aside the rope, he takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring the creaking and groaning that follows his heavy footsteps. Then he slips into the darkness of the chapel, completely uncaring of the danger—which of course doesn’t touch him or his expensive designer sneakers.

  Lukas eyes me. A strange tingle slides down my spine, followed by immediate resentment that he makes me feel anything at all. Apologetically, he says, “I guess we can always do the rest of the tour without him...”

  Mom gives Lukas a weak smile. “We can wait. I don’t mind—I have the latest Danielle Steele in my purse.”

  Annoyance rises in me, sharp and hot. Of course my mother would let these rich boys run all over her. She does mind; we both know it. But she’ll inconvenience herself to death for their mere amusement.

  “He might come back.” Lukas doesn’t seem convinced of his own words. “Or maybe I can go in there and get him to come out...”

  “Don’t worry yourself,” Mom says. “The dorms will still be there when he gets out. We shouldn’t leave him behind. He could get hurt, after all.”

  Under his breath Wally mutters, “It would serve him right.” He eyes me, leans close and adds in my ear, “I’m starting to favor the gorgeous European over the sizzling hot Southerner.”

  I give him a wan smile, unable to even fake picking one of them. It makes my stomach twist just to imagine it. “I can’t believe this.” Staring into the darkness of the chapel, I feel a white-hot irritation rise inside me. “It’s not like he’s going to find the ghost inside there. It’s just a dirty old chapel."

  “Technically,” Lukas says, his voice smoothly clipping into a British accent for a moment, “Martha is in there. In an urn on the mantel, but she’s there. She didn’t have any family to claim her.”

  My stomach drops. An orphan bullied to death right here on campus. No wonder it wasn’t on the website.

  We wait. Mom takes her mass market paperback out of her purse and cracks it open. I watch Lukas glance her way, noticing the way his eyebrows lift at the sight of it. No doubt he’s wondering why she doesn’t have an eReader, mentally calculating the worth of her thrift store clothing. Tanner knew at the sight of our little group that he was looking at a scholarship student; polite Lukas no doubt saw the same and just didn’t say it aloud.

  I can practically feel his scorn. It burns the back of my neck.

  If we were rich, we wouldn’t be standing around waiting for some dumbass to get out of the condemned haunted chapel. Our tour guide wouldn’t be a student who replaced another student. We’d be shown around by the Dean or at least a faculty member; they would wait for us, not the other way around.

  Nothing makes it clearer that these boys are the Elites than the ease with which they make my mother stand on the sidewalk, squinting at tiny letters on thin paper, at the mercy of their whims. Even Wally is starting to look bored and annoyed. Sweet, gentle Wally who drove us all the way here, who was my brother’s best friend, who found him with me.

  I swore I would make the Elites pay.

  That can’t exactly start by standing around waiting for them and biting my tongue.

  “I’ll go get him.”

  My mother’s head jerks up at my words, and she frowns at me. “Brenna, sweetie—”

  “It’s no big.” Swinging under the rope, I send a patient smile her way. “If it didn’t break under his weight, it won’t break under mine. Wally, you stay with Mom.”

  Lukas hurriedly says, “You don’t have to. I can go get him. In my experience, it's dangerous to follow Tanner Connally to a second location—especially for girls like you.”

  I look at him. Really look at him, with him looking back at me. It feels like a moment; I almost believe that his clever eyes see me.

  Then my hand throbs, and I realize I’ve grabbed the snake bite scar reflexively. I can’t forget; I won’t let go. For Silas.

  “You’ve been useless so far,” I tell him, ignoring my mother’s sharp intake of breath at my sudden rudeness. “So I’ll take care of it, since you clearly won’t.”

  "You don't have to go in alone. I can go with you."

  He steps forward, but I wave him off. "You'd only slow me down."

  I turn before he can respond, shrug off the feeling of his gaze landing between my shoulder blades, and follow Tanner’s footsteps up and into the dark.

  What’s the worse that can happen, aft
er all?

  If I die, at least I won’t be alone anymore.

  Chapter 3

  The inside of the chapel smells like sawdust and varnish.

  I don’t know what I expected—an occult scent, maybe some whiff of the arcane. If ghosts do exist, it seems like they should be obligated to announce their presence.

  Of course, if ghosts existed I would know by now. Because I would feel Silas’s presence at my side.

  There are two rows of long pews in the chapel, made of dark heavy wood, with faded embroidered cushions on the seats. To the left of the door is a small booth that must be a confessional; half of it has been torn down, and fresh wood planks are leaning against what remains, waiting to replace wood that must be weak or rotten. Up front is the altar, where little Martha Hayes must’ve lit a candle in the cold one evening before curling up beneath a thin blanket to fall asleep, no idea she was about to die.

  That’s where Tanner is standing, a lighter in one hand, head cocked to the side. He speaks without turning around. “I knew you would follow me in here.”

  The air around me is dry and still. It feels heavy with the past—or maybe that’s just the dust and still air. It doesn’t stir as I take a step forward, waiting for Tanner to turn around and realize it’s me behind him, the scholarship kid in the discount clothes.

  He flicks the lighter open, a tiny flame dancing on it, glowing against his fingertips. I lick my lips, which are suddenly dry. “It’s not Lukas.”

  “I know.” Glancing over his shoulder, he stares at me, surprisingly still. This whole tour he’s been moving, fidgeting, constantly in motion. Until now, before the altar with a flame in his hand. “Like I said, I knew you would follow me in here. You’ve got curious eyes. You don’t belong here.”

  My breath catches. For a moment, I almost think he’s found me out, that he knows I’m a fraud.