by Bella King
I shrunk under the harshness of his words, and even Troy and Martin looked worried at Andrew’s temper. That concerned me more than anything else.
“Tell me what you heard,” Andrew demanded, yanking me toward him so that his nose was nearly touching mine.
I could feel his knuckles pressed against my chest as he held me in place. I was starting to tremble despite my best efforts to remain confident. It didn’t matter what my brain was saying to me. My body had different plans.
I swallow hard, trying to moisten my throat to speak. “I don’t know. You were taking something out from the stall,” I said in a hoarse whisper.
He relaxed his grip and leaned back an inch. “So, you were listening in. It’s not that hard to tell the truth.”
He was still staring at me, but his eyes were too intense for me to maintain eye contact with him. I had to look away but looking down was a sign of submission. I looked sideways and didn’t reply.
“I hope you understand that we’re going to need a vow of secrecy from you,” he said.
I nodded. “I won’t tell anyone.”
He chuckled. “I mean, something a little more than that.”
There was always more. The creepy man at the bottom of the staircase wanted more, my ex-boyfriend had wanted more, the judge had wanted more, and everyone that I met wanted more from me. All they did was take, and I was starting to grow sick of it. When did I get my chance to take, and stop giving assholes their way with me all the time?
I looked back at Andrew, a drop of confidence returning to my blood. “I don’t know what you want from me, but I’m not involved in your business. If you let me go, I won’t tell anyone.”
That got a round of laughter out of Troy and Martin, but Andrew didn’t react to my words at all. He kept staring into my eyes as though he was trying to figure out just what he would do to me to make sure I didn’t rat him out.
I didn’t understand why he was so concerned. Whatever had been in that hiding spot must have been important to him for him to take this so seriously. It was either that, or he was criminally insane, which was honestly the more likely of the two. We were at Ridgeview, after all.
“Since you know things that you shouldn’t, we either have to kill you, or you have to join our ranks,” Andrew explained.
My stomach was in knots at the mention of killing me. Was he serious? He certainly looked like he was.
“I think you would prefer to join us, but you would need to prove your loyalty before we can let you do that,” Andrew said, a thin smile spreading across his face.
Troy and Martin were standing behind him, rubbing their hand together as though they were about to enjoy a feast. I hoped that I wasn’t the main course, but the way they were drooling over me, I suspected I was.
I remained silent while I waited for Andrew to explain what he had in store for me. I wasn’t interested in joining the ranks of a couple of handsome crooks. That was a mistake I loathed to make again, but it looked like I had no other choice. I wasn’t interested in dying during my first week at school. I had a bright life ahead of me, and I wasn’t going to let these men spoil it for me.
Andrew let the room fall silent before continuing, building an atmosphere of tension and dread. I waded through it like soup, my brain crawling toward any glimmer of hope that I could find. It was a struggle, but I was used to having to find the light in such darkness. I had been through too much to break now.
“I want you to undress,” Andrew said, his voice as cold as stone.
“Why?” I asked, fearing the worst.
“Listen and obey, and you will be allowed to leave,” he replied.
I looked for an escape but there was none. I knew that the only way I was getting out of this was if I listened to what he said. He either wanted to do something terrible to me or just humiliate me. Either way, this wasn’t my ideal evening.
I didn’t hesitate for long. Angering Andrew wasn’t on my to-do list after seeing his face of fury moments ago. I didn’t want to be subjected to his wrath. I pulled off my shirt and stood with bare breasts in front of the three men. This wasn’t the first time I had exposed myself to a group of guys to get something I wanted, but it felt dirty and degrading all the same.
“Your nipples are hard,” Andrew noted, reached out and grazing one of the small peaks with two fingers.
I shuddered at his touch, and the breast that he touched experienced a rush of pleasurable sensations. Now wasn’t the time to be enjoying myself. I was afraid, not horny, but I couldn’t deny that Andrew was attractive. His power would have been something I lusted after if I was still stuck in my old ways, but not anymore. I was a changed woman, or at least I thought I was.
I jerked myself away from his fingers, but the touch of his skin lingered on mine. I felt sick to my stomach that there was a part of me that enjoyed this, but I would never show it to these men. They were monsters who didn’t deserve a woman as good as me.
“The pants too,” Andrew said, his eyes almost lifeless as he spoke.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked, pulling down my light-blue pajama pants and letting them crumple at my bare feet.
“It’s not for our enjoyment. It’s an act of devotion to prove your alliance with us,” Andrew said, his voice awfully calm for someone who was watching a woman get naked in front of him.
The other two men were eying me like candy, but I ignored them. I glared at Andrew. “I never asked to be aligned with you,” I said.
“And we never asked you to spy on us, yet you did. There’s no going back,” he replied.
“So, now what?” I asked, goosebumps rising on my legs from the cold air that swept past me. The stone that covered the school didn’t allow for much heat to stay in the air at night, and it only seemed to be growing colder.
“Now, you leave,” Andrew said, taking a step back.
I was surprised. Surely, he was going to do something horrible to me. This was a trap or some kind of joke. I reached down for my pants, but Andrew stuck a leg out and held them in place with his foot.
“You may leave, but you’re not taking your clothes with you,” he said.
“I can’t wander around the school naked,” I said, crossing my arms over my bare breasts.
“You can, and you will,” Andrew said. “You’ll do whatever I tell you to so that you may prove your alliance with us. We take loyalty very seriously here.”
Chapter 5
Troy and Martin were gobbling me up with their piercing blue eyes. I expected one of them to reach out a hand and start touching me, feeling across my porcelain skin with their large rough hands like I was a toy for their amusement, but maybe that was just a fantasy of mine. They didn’t look terribly interested in taking things further than they already had.
“I won’t be able to get back to my room. There’s some creep at the stairs,” I said, destress leaking into my voice.
Andrew frowned. “Who?”
“I don’t know. Some guy,” I said.
Andrew’s jaw danced beneath his stubbled skin. He looked irritated, but I didn’t understand why. I didn’t think it had been anything I had done, but I could always be wrong.
“We’ll take care of it,” Troy said.
“Really?” I asked, surprised that they would want to help me.
“Yeah, we’re all on the same side now,” Martin said.
Andrew shook his head. “I told that asshole to stay away from the dorms. That’s our territory. He shouldn’t be there.”
I knew how gangs worked from my exposure to them, and Andrew, Troy, and Martin operated just like the ones back at home. They had their own territory that they would fight over and patrol at night. Whoever had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs wasn’t welcome there, which was a relief. I might actually make it back to bed alive at this rate.
“Let’s go,” Andrew said, waving a hand and spinning around.
Martin and Troy followed him as he walked toward the exit, his steps long a
nd purposeful as he went to confront the guy at the end of the staircase. I considered staying back and grabbing my clothes, but Andrew was looking for obedience, and that would be far from it. I wouldn’t be safe at this school if I didn’t follow his command, not that I was anyway. I just didn’t want to be found dead on my first week.
I scrambled to follow Andrew, Troy, and Martin, feeling oddly free as I stepped out into the darkness behind them unclothed. It was embarrassing to be naked, but none of the men were focused on me anymore. They seemed more concerned with confronting their new enemy than exploring my nudity with their greedy eyes.
I almost felt disappointed that I wasn’t in the center of attention anymore, but I had to remind myself once again that those types of thoughts were destructive. It was that same urge to dive into the arms of my abuser that sunk me this low in the first place. My ex-boyfriend had pulled similar stunts on me, and being the foolish woman that I was at the time, I fell in love with him harder for it. I didn’t know what my problem was, but it was a pervasive one that had been hard for me to stomp out.
I trailed behind the large men as they took confident steps through the halls. I would have taken hours to find my way back to the dormitory without them, but they got me there in under a minute. We weaved through the stone corridors as I made myself small behind them. Even though the school was largely empty at this hour, I was afraid of being seen naked.
“Hey fucker!”
I looked up to see Troy charging with his first clenched toward a man at the bottom of the staircase leading to the women’s dormitory. The man stood up quickly when he saw Troy.
The other two men ran after him, all charging toward the man, who had no way to escape them. I held back, watching in morbid fascination as the scene unfolded in front of me.
Troy slammed into the man, knocking him backward onto the staircase. That had to have hurt. I could only imagine the pain of concrete steps digging into the cartilage that connected the bone segments of his spinal cord. Troy could have easily paralyzed him by doing that.
I folded my arms over my chest and leaned my bare shoulder against the cold wall as he began throwing fists at the man. Martin and Andrew arrived on the scene quickly, matching the fury of Troy in the most violent gang beatdown I had witnessed in a long time.
I wasn’t a stranger to violence, but this group didn’t have an ounce of mercy in their muscular bodies. They must have had a lot of bottled rage and frustration to explode like that on someone just for sitting at the wrong staircase, not that the man didn’t deserve it. He got what was coming to him after trying to hold me hostage on my way back to the dormitory.
I couldn’t see what was going on, but I heard pitiful yelps and three men punching and kicking in a tight huddle. They were giving the man a righteous beating, but he hadn’t gone limp yet. In fact, I soon discovered that it was quite the opposite. Somehow, he managed to break free of the tight huddle and escape down the hall, flying past in a blur of skin and blood.
Andrew and his gang didn’t attempt to chase him as he flew into the darkness away from them.
Andrew held out a hand, motioning to the staircase and looking at me. “Up you go, little Rose.”
I sulked down the hall with my head down, the thrill of the fight quickly wearing off and leaving my self-conscious about my nudity again. I felt more exposed now that the sun had begun to rise, spilling pale light through the windows that were positioned too high up on the walls to see out of.
I moved around Troy and Martin, slipping past Andrew to walk up the staircase. I looked back at them nervously as I walked up, afraid that they might follow me, but they didn’t. They just watched as I walked up the staircase, their eyes fixed on my pale ass.
“Don’t think this is over,” Andrew called from the bottom as I reached the large wooden door to the dormitory.
I turned to look at him, standing for a moment at the top of the staircase. It felt liberating to be towering over them as they had towered over me in the classroom earlier that night. I smiled at the men below me and gave them a salute before retreating into the room. That was an issue I would deal with later. Right now, I was just happy that I had managed to get back to bed alive and in one piece.
Chapter 6
The sun rose too early, waking me up sooner than I would have liked to be woken up. I had managed to get a total of five hours of sleep that night. It wasn’t the worst I had to endure, but it certainly wasn’t the best either.
Eden slapped an open hand on the bed beside my head, shocking me awake. The mattress was so firm that any pressure on it could be felt all over the bed, and my head nearly bounced into the air from her slap.
“Wake up before someone draws on your forehead with a sharpie, bitch,” Eden exclaimed, reminding me that pranks and harassment were everyday things here at Ridgeview. If you didn’t wake up early enough, someone was bound to scribble on your forehead or set your bedsheets on fire for a laugh.
I groaned, sitting up in the bed and rubbing the crust from my eyes. I was wearing an old t-shirt, the only thing I felt comfortable sleeping in after my pajamas had been ditched in the classroom. I was sure someone would find them in the morning, but they wouldn’t know they were mine. AT least, that’s what I hoped.
“Did you leave last night?” Eden asked, giving me a suspicious look. She must have heard me despite my best efforts to stay silent.
I nodded. “I had to pee.”
Eden shook her head. “You were gone longer than that.”
I sighed. Eden was perceptive, sometimes annoyingly so. I looked at her with my eyelids hung low over my eyes. “Don’t ask about it.”
She shrugged. “Just curious. You know, it’s dangerous in the halls at night. The gangs like to patrol their territory.”
I would have liked to know this before I nearly got assaulted twice. You live and you learn, I guess. Next time I would drink less before bed and wait my turn at the dormitory bathroom if I absolutely had to go. Taking risks here proved to be more dangerous than I have previously assumed.
I pushed the sheets away from my legs and got out of bed as Eden made her bed. It wasn’t a school requirement that we made our beds, but Natasha didn’t like it if the dorms were sloppy, and she would patrol the area just like how the gangs patrolled the halls at night. This was her territory, and may God help you if you didn’t know that.
I was always a rebellious type of woman, but the school was teaching me that if you wanted to rebel, you better do it in a group with other strong people and not on your own. Since I didn’t want to get caught up in the drama that came with such groups, I was forced to stay in line. It was uncomfortable for me, but I valued my safety.
Get in. Get out. That was the only thing that I needed to do at this school. I remembered the judge’s smug face as he hit the gravel to sentence me to a year at Ridgeview Boarding School. It was as though he knew what kind of hell I was in for, and that he took pleasure in seeing me suffer.
He wasn’t the only one.
I quickly got changed in front of the other women in the dorm, pulling my shirt over my head and tossing it into the wooden chest at the end of the bed. Everyone had one, and it was the only storage we were giving. That meant we couldn’t have very many belongings, but I was a minimalist by nature anyway. It didn’t bother me.
Eden, on the other hand, was aggravated on a daily basis by the size of her storage chest. I saw her now, cramming in her pajamas and trying to force the top down until it clicked in place so that she could lock it. She jumped onto it, slamming her rear into the lid until there was an audible click.
“Fucking thing,” she exclaimed, kicking it once it was closed.
I laughed. “Maybe you should get rid of some of that stuff,” I suggested.
“I need it,” she argued. “I don’t see how any woman can wear the same fucking outfit every day. No offense to you, but I need more variety than that.”
I looked down at my uniform. It was a requirement that we wor
e one on the weekdays, but we did get some say in the colors we chose as long as the garments were the same. Every day, I wore a blue or black skirt with matching leggings, and a white blouse. I was simple in that regard.
Today was Friday, which meant there would be a shorter day of classes and then all hell would break loose. That was what Eden had told me. She said that students went wild over the weekend, but especially on Friday. I should expect plenty of drunken dram in the dormitory and everywhere around the school once the final bell rang.
I was alright with that kind of chaos. My ex-boyfriend liked to get drunk, even during the week, and throw parties on the street. People would be snorting lines off collapsible tables in the apartment complex and taking shots until the police arrived to shut it down. They could usually get a few hours in before that happened, and then it was off to the clubs.
Sometimes I would join in, but I was always afraid to do drugs. I didn’t like to feel like I wasn’t able to think properly or that I might do something that was out of control. I clung to the harshness of reality, only escaping into my own head when things got especially bad.
“Hey, do you have a hair tie?” Eden asked, holding a pile of messy brown hair on top of her head sloppily and sticking out a hand expectantly.
I fished around in the subtle small packet on the front of my skirt, pulling out a wad of tangled white elastic hair ties. “Here,” I said, pulling one of them from the bunch and handing it to her.
“Thanks,” she replied, continuing to put her hair up.
I was ready to go. We had showers in the dormitory, but it was always a losing battle if you didn’t wake up early enough for them. By this time, they would be overcrowded, and you would probably be late for class. A lot of the women would come back from their first or second class to take a shower to avoid the rush. I was one of those people.
Who did I have to impress? Nobody but myself. I wasn’t interested in picking up any men during my time at Ridgeview, but they seemed to be hovering around me like flies. I hadn’t forgotten about the words that Andrew had said to me right before I returned to the dormitory last night.
