by L. A. Sable
“It’s been too long,” Ms. Devlin says to Carter, voice grating. “I can’t remember the last time we saw you at a school function.”
“I’ve got a business to run,” Carter responds, his voice a low drawl. “And especially now, with no one to take over for me, I’ve got to stay on top of everything myself.”
Mr. Devlin clears his throat and takes a sip from the glass of orange juice in front of him. “We heard about all of that unpleasantness with Frank, of course. He never seemed like the type.”
Carter shrugs as if it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other. “Life is full of disappointments, sometimes that includes your own children.”
Asher’s body stiffens at the obvious dig, but he doesn’t say anything. It’s amazing to me that they’re talking about his father’s criminal exploits like he’s not even there. I can’t stop a stab of sympathy and I have to remind myself that Asher isn’t exactly deserving of the emotion.
And to my surprise, Trish just nods and smiles as if it’s all perfectly normal to talk this way at a school breakfast. It’s crazy what a few months of life married to Carter has done to the way she sees the world, or maybe she’s just trying to keep the peace by not speaking up.
“Speaking of fathers,” Chloe says, voice so faux sweet that it’s practically saccharine. “Where’s yours, Lily?”
“That’s a good question,” I reply easily, trying to make her think I’m completely unbothered even as my heart rate kicks up. “If I ever figure that out, I’ll let you know. He left when I was a kid.”
Chloe’s eyebrows go up in a mockery of shock. “You mean your mother raised you all by herself. Wow. Good for you, Mrs. Bellamy.”
“Call me Trish,” my mother responds with a smile. I marvel at the fact that she can’t see through Chloe’s act. “Lily had a step-father for a long time, but he passed away a few years ago.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Chloe drawls. “What happened?”
I close my eyes in frustration, wanting to shake her. Doesn’t Trish realize that she’s walking right into a verbal trap? “It’s probably better not to get into--”
But Trish doesn’t seem to have any problem answering the question. “A drug overdose. Unfortunately, Jessie had some demons that he couldn’t overcome before it was too late.”
Before Chloe can ask another impertinent question, Carter interrupts, voice sharp. “I agree with Lily, none of this is appropriate breakfast conversation. And I believe the convocation ceremony is about to start, perhaps we should make our way there.”
“Yes, let’s do that,” Mr. Devlin says as he starts to rise. “Our Chloe is giving the keynote speech so we certainly don’t want to be late.”
Asher doesn’t wait to be told twice, he’s up and striding out of the dining room before anyone can stop him. Carter and Trish get up more slowly, but I catch the smirk that crosses Chloe’s face when their backs are turned.
The bitch.
Luckily, Chloe heads backstage as soon as we get to the auditorium so I don’t have to put up with any more of her veiled questions. There’s still a strange tension in the air as we take our seats, but no one says anything and I prefer silence to the alternative.
The lights eventually dim and the chatter quiets as a spotlight appears on a podium at the center of the stage.
Dean Felton stands up first and gives a long and dry speech about how we’re all part of the Black Lake family and he can’t wait to see how we all grow and develop this year. Total horseshit, in other words. I won’t ever forget what he let happen to Liam, and that he can’t be trusted to act fairly.
Then Charlie gives her speech, and it’s all about how proud and humbled she is to have the chance to attend the school, thanking all the donors in the room. When she talks about her family and how she excels academically to honor them, I notice Trish dabbing at tears with a handkerchief. Carter, on the other hand, is checking emails on his phone.
Then Chloe hits the stage and I fervently wish that I had some rotten tomatoes to throw. She literally flounces to the podium, letting the shorter than regulation hem of her uniform skirt swing around her. When she reaches the center of the stage, she grabs the microphone like a lounge singer and puts her mouth right up to it so her voice sounds breathy and seductive.
“This convocation serves several purposes,” she begins, gaze like steel roving over the crowd as a small smile plays at her lips. “Among them are honoring our fine scholarship students and celebrating our community, but I also think it’s important to highlight individual student voices that really have something to say. In that spirit, I would like to read from student submitted work.”
She places a notebook that I hadn’t realized she was holding on the podium and slowly opens it, rifling through the pages. It’s vaguely familiar, but it takes a moment too long for me to put it together.
“February 15th, 2013,” she reads, voice dark and hypnotic.
Trish stiffens beside me and my heart nearly stops. That is a significant date for us, for reasons that nobody but the two of us could know. And then I think back to Chloe’s leading questions about my old stepfather and the truth of what’s happening slams into me like a ton of bricks.
But too late to stop this.
“Dear Diary, I have a terrible secret. Something awful happened today and I could have stopped it, but I didn’t.”
I want to launch myself at the stage, pull my journal from her hands and use it to beat her to death, but I’m frozen like a deer in headlights. All I can do is watch as reality crashes right into me.
“Jessie may be my stepfather but he isn’t a good man. I can’t even remember how many times he’s come home drunk or high and put his hands on Trish. She tells people that the bruises are from accidents around the house, but nobody is that clumsy. I’ve always wished there was something that I could do to help her, but I never knew what that might be.”
Trish makes a sound like a wounded animal and I force myself not to look at her. She’s never heard this story before because I’ve never told it to anyone except the diary that was never supposed to see the light of day. I’d treated it as a sort of confessional, purging myself of my sins, and now those sins are coming back to haunt me.
I don’t really even have a memory of writing this, why did I keep it after so many years?
“But he was worse than I’ve ever seen him today. I think something bad happened at work and he wanted to get high to deal with it. Trish was working late at the nursing home so he came home to fix. He stuck the needle in his arm right in front of me, said if I told on him to Trish then he’d make both of us pay for it.”
The room has started to stir with rumblings but no one tries to put a stop to it, not the parents or the faculty. It’s like everyone is on the edge of their seat, wanting to know what will come next even if this whole thing is entirely inappropriate.
“I think he took too much because I found him slumped lying face-up on the couch, making this choking sound like he couldn’t get enough air. I’ve read that with certain drugs, if you take enough, they can slow your breathing down so much you’ll die without help. Jessie was making these strange gasping noises, his mouth opening too wide while his throat jumped. He looked like a fish that’s been out of the water for too long.”
Chloe reads the words from my stolen journal with minimal inflection, like she’s describing the weather. I don’t understand how someone can do something so destructive and display so little emotion.
The memory flashes before my eyes like I’m physically there, standing at the end of the couch at eleven years old, frozen and wandering what I should do. All I could think at the time was what it would be like if my mother never got hit anymore, if I never found used syringes when I was doing laundry, if I could just let the problem take care of itself.
It feels, just like it did then, that my soul is being ripped apart as I make the decision to do evil for what I think is the greater good. I’ve carried the weight of it on my soul
for the last six years, and it’s a burden I wanted to carry alone. But now, that choice has been snatched from, just like so much else.
“I knew I should call for help, but I didn’t. I’m not a killer, but I could have made the decision to save him and I didn’t. It took almost an hour for him to finally die and I waited a bit longer before I called the ambulance because I had to be sure. And the worst thing is that I’m still not sorry. I just didn’t want him to hurt us anymore.”
When I finally turn toward her, it’s the look on Trish’s face that finally breaks me completely, that expression of betrayal and rejection that I never wanted to see. She stares at me like she doesn’t recognize who I am anymore. And it hurts.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, notifications coming in from the Inner Circle, one after another. I don’t have to look to know that people are voting me to the bottom of the hierarchy.
But I’m something even worse than a Proli.
I’m the girl who watched her stepfather die and didn’t do anything to stop it.
And I’d never told Trish, understanding that I had to keep that burden for her, spend the rest of my life ensuring she was happy to atone for what I’d done. How will I ever face my mother again?
Turning on Asher, because I can’t stand one more moment of my mom’s face, I hiss at him as tears burn in my eyes. “Did you know about this?”
Asher doesn’t respond and I can’t read his expression in the dark. He seems surprised, but it’s impossible to be sure.
“I let him die.”
I can’t take another word of it.
It’s a wonder that I manage to make it out of my seat and to the door without anyone stopping me. They’re all frozen with shock and horror, or maybe just happy to see me go. I have no idea where I’m headed, but I know that I have to get out of here.
I just want to be off this campus, away from Black Lake, even if I have to steal someone’s car to do it.
I see the shuttle bus speeding around the curve before I reach the street with a distant awareness that I have to stop my headlong rush into the street. But my forward momentum doesn’t stop, even as I realize that the bus is going too fast to stop in time if I end up in the road.
Some people will say later that I did it on purpose, that the embarrassment was just too much and I tried to end it all. But I know that I had every intention of stopping at the sidewalk and letting the bus pass me by.
Maybe my foot catches on a break in the curb, people will say, and that makes me stumble. But I will swear both now and later that I feel hands on the small of my back, shoving me forward.
Somebody pushes me into the road, right into the path of an oncoming bus.
I hear the impact before I can feel it, as if takes just a beat longer for my body to catch up to my mind. A sharp throb of pain lights up every nerve-ending for an earth-shattering moment, and then the entire world goes dark.
Chapter 19
It takes three days for me to wake up from the coma.
They had to medically induce it to give the swelling in my brain time to go down. So far, it seems like I’ll make a full recovery. My pelvis is broken, along with three ribs, and a fracture in my skull but it’s nothing a few corrective surgeries and months of physical therapy can’t fix.
Trish appears to have forgiven me, or at least she doesn’t want to talk about what happened with Jessie while I’m still recovering in the hospital. I’m convinced she thinks that I jumped in front of that bus on purpose, even if she hasn’t said it. She comes into my room every day and sits with me, but we don’t talk about anything important.
I haven’t told her yet that I fully plan to go back to Black Lake. According to the app, I’m not a Proli. Charlie sent me a long text message saying that some people took pity on me because they thought I’d tried to kill myself, others were convinced that I actually had died so didn’t bother voting for me at all, and the rest think I’m a total badass for sitting back and watching my stepfather die. It’s not enough to make me a Diamond, but I’m safe from Proli territory for now. She also spent several paragraphs telling me how sorry she is that I got hurt.
She seemed genuine enough, but it’s impossible to say for sure.
Because I don’t trust her now. I can’t trust anyone.
Somebody gave Chloe my old journals, someone who had access to the house in Connecticut and opportunity to sneak into my room when nobody was around to stop them. It could have been any of the guys or even Charlie, for that matter. What better way to take me down then to get close by pretending to be my friend?
There are dozens of flower arrangements around the room, stuffed bears with Get Well Soon! stitched on their tummies and enough balloons to cover the ceiling if I untied them from the weights keeping them secured. A stack of cards is on the bedside table, I’ll read each one before throwing them in the trash. Most of the gifts are from Kai and Jayden, who’ve both sent messages begging me to let them visit.
Is any of it real?
I’ve refused to let anyone come in to see me except for Trish, mostly because my face looks like bread dough that’s been punched into the general shape of eyes and a mouth. The surgeon said the swelling should go down soon, otherwise Trish has already promised to bring in as many plastic surgeons as necessary to set things right.
But I also don’t trust myself to keep the rage burning in me out of my gaze, anyone who looks at me will see it. There’s a dozen red roses on the bedside table and I pluck one to admire the fresh blood crimson of the petals. My hand wraps around the stem, forcing the thorns deep into the flesh of my palm. Enough narcotics from the I.V. pump are coursing through my blood stream to dull anything short of pain of death, but I know that I can recreate this numb sensation in myself even after the meds are gone from system. I will be a perfect shell, revealing nothing but exactly what I choose.
I did die in that crash and I’ve been reborn as someone new.
Because once I get control of myself, I’ll use their own tactics against them. Infiltrate and destroy until there’s nothing left but ash and dust.
My smile will hide sharp teeth prepared to bite. The body that the doctors put back together will be a distraction from my true intentions.
I will find out which one of them betrayed me and make them pay for it.
But it isn’t just about the journal or this most recent “accident”, it’s about all of it. They’ve tried to destroy me, both mentally and physically, and they need to be taught a lesson. People are not playthings and actions have consequences. The Diamonds, and everyone else at Black Lake Prep, will learn that you can’t just do whatever you want and get away with it.
Because I’m coming for all of them.
Most people think of diamonds as unbreakable, but if that were true it wouldn’t be possible to cut them into such pretty shapes.
The truth is, it takes a Diamond to break one.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Thank you so much for reading! Lily will be back and badder than ever very soon. The bully boys and girls of Black Lake Prep have no idea what’s coming for them.
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About the Author
Lillian Sable writes erotic romances with ultra-Alpha heroes. She is a former office-worker who spent more time fantasizing and daydreaming than doing her actual job. She started writing her fantasies down and turned her dreams into reality. Lillian lives in Indiana with her husband.
Visit my website: www.lilliansable.com
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