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Inside, I head straight for Penny’s room, knocking loudly. Instead of looking surprised to see me, she glowers at me. “What do you want, Davenport?”
“Where is she?” I ask, trying to look into the pink explosion of her bedroom.
“Who?”
I bring my attention back to Penny. “Taylor fucking Swift.”
She looks me up and down before wrinkling her nose in distain. “Let me pull you out of Delulu land and assure you that you don’t stand a chance of having a song written about you.”
“Tori, Bergmann. Where the fuck is Tori?”
“Haven’t seen her, and while she’s not answering her phone, I can only assume it’s because some absolute shriveled rat scrotum released a sex tape of her, and she’s decided that she’s had enough with this place.”
“Tori?” I yell into the room.
“She’s not here, Royal.”
I barge past her into her bedroom, scanning everywhere before I look in the bathroom, the closet, and even under the bed. When I straighten, Penny’s standing by the door still, arms folded as she taps her foot. “Where is she?”
“Sitting on the bed. Do you need to book an appointment with an optometrist?” She rolls her eyes. “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you check that stupid camera you freaks installed outside her room. She’s not here.”
“Tell her to call me when you see her,” I tell her, handing over Tori’s phone as I leave.
“I guess with all that money, you forgot to buy acting lessons,” Penny calls after me. “Because no one is buying that bullshit.”
Even if Tori does go to see her, I know that Penny won’t even pass on the message, but I was hoping to find Tori there. She doesn’t have any other friends here, so I know she’s not hiding out in anyone else’s room. If I was her, I’d probably have borrowed some money from Penny and left.
Depending on how much money Penny leant her, she might have gotten a taxi somewhere. Probably back to her mom’s place in New Jersey. The snow is coming down harder as I jog over to the gates, ready to check with the security guys to see if Tori walked or got a car, but before I get there, Syn appears from the direction of the parking lot.
“Where have you been?” he asks me.
“Where have you been?”
“Upstate, running an errand.”
People like Syn and me don’t run errands. We pay people to do that for us.
“Don’t just stand around. We’ve got an interrogation to get to.”
I pull out my phone and check the time. “We’ve got twenty minutes.”
“And if the guilty party dares to turn up, they’re more likely to be one of the first people there.”
XXXXII
Tori
At the sound of the soft knocks, I pull open the door to my room and quickly usher Penny inside.
“You heard him, right?” Penny asks me.
When I moved into Denali House, I left my dorm room, but never fully moved out. On the first day on campus, one of my two suitcases had broken, and I’d also decided not to take everything I own with me—just in case. Only a few minutes before I heard Royal hammering on Penny’s door, I’d gone into my old room to find some clean clothes to wear and to pack up what was left in here.
“He one hundred percent didn’t buy that I hadn’t seen you, and I’m also not convinced he thinks you’ve left, but it seems odd that they’re looking for you.”
“I wouldn’t put it past Syn to have some kind of last attack planned,” I tell her, pulling on my coat. “A public screening, just to make sure everyone has seen everything.”
That feels like something Syn would revel in, and even though everyone probably has seen the video by now, the idea still has my stomach writhing.
