She walks over to my bedside drawer and opens it up. “Where did you stash it? You need to take proper care of your finger, River. I’ll never forgive you if you ruined it.”
And I’ll never forgive her for taking it, but that’s not something I’m going to tell her while she’s still holding her knife.
“Bottom drawer,” I tell her. “Give me the knife, then let’s talk about… that.”
Whateverthathad been, with Blaze on his back with his cock out, tied to the bed looking flushed and freshly fucked.
Pandora opens up the drawer and squats down to pull out the three little bones.
Seeing her “lucky charm” makes bile rise in my throat, and it’s all I can do not to gag. I stare at it, trying to reconcile the bones with the missing finger on my own hand. Even the way they’re linked with wire is an eerie reminder of the way they’d once fit together naturally.
I’d placed it against the stump on my hand, and the immediate, visceral flashback, the pain of having it cut off, had overwhelmed me. After that, I had stuffed it into the drawer so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I should have thrown it away.
“What the fuck did I walk in on?” I blurt out, trying to get my mind off of the macabre token she’d taken from me.
Pandora kisses the charm, making my stomach roil again, then drops her knife on the floor. Before I can grab it, she kicks it under the bed.
“There. No more scary knife,” Pandora says. She sits down on the bed and rubs my finger bones over and over. “And I don’t know, you walked in on me attempting to cut Blaze open? I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing.”
“After you fucked him?” I ask. “What, was that a going away present or some shit?” I shake my head. “How the hell did you get Asch in on that?”
Pandora’s eyes practically sparkle as she grins at me. “Asch knows what Blaze did.”
“What Blaze did,” I repeat. “You mean to Rachel?” My own expression darkens, and I wish she hadn’t kicked the knife out of my reach so I could go back into the other room and take my own pain out on him.
“No, what he did toAsch. Why would Asch care about Rachel?” Pandora puts my bones into her pocket. “Keep up!”
Out of sight, but not out of mind.
“Anyway, the files I grabbed from that basement room?—”
“The basement? Files?” I huff in annoyance. “You mean the secret room in the frat?” It’s not like it’s new for Pandora to flit from topic to topic, but I need her to slow down and explain what she’s talking about instead of expecting me to follow her trainwreck of an attention span.
She nods. “Right! The one where they took pics of pretty college girls. And a few boys, but mostly girls.”
Pandora takes her phone out and taps for a few seconds before holding the screen up for me to see. There’s a photo of a printout, which has what looks like a modeling profile for a random student.
“I checked, and this girl was a student for one semester like five years ago. Then she abruptly dropped out.” Pandora puts the phone away again. “Uncle Slayer wasn’t able to find anything more about her either. Just poof, vanished. Her sister reported her missing six months later, but that’s way too late to find anyone. Everybody knows if you don’t find them within the first forty-eight hours, they’re probably dead.”
She says that last sentence so cheerfully, but there’s something wild behind her eyes.
It reminds me of how she looked that night at the gym.
“How many others?” I ask, licking my lips. My mouth is so dry. Is this what Rachel had stumbled into? Some scam that made girls think they could become models, only for them to disappear?
“Just a few.” Pandora flops across the bed. “You should have let me stab Blaze a little. I wasn’t actually going to kill him. A puncture between the ribs might have done him some good, even.”
It probably would have.
“Well, with both your knife and his cock out,” I point out, “I wasn’t too sure what the end goal was.” I watch her. “What about Rachel, Pandora? Did you find a modeling contract for her?” My heart is pounding in my ears, and it’s all I can do not to storm into the other room and demand answers from Blaze. “How is Blaze involved?”
“No, I didn’t find Rachel.” Pandora reaches into her pocket again, and this time her hand stays there.
She’s touching my bones.
“But she must have been here, right? And Zayden, I know he was involved. He delivered dahlias to my roommate, River. Blood red dahlias, like he was fucking taunting me.”
