Page 37 of Savage Elites

“Ashley Evergreen?” asked the sergeant. “One of your classmates reported an assault.”

Ashley lowered her gaze to the parquet floor. “As I’ve said to my sister a hundred times, it was just a bit of name-calling. Nothing untoward happened.”

Anger exploded in my heart, which pumped out gallons of hot blood through my veins. Heat flared across my cheeks and into fingers I wanted to wrap around her scrawny neck. Why would she want to protect those animals, and why hadn’t she called to say she’d changed her mind?

I cleared my throat. “But we—”

“Sorry, officers. I’m not sure what’s wrong with my sister.” Ashley shrugged. “It’s either crying-wolf syndrome or Munchausen’s by proxy. She’s done it before.”

The policewoman flipped open her notebook. “Could you tell us in your own words what happened?”

Ashley stepped aside and let the officers into our room. As I followed after them, the male constable held up a hand. “It’s probably for the best if we interviewed you separately.”

“Right,” I snarled through clenched teeth.

I stood in the hallway, breathing like an agitated bull. All throughout, nausea battered through my insides, making my breaths ragged. After everything that girl had put me through, she had now undermined my previous complaints to the police by portraying me as a fantasist.

Eventually, the door opened, and Ashley strode out of the room with her nose in the air. The police invited me in and wanted to talk about all the complaints I had made in the past. According to Ashley, I had a track record of telling lies to get rivals into trouble.

It took nearly an hour to straighten things out, and after the police left, I turned to Mom and Dad’s smiling portrait.

“See what happens when you try to help Ashley?” Bitterness rolled from the back of my throat and coated the surface of my tongue.

Mom and Dad smiled back.

“She hates me more than she hates those boys. This time I mean it. Ashley and I are no longer sisters. I’m going to stop thinking about her completely.”

I paused as though waiting to see their reactions, but they continued smiling.

“And when she gets expelled, I won’t lift a finger to help.”

* * *

The boys weren’t at breakfast, so I walked across the dining room to the scholars’ table and sat with Michelle. Her hair was styled into cornrows with ends that trailed down her back. She and Cora repeated gossip about last night’s events and cast me furtive looks as though to prompt me to add to the conversation.

I wasn’t in the mood to rehash any part of Ashley’s ordeal and subsequent betrayal, so I headed to English, sat in the empty lecture theater with my laptop, and tried to read Corrine’s diary.

A string of nonsensical words danced before my eyes, and I blinked myself back into focus. My head injury had damaged my ability to concentrate on long passages of text, and the software I’d used to translate the numerical Optical Character Recognition readout into letters had produced gibberish.

“I can barely read English, let alone Latin and Spanish,” I muttered.

“What are you doing?” Prakash strolled down the steps.

I slammed the laptop lid. “Translating Gobbledegook.”

“Medieval English?” he asked.

“Worse.” I glanced over my shoulder. “What happened to you guys last night? Cormac and I roamed the academy, and we didn’t see you.”

Prakash pulled out his textbook and flipped to the last subject we had studied. “Miss Claymore interrogated us about what happened. She thought we had started some kind of fight club and wouldn’t listen to anything we said.”

“Really?”

“She is biased against us.”

The bell signifying the end of breakfast rang. Students piled into the lecture theater and filled the seats. I rubbed my temples and stifled a yawn, as sleep had evaded me the night before.

“How long did she keep you?” I asked.