Page 59 of Twisted Elites

A tiny voice whispered that the knights had played Ashley from the start. It reminded me to look at what happened to her, but I shook it off. Even if Geraldine might be playing Cormac, it didn’t mean the kings were playing me. Too much had happened between the boys and me for their affections to be fake.

I leaned across the armchair, reached over, and squeezed Cormac’s hand. “Please, be careful with Geraldine.”

He squeezed back. “And the same to you about Kashaayah, Brunswick, and Garraway.”

Annoyance flickered across my skin. Geraldine went out of her way to cause me grief, while the kings mostly ignored Cormac. I was about to remind him that our situations were different when a voice interrupted us.

“Miss Evergreen?” Mr. Blunt stood over us with his cap in his hands. “Mrs. Benazir says you have an important phone call.”

* * *

The last time I entered the headmistress’s office on my own, someone had bludgeoned the back of my head and dumped me in the same cave the police had found Corrine’s dead body. I wasn’t about to visit the woman without a trusted escort. Cormac walked me down to Mrs. Benazir’s office and waited for me outside.

As soon as I stepped into the lavender-scented room, the headmistress’s lips thinned. “Thank you for coming down,” she said with a rebuke in her tone. “In the future, please give your callers your direct number. My office is not a telephone exchange.”

My brows drew together. Who could possibly be calling me via Mrs. Benazir? And why would they wait so long on the line for me to walk down from the east tower?

The headmistress beckoned me over and gestured at the phone.

I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Miss Evergreen,” said a smooth, cultured voice. “I trust that Geraldine spoke with you today.”

My stomach dropped, and my heart tried to gallop out of my chest. Mr. Byrd! “What do you want?”

“Is that any way to speak to a school governor?”

Now he sounded like his partner in perversion, Miss Claymore. I slowed my breathing in an attempt to calm myself and waited for him to speak.

“Retract your statement,” he said. “More people are being hurt than you realize.”

My stomach hardened with indignation. If social services took away his daughter and his wife had walked out on him in disgust, this was his doing, not mine. Not to mention what he did to Bianca. Nausea swirled in the back of my throat as I considered how far he would be prepared to go to silence me.

Miss Claymore only wanted me dead because I stood in the way of her and a boy who she knew never loved her. Mr. Byrd stood to lose his family, his firm, and his freedom. Right now, he was probably the most pressing threat, considering how much was at stake.

An impatient huff sounded from the direction of Mrs. Benazir, which got me clenching my jaw with annoyance. “You want me to lie to the police about what I saw? Don’t crimes like that carry heavy sentences?”

His angry breaths reverberated through the receiver, making a thousand imaginary centipedes crawl over my flesh. This entire conversation was futile, and it was time to hang up.

“I have something of yours,” he said.

“That’s doubtful,” I spat.

His low chuckle made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “I went to great lengths to fetch it, or rather fetch—”

With a silent ‘fuck you,’ I hung up. He could play games with someone else. My only irreplaceable possession was Mom and Dad’s house. Now that Ashley had signed her share over to me for a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, no one could take it away.

Chapter 15

I spent the rest of the day with Cormac, getting the software to cycle through foreign language dictionaries to identify the mistranslated words in the diary. We reached a passage that said:

Is it strange to love and hate the same person? That’s how I feel about el Sol. When he answers a calculus problem, I can only admire him, but when he sits with el Moreno, el Rubio, and las Perras, I hate him so much. It’s like he’s living a double life, torn between loving me and standing by those who mock me.

Cormac ran a hand through his hair and blew out a breath. “But she dumped Kashaayah weeks before that.”

I scrolled back up the diary entries and pointed out a passage I had skimmed earlier. “That’s because Bianca told her Prakash was planning to parade her through the hallways dressed as a pig.”

He frowned. “I skimmed over that.”