Page 1 of The Unravelings

1

Olivia

“Spitfire.”

My heart beats in my ears at the long-forgotten nickname, leaving his filthy, betraying tongue.

“You’re alive,” JJ struggles to gasp out the words.

His chest heaves several times. Those glistening golden-brown eyes that I used to stare into for hours assess me, looking me up and down and committing me to memory. Almost as if I’d disappear the moment he blinks.

Maybe I will.

My fight-or-flight response soars through my veins the moment disbelief shudders through him. His eyes darken to dangerous levels. Levels I never experienced when we were kids. At least, not at me. Hux? Mack? Oh, yeah. But me? Never. His fingers glide over his shirt, rubbing over his heart.

“You’re alive?” he questions again, with a hardened edge to his voice. “How? What…” He trails off, running a hand through his dark hair and shaking his head.

Instinctively, my feet take me back a step, attempting to avoid this confrontation. Run. I need to run out the door of my dorm and away from this school. This was all a mistake. A gross miscalculation on Jonathan’s part in sending me here.

A lump forms in my throat. Heavy. Unrelenting. Burning. My eyes sting from the wetness threatening to cloud my vision.

I’ve been compromised. Something that’s never happened before. I was so careful. Methodical, even. All this work. Cutting my hair. Changing my name and appearance. The binder. The emotional turmoil of returning to this hellhole.

All for nothing.

For a fleeting moment, I thought I’d pull this off. I was confident. Olivia who? She’s no one. Dead. I have a grave marker to prove it beyond this building. The me everyone knew is buried beneath six feet of dirt.

Now, I’m Oliver Davenport. Male. Student at Greenwood. Sent by Veritas to investigate Franco and his three foster sons. The men who murdered me in cold blood when I was seventeen and watched as I died on the floor of my home.

I never wanted to set foot in this stupid town again. I never wanted to see my ex-best friends ever again.

Certainly not in my classes. At parties. Fights. All around me. Talking with me. Goading me. Making me their enemy.

But they never knew who I really was. The girl beneath the mask I wear. Never looked at me like I was the one they betrayed five years ago.

And now?

Jasper Jeremiah Jones is two feet in front of me with unshed tears glistening in his eyes, staring at me like he has seen a ghost.

Unraveling me. Seeing beneath my flesh, straight to my broken soul. It weeps at the sight of him.

“Olivia,” he signs, moving his fingers and spelling out my name. But not any name.

No.

I flinch back, tightening my grip on the knife I had snatched up the moment he set foot in my room. He might as well have stabbed me all over again with the way pain ricochets through my chest and straight through my rapidly beating heart.

The special name. The one he created only for me. My sign. My name. Seeing him sign it immediately brings me back to that day.

“What are you doing?” I sign, sitting next to JJ at the picnic table in the backyard of the mansion.

My chest fills with pride when he grins back at me. Long gone is the anger that rested in his eyes for the first few months he resided here. The pain. The sorrow from losing his parents and sister.

Here sits the boy who’s come out of his shell and embraced every special part of himself.

He gazes at me, excitement lifting his lips. ‘I learned something new today with my tutor.’

Every day after school, he meets one-on-one with his ASL tutor. The same tutor we all studied with, so we could communicate with JJ and others with hearing loss. Although JJ has recently been fitted with hearing aids, he still loves to converse through ASL.