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I sighed as I entered the library. When I’d first come to campus, and someone had left me notes, I’d wanted to spend as little time as I could in here even though I loved libraries.
But it felt like something was happening to me. It felt like I was shedding my fears and all my insecurities the longer I was in this place. It's like it was somehow doing what I'd never been able to do under the Demon's thumb; it was stripping off my layers until I became a new person. Which felt a little fitting since I already had a new face. Maybe this new “me” would match my new face much better than my old one.
In the back of the library, there was a dark room where they kept old newspapers. I wasn't really interested in those, but I was interested in the computer there that I'd never seen anyone use before. I wanted to look up news about Sophia's death, because it was driving me crazy thinking about it after that dream I’d had.
I’d almost made it to the back room when I heard my name whisper-shouted from down one of the rows of books. I stopped, immediately recognizing who it was. Jenna.
My insides were all twisted up when it came to her. She’d dropped me like a bag of dog shit when news about my real identity had leaked out, but then, at one of my weakest moments, she'd been there.
I was pretty sure that put her friendship balance at zero currently since her negative and positive actions canceled each other out.
She was walking towards me quickly, a timid look on her face like she wasn't sure if I was going to talk to her today. I gave her what I hoped looked like a warm smile so she would feel more at ease.
"How are you?" she asked as soon as she’d gotten close to me, looking concerned.
I read the meaning in her words. I'm sure that news of what had happened at the "Kings" masquerade had spread like wildfire through campus. I wouldn't be surprised if it had spread all over the northern hemisphere by this point.
I hoped the news of Cain losing his beloved McLaren had spread around too.
Fucker.
I thought about how to answer her question. I was penniless, forced to live with my enemies, and everyone hated me, but on the bright side, I was still alive. Count your blessings and all that.
"You know what, I'm doing okay,” I finally said. She looked so unabashedly impressed at my answer, it was a little unsettling.
"Are you here to study? Is it all right if I sit with you?" she asked hopefully. I studied her, wondering if I could trust her with what I'd come to the library to do. I decided I might as well bring her along. It's not like the guys didn't already think I was responsible for Sophia's death. It wouldn't be shocking for them to find out that I was looking up her disappearance.
"I'm here for a little research project. I'm pretty sure Remington is some master hacker and tracking whatever I'm doing on my laptop, so until I get some software to protect it, I thought I'd use the computers here."
"Sounds good. What are you researching?" she asked curiously as I led her towards the room. After making sure no one was in there with us, hiding behind the rows of newspapers, I closed the door and locked it so I could at least let my guard down for one fucking minute.
“Stellan's little sister. We used to be best friends. I was neighbors with them and we hung out all the time, but sometime after my father forced us to move, she disappeared, and no one really knows what happened to her. I've never read anything about it, so I wanted to see what I could find," I explained to her as I fired up the computer.
"They think you had something to do with it," Jenna said softly.
I nodded, not looking at her. I didn't want to see if she believed it too.
Once the computer turned on, I went to work. There was just a small newspaper in the town where we’d lived, so it was easy to find stories about her, because there really wasn't very much that ever happened there.
The stories talked about how she'd disappeared sometime in the night. She'd said goodnight to her parents, and then gone into her room. Her dad had checked on her to see if she'd actually gone to bed and wasn’t on her phone at around ten p.m., and she’d seemed to be sleeping soundly. But the next morning she hadn't come out of her room to eat breakfast. And when her parents went into her room, she wasn't there. There hadn't been any clues. The window had been closed, and there weren't any unusual fingerprints.
Sophia and Stellan’s family had cameras around the house, so assumedly they would've caught anyone going in or out. Except the cameras were only turned on at night after Sophia's dad went to bed. And he’d gone to bed around midnight that night. So that meant that most likely the only way she could've left the house would've been between the time when her dad checked on her at ten and when he’d gone to bed at midnight.
It was like the JonBenet Ramsey story all over again. There was no sign of her. No clues. No people claiming that they had seen her. There was just nothing.
Jenna had pulled a chair beside me, and she was reading the articles avidly, making small noises when she got to different parts of the stories.
"If you had already moved away, why did they think that you had something to do with that?" she asked.
I hesitated before I answered, not sure how much I could trust her. "He… Dad…the Demon didn’t like it when I grew close to anyone. Obviously, the closer someone got to me, the likelier it was for them to realize something was off about us. He'd…threatened me before we left about her, that's why I’d moved away with him so willingly.”
"Okay…so there's a chance that he went back. But that doesn't mean that you went back with him," she said adamantly.
Something warm wiggled around in my chest. She sounded so confident that I hadn't been involved. There was no one on this planet that was confident in me aboutanything. I side-eyed her, trying to see if I could find any hints of ulterior motives, but I didn’t see anything there.
Shaking the fleeting feelings of happiness away, I went back to my search. Sophia’s story had never been national news, although a few of the bigger local news stations had picked it up. But they didn't add anything new. I was scrolling down one story and came across a picture of Stellan standing with his parents, his shoulders hunched and a look of complete devastation all over his face. My heart ached just looking at the picture. Because I knew what he'd been feeling in that moment. It was the same feeling I’d felt every time I let myself think about Sophia's disappearance.
I wiped a hand down my face. "None of this has been helpful," I growled.
