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Aiden let out a long exhale, his hands unclenching from around the edge of the table.
“What the hell?” I whispered, shaking. The scene replayed in my mind with vivid clarity. Every desperate cry. Every tear trailing down faces. Every otherworldly movement by the so-called “professors”.
Around me, the other students were acting as if they were fine. Laughing. Talking. Flirting. As if it was any other day.
“It’s the drugs,” Kace said, surveying me from beneath his fringe of dark lashes. “We told you. Without the antidote we gave you, you would be just like them. Oblivious to the horrors of the world.”
“I don’t understand,” I whispered honestly. My hand instinctively sought out Beau’s, and I held it in an iron vise. I knew my nails were digging into his skin, but if I hurt him, he didn’t complain.
“The drugs in the food,” Aiden began, nodding toward his plate of pancakes, “are unlike anything we had ever seen or even heard of before. It makes it so you see things through a different lens, a different perspective. Instead of three students being brutally attacked and ripped away, the other students instead saw the principal reprimanding them and calling them down to his office. I don’t know how it works.”
“Is it…” I almost felt silly for the question I wanted to ask. Almost. But I forged ahead anyway. The answer would do nothing for me. It wouldn’t pacify my rage for what I had just witnessed. It wouldn’t be the balm my soul needed to survive this nightmare. But an answer was an answer, and it was something I was desperate for. “Is it magic? Paranormal?”
It was Kace who answered, leaning languidly back in his chair and kicking his feet up.
“Maybe. We considered that option.” He exchanged a glance with Aiden and Tanner and even Beau. The Three Horsemen. No, theFourHorsemen. I didn’t know when it happened or how, but somehow, Beau had joined their little group.
Without me.
“My bet is a governmental experiment,” Tanner said succinctly. Aiden rolled his eyes.
“That doesn’t seem likely.”
“And supernatural does?” he retorted back.
Ignoring him, Aiden looked at me. “We believe only one person knows the truth about this place.”
Kelly, I thought, but didn’t say aloud.
Aiden’s answer took me by surprise. “Heath.”
“Heath?”
I had never heard of a Heath before.
Aiden nodded seriously, flickering his eyes over my shoulder. “He’s the student body president appointed by the professors themselves. How would he not know?”
I followed his gaze toward a boy sitting at a table with a dozen others, laughing. He was handsome with wind-swept brown hair and a large smile. It was his eyes, though, that gave me a pause. They were surprisingly cold on his handsome face. Icy.
I knew innately that his smile was a mask.
A girl had her arm curled around his bicep as she giggled at something he said. Another girl was leaning so far over the table her large, perky breasts were practically spilling out. Still, he ignored them all as he talked. He was talking to them, but not at them.
And then I spotted Dylan a few people over, eagerly eating up whatever Heath was saying. Seeing my nemesis, my tormentor, made my blood run cold.
I turned back toward the four men eagerly, unable to quell the growing panic Dylan’s mere presence evoked within me.
“He’s an asshole,” Aiden explained icily, oblivious to my inner turmoil.
“You’re one to talk,” Tanner snapped.
But it was Kace who was staring at me intently, brow furrowed. He had obviously seen something in my face, something that hinted at the fear I wished to remain hidden. His lips were pursed delicately as he surveyed me, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t demand answers.
But for some inexplicable reason, I felt as if I had just been seen more clearly than I ever had before.
“I want to know everything,” I whispered, pulling my gaze away from Kace’s. Aiden’s smile was speculative, eyes amused, when I finally faced him.
“What if we told you everything in exchange for your help?”
