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“I don’t even know why I’m still here,” I whisper. “Who paid for my tuition. Who pulled strings to get me back on the list.”
“Usually,” Jason says, “the killer strikes at the same place twice.”
“You mean, the same person who got me into the Academy helped keep me here?”
He shrugs. “Maybe.” He raises a hand to my face, touches my lips. “How did it feel when Ashton bit you?”
I pull back. “For what it’s worth, that’s none of your business.”
His mouth curves into one of those devastating grins, deep dimples and all. “That good, huh?”
How does he do that, go from wrenching my heart to making me want to bitchslap his handsome face?
“Oh my God, why do I bother?” Wrenching my hand free of his—in fairness, he allows it—I step back and turn away. “You can writhe on the floor for all I care.”
“You sure about that, sweetheart?” he calls after me.
Bitchslapping. Next time. If I let him get this close. And even if I feel in my bones that everything he told me is true, even if I sense that his past is hiding so much darkness that I can’t imagine what he feels, I have to step back.
Until I know who he really is. If he really killed someone or not.
If my heart can take it.
11
MIA
Art class.
It should have been relaxing, a quiet hour spent drawing or throwing paint at paper. That was how I’d imagined it to be.
And it’s almost like that, except that’s not all, and… Sindri is here.
The fae boy is either ignoring me on purpose or is so entranced by what he’s drawing he hasn’t noticed me.
I’m trying to draw the girl posing in the middle of the room, a fellow student. She’s wearing a long dress with many folds and is holding an apple. It’s supposed to be allegorical or something. Her pale hair is loose on her shoulders.
I’m doing my best but what I’ve drawn looks like a cross between a scarecrow and a bicycle. I could try to convince the teacher that it’s modern art. Probably conceptual. Or cubist. The teacher wrote the terms on the blackboard at the beginning of the class assuming we know what they mean.
Sindri is to my far right, turned slightly toward me, eyes glued to his pad whenever I glance at him. He looks like a picture himself, painted in stark contrasts, black and light blue hair falling in his pale face, framing the clean line of his jaw, softening it. He’s a muscular guy, tall and broad-shouldered, but the way he draws is gentle and smooth, delicate and confident at once. Around us other students draw and erase, erase and redraw, lips caught between teeth, the tips of their tongues sticking out as they try to capture what they see on paper, and he just… lets it happen, lets his pencil flow over his pad.
I’m dying to see his drawing but it’s all I can do not to let him catch me as I stare at him.
I’m mad at him. At all of them, really, but the thing he pulled with the videos still has me rattled. I want him to admit his guilt. How am I going to help them if he’s smug about it? How will I bring myself to evenpretendto help?
Rubbing at my brow, I gaze down at my failure of a drawing, and it looks just like my life. Smudged, confusing, badly drawn. Incomprehensible.
“Okay, put your pencils down,” the teacher says. “I want you to form groups and analyze the style you used listing specific style elements. Let’s go.”
Oh crap.
The groups are already forming and Sindri has three girls pulling their desks toward him while others gaze on with envy. I curl my fingers around the edge of my piece of paper, scrunching it up.
What’s this obsession with group work, huh? Don’t these teachers have any original ideas for classwork?
Then Sindri gets up and walks over to me. Without a word, he grabs my desk and pulls it—me with it—across the classroom, to where his desk is.
“What are you doing?” I hiss.
