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“You’re such an asshole,” I huff, shaking my head in disbelief at this guy.
Riley draws in a deep breath, holding her composure, while Jagger and I share a look, him just as annoyed with Neo’s outburst as I am.
“He went missing…” Neo lifts his eyes to mine momentarily before shifting his gaze to Jagger. “Halloween night of 2001. His body was found days later, floating face down in the river with a knife in his back. Case closed.” He slams his hand down on the stack of papers aggressively. “As they always are with any Blue Blood member.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stand tall as I say, “Tomorrow, it’ll be exactly twenty years since he went missing.”
Jagger peers over at the page Neo was just looking at. “It’s also the same way we found that dummy in the river last week.”
Neo shuts the folder and drops it on the desk. “Think it means anything?”
“Probably not,” Jagger says, “but all these coincidences are fucking puzzling.”
I’m reminded of the fact that Elias wasn’t in any of our classes. It has me wondering if he ever really attended at all, or if he just took the name to trick us, without being registered as a student. “Is there any record of him attending classes this year?”
A minute of shuffling through some other papers, and Riley quips, “Nope.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Neo says. “We know Elias is dead. We know he was murdered. And we know that the guy pretending to be him is, without a doubt, the one wreaking havoc on our Academy.”
The door flies open and Crew enters, beaming with his Halloween mask in his hand. “You're now looking at a straight-A student.” The wide grin spread across his face makes it obvious he’s missed out on what’s going on. When he catches our perplexed looks, his expression quickly drops. “Tough crowd. Who died?”
“Elias died,” I remind him, “twenty years ago, to be exact."
He crosses the room, joining us in front of the desk. “Shit. He would be like…old as dirt.”
“He’d be our parents' age. Probably would have had a kid our age who would have been a student here had he not been murdered.”
Crew’s eyes widen. “Murdered?”
“Knife straight to the back,” Neo says. “Probably one of the Becketts.”
“Or,” Jagger cuts in, “a student. A Blue Blood. A Lawless member. Could have been anyone. The question is, why?”
“Does it really fucking matter why he was murdered?” Neo folds up the paper with the details of Elias's death and sticks it in the inside pocket of his leather jacket. “People fucking die. Everyone dies and one day we all will too.”
“Geez,” Riley gripes, “someone’s feeling morbid.”
I’m watching Neo intently when his disposition shifts. I can hear the pain in his words—see it in his eyes. He’s not just talking about Elias, but his mother, too. Is he scared of death? Is he living each day like he’s simply waiting to die, as well?
“My point is,” Neo continues, “it doesn’t matter how or why he died. What matters is why the hell someone is pretending to be him.”
I’m still watching him—trying to figure him out—when his eyebrows pull together and he scowls at me, as if I’m doing something atrocious by simply looking at him. “What?” he huffs.
And I say, “Nothing.”
He glances away momentarily before looking at me again, this time, his shoulders taut and his back straight, trying to appear unaffected, but he knows I’m reading him. And I’m making him nervous. “Stop fucking looking at me!”
But I don’t. Even when everyone catches me staring into his eyes.
Why haven’t I noticed before?
Neo isn’t dead inside. The tragedies he’s dealt with just make him feel like he is.
“Babe,” Crew says, sliding an arm around my waist, “everything okay?”
I lick my lips, finally peeling my eyes off Neo as my chest rises and falls rapidly. Whatever I’m feeling, it’s strange. Butterflies in my stomach mixed with a stabbing pain in my heart.
“Yeah,” I finally say, suddenly embarrassed that they all saw me trapped in my own thoughts. But I’m not sorry Neo saw me because I think I just broke down one of his walls and I also think he knows it.
