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"You saidwhat?" Willow's brown-eyed gaze slides to Saint, and he gives her the creepiest smile I've ever seen. I guess he's trying to put on his human mask today, but it slips and he doesn't pull off the adorable boyfriend look he's going for. Instead, he looks like a cannibal who just cut out a human-sized pate. Even I can do better than that.
"I said you're beautiful," he tells her.
Willow barks with laughter and playfully slaps him on the chest. Then she turns back to me.
"Okay," she says, "I want to help. You're having problems with that girl, right, the one who sat at our table?"
"Yeah," Kill nods for me, "the dead one."
"Dead?" she asks the word carefully as Saint plays with her hair, letting the smooth strands slide between his fingers.
"It's because she smells like death," he explains. "G didn't kill her. Wait," he looks at me, "did you kill her?"
"No."
"Would've been easier," Kill murmurs.
Now that, I agree with.
"What's the problem?" Willow says, making herself comfortable on Saint's bed.
"She's infuriating and stubborn and won't listen and . . ." I lose the words.
Willow looks to Saint and something unspoken passes between the two of them before her attention returns to me.
"Hmm," she says, thinking. "Well, it sounds like you can't reason with her, right?"
"Right," I agree. "There's no reasoning with her."
She shrugs. "Then the way I see it, you only have one option. Give her a choice, one where you're happy regardless of how she chooses."
"And if she won't choose?" I ask.
She shrugs. "Then make her."
She says it like it's the easiest thing in the world, and as Saint nods with her, I wonder what impossible choice he gave his stubborn girlfriend to make her say yes to being his pet. If I know Saint, though, it had something to do with the fucking morgue.
21
GABE
Ilet Avery stew all goddamn night and well into the next morning before I stuff a bunch of shit from the vending machines into my pockets and start for the basement. My bulbous pockets look suspicious as fuck, but the staff's so busy at the moment that even if there were any in the hallway, I don't think they'd notice me. The staff is still searching the campus grounds, and we're coming up on the forty-eight-hour mark, but I know Headmistress is going to put off getting the police involved. She won't want the attention that comes with the government poking around up here.
Saint and Kill were smart about Avery's disappearance, though, especially on short notice. They dropped just enough clues in her room and around campus, that have the staff running around the forest in circles.
Literally, from what Kill overhead between a couple of guards this morning.
Time isn't on my side, though, and I need my Firefly to learn to cooperate and quickly. I need to step up my game.
I swipe the key card, open the door, and disappear into the winding stairwell. It takes twelve minutes from the time I open the door until I reach Avery, and when I do, I spot her tucked into a ball on the bed, her back against the wall. I unlock the cage, and she looks up, lifting her head out of the fetal position. She looks terrible, and I immediately regret not coming earlier. She's got dark circles under her eyes and a faraway look. Her skin is ethereal, so pale it's almost unearthly even in this dark space.
Gabe would take one look at her and say she looks actually dead today.
I don't disagree.
I glance at the untouched food on the floor and on the bed. She even found the granola bars at some point last night, but they're untouched too, and a couple of them are just outside of the cell, like she got tired of trying to throw them out, and finally, started carefully pushing them through the spaces in between the bars.
What the fuck is she doing to herself?
