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A smile on her full lips. A pen in her hand.
I never expected it to be Dahlia Roy. And I never blinked after I found her that day. Never looked away.
Obsession takes root fast at the best of times. With me, it’s almost instant. She’d already been a fixation of mine in a way I couldn’t quite understand. Seeing her with my diary in her hand and that smile on her face as she read it cemented her fate.
But I wanted her to connect the dots herself.
I started dropping hints in my notes: alluding obliquely to what my family did, hinting at being in a position of authority in one of the student clubs. We got to talking about our darkest desires, and when she confessed the damaged, dark, and deviant things she craved in the pages of that book, I was done for.
Finally, I just flat out asked her.
Have you figured out who I am yet, Dahlia?
Her reply was there later that day:
Yes.And I cannot tell you how glad I am that it’s you. I think I wanted it to be you all along. I can’t wait to dance with you at the Halloween Ball.
Which is tonight. We haven’t conversed for a week, since she wrote that. She’s been back to the book—I know because I’ve lain in wait and watched her. But I’ve purposefully silenced myself.
I want the moment we come face-to-face at the dance for the first time to be filled with anticipation.
But first, there’s mayhem to cause.
Chase and his Para Bellum goons have once again escalated the “pranks” to something dangerous and past the line. Corbin Shaw, a junior who’s in The Reckless—the guy who’s tapped to replace Chase as star quarterback on the Knightsblood football team next year after Chase graduates—was badly hurt at practice the other day.
It wasn’t an accident.
The team was divided up, playing a scrimmage game when two Para Bellum defensemen slammed into Corbin from two directions—one clipping him at the knees, the other tackling him from behind. He didn’t even have possession of the ball, for fuck’s sake.
The result was a torn Achilles tendon, a broken tibia, and a fractured L4 vertebra. Not being the star quarterback next season after all is the least of Corbin’s problems. He’ll be in physical therapy just to be able to walk properly again for the next couple of years.
The darker part of me has grand plans for revenge. Mostly, they involve knives, blunt instruments, snapping bones, and possibly a woodchipper, a laFargo.
But I’ve dialed my monster back a little for tonight. After all, I have a date, and murder might get in the way of that.
I grin to myself as I make my way across the dark campus toward the Para Bellum mansion. I’m wearing an all-black suit and have painted my face in a dark, skeletal grin, somewhere between Jack Skellington fromThe Nightmare Before Christmasand Brandon Lee’s character inThe Crow.
I won’t be feeding Chase and his fucking goons into a woodchipper tonight. But Iwillbe dosing the whiskey in their inner-sanctum club room in the mansion with ipecac—a fast-acting medicinal emetic.
As in, Chase and his buddies are going to be spending the evening puking their fucking guts out after they propose a pre-dance toast to themselves.
…And yeah, if I can swing it, I’ll also do my best to break a Para Bellum nose or three on my way out the door.
I slip in a back door to the mansion and creep my way through the kitchens to a little-used back staircase. Upstairs, I disappear into the shadows, watching with a grim face as two Para Bellum underclassmen jostle each other down the hall on their way to the Halloween Ball.
I’ve planned ahead by enlisting the unwitting help of a few of the more…sexually liberalgirls on campus. I told Jen Morebach, Arianna Amato, and Katya Skovony—all currently Juniors, all known campus-wide for their habit of star-fucking their way to popularity with the top brass of the student clubs—that Chase and his buddies had been talking about them and wanted to “hang out”…wink wink…with them before the dance tonight.
Currently, they’re all down in the billiards room of the mansion, in the basement. Which leaves their clubroom unoccupied for my meddling.
Inside, I grin as move to the bar cart next to the crackling fireplace. I lift the glass stopper of the decanter full of Chase’s favorite high-end whiskey and dump in the ipecac.
“I assume you’re here to concede defeat?”
Shit.On the downside, I’ve just been caught. On the upside, maybe I’ll still be able to break some noses on the way out of here.
I turn to smile thinly at Chase, with Brad Hathaway filing into the room behind him and closing the door.
“Where’s your third musketeer?”
