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Abruptly trundled off between the forceful hands of three sisters, it seemed they had selected another location for my reprimand. Why not just bleed me out in my room? It would not be the first time sisters had staged an “accident” that could be reported later to the instructors.
Our family was self-policing. Involving our superiors was unnecessary and even dangerous for the collective.
Willingly, I had been a part of such group castigations in the past. They were rare and well-earned. Only one had ever ended in murder. An older sister had abused a younger girl. There had been five of us in that room when she was ended. One for each limb. One to cut her wrist.
I was deeply fond of the little girl, and she was too young to exact her own justice.
As she thrashed under our sisters’ weight, it had beenmypleasure to rake my talon deep, from wrist to elbow. To curve the end of the wound in, toward her body… as if the vicious laceration was self-inflicted.
Once it was sliced, Maeve held her down as she bled out, while Agnes moved to sit on both her legs. Tamsyn and Tabitha had then gone to stand guard to make sure none of the younger girls were wandering the common area at night. I muffled the screams.
I’d let the wound close before I sent my talon down the length of that artery once more, blood still wet as I watched her heal at the speed of a healthy vorec, despite how sick her mind was.
And again.
And again, until the blood stopped flowing and the edges of torn flesh no longer knit before my eyes.
It had taken half an hour for her to die.
No instructor had questioned the grisly scene when it was reported a body had been found the following morning.
That had been a spectacularly dark scenario.
Realizing thatmysin ranked high enough with my sisters to warrant more than a few broken bones… more than a staged suicide… was devastating.
I wasn’t going to be a social pariah—I was going to be a cold corpse.
Were they going to throw me off the building and make it look like I’d jumped? Would I scream on the way down?
They had to make this look self-inflicted, or all of them would suffer. Whatever they were up to, dragging me out of my room, was too theatrical to pass for self-harm. How much trouble would these girls be in when academy leadership found a mangled corpse on site? They might all be executed.
“Stop!” I began to flail about in my sheet cocoon. “Don’t you understand what he’ll do to you if you get caught?”
What the general would do to every last female student!
I had seen some truly heinous punishments in the years I’d been trapped in the academy. My sisters were not thinking straight if they thought this deserved bit of revenge wasn’t going to earn them all severe consequences.
“He killed Darya for—”
“Shut up! He killed Darya for drooling every time she spoke. They won’t let us stay here if we're not perfect!” Maeve hissed. “And you must think you’re pretty goddamn perfect to get away with acting like a total sloth, while the rest of us are working our asses off.”
Had she...? Had she just slapped me through the sheet I was wrapped in?
Eyebrow and cheek smarting, I squished up my nose just in time to lose all sense of gravity. Weightless, I realized they had chucked me into the air, only to smash into a slippery, hard floor less than a second later.
Before I could continue to point out the flaws in their plan, icy water hit the fabric wrapped around my frame. Soaking-wet sheets were even more annoying than dry ones, and I’d had enough of their shoddy plan. Talons made short work of the sad covering, sopping cotton ruined as I sputtered and fought my way out.
The round room was familiar—the women’s communal shower. All water flowed from the center, where twenty of us might wash at the same time before the bell signaled that we were to rotate for the next group.
It was not like the pretty pools in my magazines. It was a place for utility and haste.
Cold water soaked through my rank pajamas and limp hair. My feet now beneath me, I squared off against my friends.
Maeve sneered. “If you expect me to wash you, I won’t be gentle.”
A waning bar of soap hit me right between the eyes. “What in the hell, Maeve?”
“You smell so bad that suffering through it to speak to you is impossible. For the love of God, take a shower!”
