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Far from Crimson Academy.
CHAPTER11
I wokewith a pounding headache and my alarm blaring on my desk.
Its chime bludgeoned my ears, and my head felt stuffed with cotton. Nothing felt real like I’d just woken up from a bad weekend of partying and couldn’t remember where I’d fallen asleep.
“Hey, babe,” I murmured without opening my eyes. “Can you get that?”
I reached across the bed for Luke to prod him and force him to wake up before me. He always handled hangovers better than me, so I relied on him in times like this.
Like this.
This.
As I regained consciousness, everything slammed back into me. This wasn’t the place I was supposed to be.
My eyes snapped open. The shreds of memory or a dream fell away from me as reality came into clear focus.
Luke wasn’t here. He was probably in his dorm room in one of the Lower wards. I wasn’t hungover. I’d been forced to take two little blue pills last night. They’d wiped me out and nearly wiped my mind clear.
I groaned as pain throbbed in behind my eyes, and I reluctantly rolled off the bed to get to my alarm. When I picked up my alarm, I saw an angry blaring notification to take my morning medication.
“Fucking fine,” I grumbled and turned the alarm off and turned to the bottles. I took one from each of my early doses and swallowed them down with a drink from a bottle of tepid water nearby.
I almost gagged when they hit my throat, but I was getting used to this routine now and finally swallowed them down like an old pro. It was just the fogginess from the night before that made me feel sick.
I drank the rest of the water and got into the shower, hoping to wash away the strange sensation I had that I was living with one foot in the dream I had and one foot in this reality.
It helped, and by the time I dried my hair and did my makeup, I was fully invested in existing in this world. The dream I’d been having had faded into a watercolor memory, faded and dissolving with each hour I spent awake.
I heard a knock at the door, and both feared and hoped it was Alexander. He terrified me, but he intrigued me. He had my attention but also my disgust.
“Come in,” I called out, and Victoria stuck her head in.
“Are you going to make it to breakfast?” she asked and closed the door behind her as she strolled towards me, her eyes snaking around to take in the messy state of my room. “Oh no, did you have an accident?”
She was staring at the spot where I’d fought with Alexander, where we’d tussled over the pills in the first place. There were books knocked over and a chair on its side. On the floor, you could see two drops of dark, dried blood.
“No, nothing too dramatic,” I said with a laugh that was far too brittle and high pitched to be authentic. “It’s just from cutting my toenails last night. I cut too deep, and it hurt. I must have missed those drops.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, and her eyes dropped to my feet, where my perfectly manicured nails gleamed with a light peach polish. “We do have people to handle that, you know. Just call one of the Lowers. They’ve been trained to attend to all our needs. But you already know that, right?”
“Of course,” I replied. “I had a headache. That’s why I didn’t make it to dinner,” I replied.
“I thought maybe you were fasting. Losing weight has been so good for you, and we are starting dance this coming week. I thought you wanted to drop out of music and come compete,” she replied, looking me up and down.
“Not at all,” I said. “I think I might take a semester off all arts, actually.”
She burst out laughing, then stopped when she realized I was serious. “You know you can’t just opt-out of our core program. That’s insane. How will you hang on to a Remington man if you can’t perform the most basic functions of an Upper wife?”
All the rules I was supposed to follow were so damned confusing.
“We’ll see,” I shrugged and picked up a light sweater to take with me. Not that I was cold. In fact, it was still warm around campus in the late summer heat. It felt more like armor, like another layer to shield me from Alexander’s dark looks.
She shook her head in disgust and disbelief again but left my room. I trailed alongside her, keeping up as she went on about her treatment after I left.
“Flora felt so bad that I got double my usual time, plus another skin saturation thing that made me glow. Can you see it?”
