“Stupid motherfucking bullshit wheels,” I cursed, kicking the suitcase back onto its front. The damned thing was overpacked, old as hell, and I lost one of the wheels about a quarter mile back. I tugged it along anyway, balancing it as it teetered precariously on the one wheel that was still working.
Everything I owned was in this bag. One way or another, I was going to get it up this hill.
As though in answer to my prayers, a break in the clouds allowed the moon to illuminate what was unmistakably a building taking shape amid the trees around the next bend.
A weathered brick exterior covered in young ivy came into view in bits and pieces. Darkened windows on the main floor were framed in black metal to match the large door set into the shadowy maw of a front stoop. Above the door in a bold pewter serif read Briar Hall, and below in shining silver cursive were the words as the crow flies.
What? No Latin inscription? How very modern.
I chuckled darkly to myself, wincing as the strain to my shoulders began to reach a breaking point. The damn suitcase chose that moment to catch a loose stone on the curving driveway and the case went down hard, nearly ripping my fucking arm from its socket.
I whirled around and kicked the thing as hard as I dared, cursing under my breath.
“What did that poor suitcase ever do to you?”
I had a blade out in half a second, letting the suitcase fall with a thud at my feet.
A girl emerged from the gloom beneath the front stoop, her shining brown eyes wide as she took in the slim blade gripped in my left hand.
“Uh, sweetie, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just the welcoming committee.”
That was when I noticed the haze of smoke in the air around her and how the heel of her knee-high black boot was stubbing out the remnants of a joint.
Not a heartbeat later the smell of pot-smoke wafted toward me on the cool breeze. I relaxed.
“Weapons aren’t allowed on school property,” she added, clearing her throat as I slipped the blade back into the garter belt beneath the hem of my skirt.
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” I replied, inclining my head toward her foot and the stomped out joint hidden beneath it.
She laughed, bending to retrieve what was left of her midnight puff. I guessed that meant it was a deal. “I assume my aunt called ahead?”
The girl nodded, pushing long black hair back from her face. “Yup. Apparently, Mrs. June couldn’t be bothered to welcome you herself since it’s the middle of the night and all, so you get me.”
“And you are?”
“Becca. Becca Hart. You’ll be rooming with me.”
She didn’t sound too thrilled about that. Her smile tight.
“I was told I’d have my own room,” I argued, a prickle of unease going through me at the idea of sharing with a total stranger.
If I’d learned anything, it was that people could not be trusted. And having a safe space to plop your ass down at the end of a hard day to sleep was paramount to survival.
A shudder ran through me, and it wasn’t from the chill of the late hour. I shook off the imposing memories. This wasn’t the time.
The girl, Becca, came down to the bottom of the stoop and reached out to help me lift my suitcase from the ground, showing off fingernails that were polished a perfect pearlescent black. Not a single chip.
Mine were a similar color, a deep plum, but shorter, chipped, and with all the color peeled off the right pinkie. She definitely noticed but said nothing.
“You do have your own. We share the floor as in: you have your own room, I have my own room, but we share the common living space. Most of the other students share at least four to an apartment. And on some floors, it’s six. No one at Briar Hall has their own apartment except Bri. Well, and me, I guess, until you came.”
“Shitty,” I muttered as Becca helped me get the suitcase to the top step.
She made no comment to the contrary, but I felt her gaze roving over me as she shouldered the heavy metal door open and ushered me inside.
“The elevators are usually reserved for the Crows, but since they aren’t here and it’s the middle of the night, I think we’re safe.”
Becca walked across a wide marble foyer toward the single elevator against the far wall. To my left was a hallway twice as wide as the ones at my old school, a wooden sign on a wrought iron hook hanging from the ceiling farther down indicated the main office. Opposite that hallway on the other side of the foyer was a curved staircase leading up to where I imagined the classrooms to be.
The whole place smelled of oiled wood and old paper with an undertone of chemical cleaning product.
A loud ding in the dim foyer brought me back to reality, and I saw Becca striding into the elevator, throwing out an arm to keep the door open.
“Hurry up, would you? Before someone sees.”
I did as she said, not because I was afraid of some mysterious Crows but because if there were any way I could avoid lugging this fucking thing up all those stairs, I was taking it.
Painfully aware of the trail of dirt and bits of gravel I was leaving in my wake on the waxed marble, I strode into the elevator and Becca released the doors.
“Who are the Crows?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me as Becca jabbed a button, careful to wipe it with her sleeve when she was finished.
Better to know in advance who to be on the lookout for.
I had to get through this last year of school, and then I would be home fucking free. Nothing was going to get in the way of that freedom. Not if I could help it.
Like Pops always said, head down, eyes open, Ava Jade, that’s how people like us make it in this world. I’d never been very good at the head down part, but a girl could change.
Becca cut a sidelong stare my way, arching a brow. “You really aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
She bit her lower lip, thinking something through before she responded. “Tomorrow afternoon,” she said finally as the doors opened again, letting us out in a long, dark hall.
“Tomorrow afternoon what?”
She shushed me, indicating the doors as we passed them, and I got the picture that these were the dormitories. The doors were too close together for them to be the larger rooms. At almost two in the morning, all of the students would be asleep.
Once we were clear of the corridor, Becca led me through a set of double doors and around a steep turn in the hallway. A sign in the same pewter serif as the front door of the building read, East Wing.
“At lunch,” she continued as the door closed behind us. “I’ll explain everything you need to know.”
She took out a handful of keys from her pocket and separated two rings, handing me one. On it were two silver keys. Though I noticed there were not two, but three keys on hers. “We’re just through here.”
Becca unlocked the wooden door with the number 3 on it and pushed it open, flicking on a light switch as she stepped inside.
And holy motherfucking shitballs.
Equal parts stupefied, ecstatic, and disgusted, I strode past the wide foyer where a row of neat iron hooks held several jackets and hats and into a fully furnished living room. A black sectional U-shaped couch hugged a polished black square of a coffee table. On the gray stone wall across from it, a fire licked lazily at its chimney.
Behind the couch was a kitchen made up of a long bank of cabinets with a fridge at one end and a stove near the other.
Not like a cooktop or something. No, this was a monstrosity of polished chrome and black glass. With at least six burners. Matching cherry wood doors stood opposite one another to either side of the main living space. One sealed shut, the other slightly ajar.
“Holy shit.”
I didn’t realize I’d spoken aloud until Becca stepped up beside me, making me jolt. “Yeah. I like black. It just kinda matches everything.”
When I didn’t reply to her right away, she pursed her lips. “I mean, I can live with some color if you wanted to change anything—”
“It’s fine,” I hurried to say, picking my jaw up off the floor.
The living room and kitchen alone were damn near the size of mine and Dad’s basement apartment back home. Definitely bigger than the trailer we lived in before that.
A painful jab in my chest made my lips tighten.
“I like black. But I thought we weren’t allowed to change anything in the rooms anyway? My aunt drilled me on all the rules on the way here.”
After she tried to convince me to stay with her and have Jarvis, or whatever the hell that dickwad driver’s name was, drive me to school every day. Until I shut her the fuck up by literally jumping from the moving vehicle. No way in hell that was happening.
Becca shrugged. “My dad donated a new library to the school and has promised them a new gym, too.”
She paused.
“After I graduate.”
I cocked my head at her. Did she just say what I thought she’d just said? That her dad was literally blackmailing the school with fancy new shit so his daughter could do what she liked? Fucking rich people. But even I had to admit, that was pretty ballsy. He could just as easily have gotten her kicked out pulling shit like that.
“Sounds like an upstanding citizen of Thorn Valley.”
She barked a laugh.
“As if. The formidable Mr. Hart doesn’t live here. He just shipped my ass here so he wouldn’t have to worry about me doing drugs or riding dick. Don’t think he realized there are drugs and dick in every nook and cranny of this country, and I have my way with both no matter where I’m at.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t mind him feeling guilty though. His guilt got me this room. Oh, and my Audi. So I can ‘drive home for the holidays.’ ”
I narrowed my eyes at her, still a little taken aback at her drug and dick comment. I expected goody-two-shoes. I expected brown-nosers and posers and assholes. I didn’t expect…
Whatever the hell Becca Hart was.
We might just get along after all.
“Fair enough,” I nodded. “I’m assuming that’s my room?”
I gestured to the door that was slightly ajar. Becca didn’t strike me as an open-door sort of chick.
“That’s the one,” she trilled, capping off the sentence with a yawn as she dragged herself to the kitchen and rifled in one of the cupboards for a bag of peanut M&M’s.
She stopped with a hand on her door handle. “Find me in the cafeteria at lunch,” she added before leaving me alone in the living room. “I’m bagged, and you won’t see me in the morning. I have somewhere I need to be.”
“All right,” I replied, hefting my suitcase over the hardwood, afraid to let the mangled wheels rub against the polished surface.
Huffing as I leaned my bag against the wall inside the room, I felt around on the cool bumpy surface for a light switch, cursing when I stubbed my toe on something.
I flipped it on, and the overhead light flashed to life, bright enough that I damn near turned it right back off. But in the end, curiosity won out.
The bed was the first thing to catch my eye. It was covered in a frilly purple monstrosity, with matching pillows. Who the fuck needed eight pillows anyway? I was lucky to have one at all half the time.
I cringed inwardly, making a mental note to get a new set the first chance I got. The rest of the space wasn’t really that bad, though. The wall with the light switch was covered in a textured pearl wallpaper, and the deep purple color of the other walls looked pretty good with it.
The thing I’d stubbed my toe on had been a long dark wood desk with one of those fancy brass lamps on top of it. There was what looked like a walk-in closet to the left of the bed, and to the right, another door led to what I prayed was a bathroom.
Nearly tripping in my haste, I rushed to check it out, finding the light switch more easily this time. Fuck yes.
The room had its own en suite. Complete with a glass encased shower and removable shower head. Double sinks because…rich people. And a bright band of light embedded in the mirror. Stepping closer, I noticed there was a blurry bit and reached out to touch it.
The light brightened.
I touched it again, and the light changed from an orange hue to a blue one, making the dark pink circles beneath my dull eyes pop.
Jabbing the mirror again to darken my reflection, I tried to remember where I’d stuffed those big t-shirts in my suitcase. I could feel the tackiness of my own sweat drying against my skin beneath my clothes. A shower was absolutely mandatory before I crawled into bed and stuffed my blade beneath the pillow.
I noted the panel of shower buttons and my lips fell open.
It was official. Ava Jade was not in the Lennox ghetto anymore.
Sighing, I tore myself away from the awaiting spa experience and surveyed the room, checking the vents and every nook of the walk-in closet before I found what I was looking for. A loose board in the wood paneling beneath a shelf and hanging bar. I used a blade to carefully pry it free and peered into the dark hollow within.
It would have to do for now.
I upended the contents of my suitcase on the bed and pulled back the lining. The wrinkled Manila envelope filled with cash from my last job came free with a sharp tug, and I set it into my new hidey hole, notching the small panel back in place.
Chances were I wouldn’t need it anymore. Not with a rent-free roof over my head and three square meals a day provided by my aunt’s tuition payment, but if I couldn’t do what she expected, I’d wind up right back where she found me on the streets of Lennox. Not fucking happening. I’d die before I went back to that shithole.
I set my blades right outside the door to the shower and stepped inside, hoping I wouldn’t need a manual to work the thing. I jammed a few buttons, cursing when nothing happened.
“Come on,” I groused, hitting the up arrow to increase the heat. “Let me simmer in my hell water you stupid fucking—”
I gasped as water sprayed from not one but five different places. Cool at first, but growing in temp until my skin flushed red. Just how I liked it.
