“When you’re planning this painting, I want you to think about the negative space,” I said to my class on Monday afternoon.
A hand shot up.
“Yes?”
“What’s negative space?”
I fought a sigh of frustration. I’d just given a definition a second ago. “Can anyone answer that?”
The class was quiet for a long moment, and then a deep voice spoke. Cayden West.
“It’s the space around the thing you’re drawing. The darkness between things,” he said.
I looked at him. His face was down, he was staring at his notepad, and he had his hood up, a pet hate of mine. He was a new student at Hade Harbor High, and I didn’t know what to make of him. Within days, he’d joined the ice hockey team and was already their ace. He had instantly joined the group of hockey stars who ruled the school, nicknamed the Ice Gods. He was a foster kid, and Coach Williams had taken him in, no doubt, so they could use his skills to win nationals.
“It doesn’t have to be dark,” a voice objected.
Cayden finally brought his head up and swung it in the direction of the person who had dared to disagree with him.
Lillian Williams. The coach’s daughter. She was one of my favorites and didn’t fit the usual mold of girls at HHH, being more interested in microbiology than social media. She enjoyed art, however. It was her break from the courses she’d loaded up on in order to get into the highly competitive Hade Harbor University.
She and Cayden were now foster siblings, presumably, and cohabiting. The tension around them tainted the air. Cayden was staring at Lily. I wondered how Lily was taking having a stranger in her home. She was seventeen, nearly eighteen, and Cayden didn’t have an innocent, easygoing bone in his body. He looked like a kid who had been through the wringer and out the other side. There was a hardness to him that made painful, jagged memories crowd my head.
Memories of another life. Of tragic men who smiled grimly in the face of danger.
Twisting the band on my finger absently, I watched Lily and Cayden argue without words.
“Sure, it could be, but darkness makes it better. Everyone loves a little darkness,” he muttered.
I had a feeling his words were for Lily and her alone. His eyes never moved from her.
I could still remember what it felt like to be watched like that.
I should probably interrupt their fiery staring contest. “You’re both right. It could be a background of any kind. It’s really just the space that isn’t supposed to be the focus,” I said and paused when the bell rang loudly overhead. Thank god, three classes down, two to go. I hadn’t slept well for three nights in a row, and I needed a break.
The students surged out of their seats, an explosion of chatter filling the air. It was just before lunchtime, and I decided to eat outside. The weather was so lovely. After a quick tidy, I grabbed my sandwich and headed out. Hade Harbor High had a beautiful setting, with dense woods to the back, and now I headed along the small trail that led to the entrance. The kids weren’t supposed to come into the woods during school hours, but plenty did. There were a few picnic tables and benches dotted around within the first few minutes of walking. I headed for my favorite one, right next to a small bubbling stream.
Setting my sandwich down, I reached for my phone, looking for some mindless diversion.
My mind returned immediately to the subject that had plagued me since I’d spoken to my brother.
Nikolai Chernov was free.
Maybe he’d already found me. Ren’s words were terrifying. Nikolai had been killing De Sanctis men. He’d burned part of a church down. It was extreme, even for him. Seven years had passed. Seven hard years for me, so I couldn’t even imagine what they’d been like for him, locked up with other criminals, the worst that the East Coast offered. It sounded like he was even more dangerous now.
He was always dangerous. You just had a free pass.
After what I’d done, I was pretty sure that free pass would have expired. I didn’t want to know what had happened to those on the receiving end of Nikolai’s hate. I didn’t think there were any around to tell the tale. His father certainly wasn’t. My blood suitably chilled, I shivered in the cool breeze. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the air in the woods took on a different feeling.
Then, I felt it.
The creeping sensation of being watched.
Twisting around, I stared at the trees around me. The woods were still bright enough, muted sunshine falling in slices of gold against the deep-green leaves and the warm brown of the well-traveled paths. It wasn’t a creepy wood by any stretch of the imagination, so it was the first time it occurred to me how far I was from the school building.
It was the first time I realized how no one would hear me scream.
My shoulders edged up to my ears as I put my phone away and took a bite of my sandwich. It was probably nothing. I’d been tense before. I used to live in a state of constant tension, and with Leo away, it was probably just wearing on my nerves. I ate quickly, unwilling to run away, in case it was my imagination, or more likely, asshole students who thought it would be funny to spook a teacher in the wild. While they weren’t allowed out here, I had no doubt that the Ice Gods came out to these woods whenever they felt like it. I’d seen Cayden dragging Lillian out here the other day. The only reason I hadn’t gotten involved was that she’d assured me it was nothing to worry about.
I finished my lunch with a stubborn determination, barely tasting it, and got up. As I walked away from the woods, heading out of the tree line, I heard it. The snap of a twig under someone’s foot. I stopped, all the hair on the back of my neck rising. I had a sudden, terrible paranoia that if I turned around right now, there’d be someone behind me. I took a step forward. A soft crunch echoed my footstep.
Terror and the urge to act flooded my mind. In the past, I’d been the girl who’d fight, the knife-wielding Mafia princess who practiced paranza corta and had taken a liccasapuni blade to prom. Now? Now I was a mom, and a woman who had learned firsthand how her strength stacked up to a predator.
Now, I ran.
I burst forward with a surge of speed, running as fast as I could for the tree line. It mocked me, so far out of reach, as I pelted along the trail, my soft, slippery-soled ballet flats sliding on the pine needles of the forest floor. I heard something behind me, a swish of fabric, like someone was chasing, and then, worst of all, a soft chuckle. It was dark, crawling along my veins and sending fear crashing into me, pushing the last of my energy into my limbs. Just like many a damsel in distress before me, with the break in the trees just out of reach, I tripped. I went down hard, biting my tongue as I landed on my outstretched hands. My phone flew across the ground and disappeared under a bush.
I froze in the position, on my hands and knees. My palms were burning. I felt terrified and ridiculous at the same time.
What if it was really him?
Would I run from Nikolai when I was the guilty one this time?
No, I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to.
I twisted around before I could question the sanity of it.
My butt hit the floor, and my gaze searched the path behind me.
There was no one there.
I stared at the green-black shadows between the trees. Was someone there, watching me right now? Or was it just the ghost in my head, tormenting me? Nothing moved, and slowly, my heart rate dropped back to the range of normal.
When I finally found my phone, dusted myself off, and walked out into the woods, I smacked right into a hard chest, nearly falling.
Powerful arms gripped me and kept me upright.
“Miss Rossi? Are you okay?” voices asked me.
I spun around and got my bearings. The Ice Gods stood on the trail before the wood. They were looking down at me with a variety of confusion, some concern, and a little annoyance.
“I’m fine. I just thought there was someone in the woods.”
Cayden West looked up at the dark tree line. “Who?”
“I don’t know, I ran… he nearly caught up with me, though,” I said, taking a deep breath. As much as I might feel uncomfortable about the Ice Gods, I felt safer now, standing with them. They might be assholes, but they were strong, and tough.
Cayden narrowed his eyes at me and then jerked his head to his teammate, Marcus. “Take Miss Rossi back to school, we’ll have a look.”
“No, it’s okay,” I found myself saying as three of the four headed into the trees.
“Don’t worry about us, teach. Worry about the creep in the woods, if we find him,” Beckett, the only Ice God with the same imposing stature as Cayden, called confidently to me, just before the two of them disappeared into the shadows along with Ice God number three, Ashton.
“Come on, Miss Rossi, let’s get back to school grounds. You know we’re not meant to come out here during lunch, right?” Marcus teased me.
I fell into step beside him.
“That’s for students,” I reminded him. Shouldn’t I report what had just happened? I’d just let three eighteen-year-olds race after a possible assailant. I said as much to Marcus.
“Naw, don’t worry about it. What would you even say? ‘I think, but I’m not sure, that someone I didn’t see was chasing me in the woods.’ If you say anything, we’ll just get in trouble for going off grounds at lunch, and with the big game coming up, we can’t really afford detention right now.”
“Like you’d get detention. You four can do anything you want, and you know it,” I muttered, concentrating on getting to the gates.
He was right, however. The boys would get in trouble for being out, and the mystery figure would be long gone. If he’d even been there in the first place.
“Can I get that in writing, teach?” Marcus grinned at me.
“I’m ignoring that and going inside. Thanks for the escort.”
“Anytime, Miss Rossi, and I mean that sincerely, from the bottom of my heart, any time you need a big strong protector, you call me,” Marcus said and raised a rakish eyebrow at me.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think this eighteen-year-old jock was flirting with me.
I left him at the gates and headed back upstairs to the art room and my office.
As soon as I stepped inside, I felt the shift in the air.
It felt like someone had been inside. I looked around. The papers on the surfaces were still as madly disorganized as ever. A real downside to growing up with maids was the lack of functioning cleaning skills. It made it particularly difficult to tell if someone had been through your things or not.
I approached my desk, the paranoia from the woods returning tenfold. Had that really just been my overactive imagination or something else? Someone else.
I sat at my desk, my gaze drifting over my things. It stuttered to a stop when I saw it. A print that hadn’t been there earlier. I picked it up gingerly.
I recognized it a little, though it wasn’t one I was overly familiar with. It was Madonna of the Swallow, by Carlo Crivelli.
In the print of the famous painting, a swallow perched over the Madonna’s throne. Dropping the print, I pulled up the search bar on my phone and typed in the painting’s name.
I scanned the results, and darkness tugged at the edges of my vision.
“The swallow depicted in the image represents resurrection.”
I set my phone down and stared blindly at my desk. A swallow, representing resurrection?
My lastochka, I’ll always find you, wherever you go, the past whispered in my ear.
Feeling my sandwich threaten to return on me, I put the print of the painting into a drawer and slammed it shut. I couldn’t fall apart right now. I had work to get through, papers to grade, and a professional shiny smile to paste on for at least four more hours.
I could fall apart later, at home, with a bottle of wine, behind locked doors, like a normal person.
