I dangle the rat above the cage and wait until Nessie sees it. She slithers out of her hole and snatches it from the hook with ease. Her mouth opens wide, and she swallows the dead rat whole.
Such a shame I never see the chase. The fight. The struggle as the rat clings on for life.
The handlers call it more humane to feed them dead animals.
But if you ask me, the snake is being deprived of something too.
Its natural instinct to kill.
I lower myself to look through the glass and watch her finish her dinner with a rotten smile on my face.
“I’ll get you something nice to eat soon.”
“You talking to that fucking snake again?”
I turn my head. Dylan saunters into my room and chucks his mask somewhere in the corner.
“Weren’t you busy sexing up those bitches downstairs?” I sneer.
He shrugs and jumps on my bed, lying on it like he owns it. “It’s fucking boring when you’ve already spilled all your juices.”
“You …” I murmur. “You say it like that’s the case for all of us.”
“Well, aren’t you spent?” he says, yawning as he makes himself at home on my pillow.
I fish my knife from my pocket and chuck it right at him, missing his ear by only an inch. “I will never fucking have enough.”
“Okay,” he says, raising his hands. “No need to get violent on me.”
“You’re in my fucking bed.”
“But your pillow is so nice.” He rubs it against him, and it makes me want to rip his face off. “Some boys had sex in mine.”
“So?” I raise a brow. “Clean it.”
“Disgusting,” Dylan rebukes. “I’m not touching someone else’s cum.”
“Interesting.” I turn back to the snake but watch Dylan through the glass. “You didn’t have any problem with it when it came to—”
“You know that’s different,” he says.
“You keep telling yourself that.”
“We gonna talk about me or about her?” he rebukes.
I pick up another dead rat with the hook and dangle it above Nessie’s cage. “What about her?”
“When are we gonna free her?”
I lower the hook and wait until she shows her fangs. “We don’t.”
“Wait, what?” Dylan sits up on the bed and grabs my mask to look at it. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. You wanna let her hang there forever?”
“You were there. You didn’t care then, so why do you care now?” I ask.
Nessie strikes, fangs embedded in the rat.
“I thought we were just messing with her. Not that we’d leave her there permanently.”
Nessie rips the rat from my hook. “Oh, don’t worry … she’ll get untied.”
“What if she goes on to tell people? What if someone finds her there? They’ll know it was us.”
I shrug as Nessie slowly starts to swallow the rat. “People know not to get in our way.”
I turn to look at him. “I don’t just want to mess with her.” Dylan lights up a joint, but I steal it from his hands right before he takes a drag and take it for myself. “I want to get in her fucking head. Invade her fucking mind. Break her from the inside out.”
“Whoa,” he mutters, and I throw the joint back at him. He catches it with his mouth, grinning like a bastard before taking a drag. “She’s not gonna let you in that easily.”
I smirk and lean against Nessie’s cage. “I know. But I like a fucking challenge.”
Dylan’s eyes narrow. “She really does behave just like her, doesn’t she?” He takes another big drag and fills my room with smoke. “This is going to be so much fucking fun. Much more fun than these kind of fucking parties ever will be.”
The door suddenly creaks open. Alistair sticks his skull head in and rips off his mask. “Back.”
My heart picks up the pace. “You got it?”
He nods. “Was tough as hell getting into that sorority again. They really upped security after I broke in the first time. Luckily, half the girls are at our party downstairs, so there was no one to stand in my way.” He holds up the diary again. “This was all she had. No other notebooks.”
I frown and sigh. “We’ve seen that already.”
“I know,” he says, and he steps inside and shuts the door. “But not this.” He opens it on a specific page where there’s multiple cutouts of her and her sister slapped onto each other, and he peels away a corner of the photo to reveal some text.
My eyes widen, and I march toward him to snatch the diary from his hands. “She pasted these on top?”
He nods. “Read it.”
I’ve done everything that’s been asked and more. It’s never going to be enough. And I refuse to go through life … broken. Split in half by a decision that wasn’t mine to make.
So I will stop it now.
This bonfire near The Edge will be the last night spent at this godforsaken university—
The rest is unreadable.
But I can tell from the handwriting it’s hers.
Eve.
My hands tighten around the diary, my blood turning to ice.
It takes everything in me not to rip this to shreds.
Dylan stands behind me and checks the text over my shoulder. “Shit.”
“This is the note Penelope was talking about,” Alistair says.
“Are you sure?” Dylan asks.
He nods. “Positive. But we’re missing some of it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “This is all the proof we need to know she made a conscious choice.” My fist balls. “And someone’s to blame.”
“Penelope’s convinced it was us, though,” Dylan says. “No wonder she tried to stab you twice.”
He snorts like it’s funny or something.
“I’ll fucking make her pay for that, don’t worry,” I growl.
“I thought we were well underway with that,” Dylan says, winking.
I peer at the photos hastily pasted over the text, Penelope’s face drawing me in. “Oh, I haven’t even gotten started.”
I slam the diary shut and throw it on my nightstand.
“We need the rest, though,” Alistair says.
I push past him but pause and turn. “Scan everything in that fucking diary. I want all of it digital, enlarged. Ready to print.”
“What? Now?” Dylan scoffs. “But the party is still going.”
“I don’t care,” I reply, opening the door. “And get a fucking burner phone too.”
“Fine,” Dylan says. “But I need to know why.”
“Are you gonna do what I think you’re gonna do?” Alistair asks. “You know we already agreed to help her, right?”
I’m one foot outside the door. “We never specified how.” My nostrils flare as I clutch the door so tightly the wood almost cracks. “I don’t fucking help. I break things. And if I need to fucking find someone, I will do it my way. By breaking everyone in my fucking path … including her.”
