Zachary
the craziest thing I’ve ever witnessed.”
Zaro’s voice behind me startles me. I hadn’t even realised she was standing right there, my attention wholly absorbed by the black hole of Mr Dorokhov’s presence.
Our father has already turned around and is walking away back to the small lounge where he takes meetings or sits with our mother in their free time. I follow him, and Zaro follows me, hot on my steps.
“Did you mean it?” she asks our father. “You can’t actually get someone killed, can you?”
He stands in the doorway of his lounge and holds the door open, letting us through and closing the door after us. Our mother is out visiting friends, so it’s just the three of us in the room. The calm atmosphere is in stark contrast to the adrenaline still pounding through me.
Casting Zaro a disapproving look, my father says, “I didn’t say I would have him killed, Zahara. Simply removed.”
“You can do that?” Zahara’s voice is hushed as she drops herself down into one of the couches. “Just have someone removed?”
My father tilts his head and gives her a strange smile—mingled rue and satisfaction. “Of course. Why do you think I didn’t press charges on that predator at your school?”
Zahara’s mouth falls open. My father, calm as ever, stands at the small, glossy cabinet of his bar and pours three cognacs and hands us one each.
“You had Mr Perrin killed?” Zahara explains, taking her glass absent-mindedly, her attention completely fixed on our father.
“Removed.” He shrugs and settles himself next to her on the couch. “He hurt my daughter, and I will never allow anybody to harm a hair on my children’s heads. He received precisely what he deserved, Zahara. He was not a good man.”
She stares at him, but he turns his attention to me. “Is Theodora here?”
I’m still standing in the middle of the room, the glass of cognac in my hands. The amber liquid splashes in the glass, and that’s when I realise my hands are shaking slightly.
“She’s not here.” I sit at the edge of an armchair.
“Where is she?” my father asks.
I ignore his question. “Why did you let Mr Dorokhov believe she was here?”
“So he would stop looking for her, naturally.” My father takes a sip of his drink. “Where is she, Zachary?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I stare into my glass, the troubled surface of the alcohol as my hands shake uncontrollably. “I don’t know.”
“We need to find her. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“She lives with her mother when she’s not in school—somewhere in Surrey—but that’s the first place her father would have looked. And she’s not in Spearcrest—he removed her from the school. She might be with one of her friends, I don’t know. Her phone—I’ve tried texting and calling her, but her phone isn’t working.”
“No doubt it’s in her father’s possession,” my father says in a thoughtful mutter. “Hm. Very well. I’m going to need you to give me her friends’ names—anybody you think she might have gone to for help. I’ll make some calls.” He stands, drains his glass and sets it down. “We’re going to find her, Zachary.”
the following day on calls, my father joins the rest of us for dinner the following night and sits down with a heavy sigh.
“Any news?” my mother asks. Her voice is calm, but she can’t quite hide the flash of fear and sadness on her face.
My father shakes his head.
“No. Nothing.” He glances at me. “Were those all the names you could think of?”
I nod.
When I handed him the list, I didn’t have the heart to tell him I doubted she would go to any of them. Because if Theodora needed help, if she needed a safe place to go to, she wouldn’t have gone to Rose or Camille or Giselle or even Kayana, who lives in the UK, too. She wouldn’t have gone to Inessa, her best friend.
She would have come here. She would have come to me.
“What are we going to do?” Zahara asks, swallowing thickly. “How are we going to find her?”
“There are people I can hire to try and track her down, but if she doesn’t have her phone with her, it won’t be easy.”
“Where on earth could she have gone?” My mother sighs, shaking her head. “That poor girl. I would never have imagined this could happen to her. Such a bright, lovely girl. She deserves better than this.”
My chest constricts. It’s felt tight all day—it’s felt tight ever since Theodora disappeared. But it continues to constrict, and a sudden terror seizes me. I grip my chest, realising I’m about to have another panic attack.
Zahara is first to realise. She scrambles up from her chair, crying out, “Zach! Zach, are you alright?”
I stand up, and my chair goes flying back behind me, crashing to the floor. My mother jumps, and my father’s face drops. I back away, not wanting them to see me like this, but stumble over my fallen chair. I fall hard.
Then I’m curled up on the floor, trying desperately to squeeze some air into my lungs. My pulse is a deafening drumbeat, going too fast, too fast.
It’s just a panic attack, I try to remember.
It’s just a panic attack.
I know it for a fact, but knowledge, as I’ve learned, is just not enough sometimes. I know what I’m supposed to do. Stay still, remind myself it will pass, try to breathe as slowly as possible, the three three three rule. I know all these things, but that knowledge is like a book in the hands of a person who can’t read. Completely useless.
Zahara drops onto her knees at my side and grabs my head to prop it on her lap. She bends over me and rubs my shoulder.
“It’s alright, Zach, you’re alright. I promise you you’re alright, okay? You’re alright.” Her hand is gentle on my shoulder as I gasp and wheeze. “You’re alright, Zach, you just have to breathe. Breathe for me, alright? I never ask you for favours, do I? So you have to do this for me. Breathe. Nice and slow. There, there.”
She remains patient the entire time, murmuring encouragements and little jokes. When my heartbeat finally settles, the pinprick-hole through which I’m breathing finally widens, and the air starts to flow back into my lungs, she smiles at me.
“I’m pretty sure I just saved your life, you know.”
I let out a strangled laugh. “Idiot.”
“Drama queen.”
I look up to see our parents standing above us. My father, as always, remains calm, but he’s holding my mother in his arms, and she looks distraught. I’ve never seen her look like this.
I sit up, and my mother rushes out of my father’s arms to sink to her knees, gathering Zaro and me into her arms and hugging us so hard she almost smashes our skulls together.
“I’m alright, Mum,” I whisper.
She kisses Zaro’s forehead, then mine. “We’re going to find her,” she whispers against my temple. “We’re going to find your beautiful Theodora, Zach. I promise.”
her, and soon, half-term is over, and Zaro and I return to Spearcrest.
Everything seems to go back to normal: lessons, coursework deadlines, Apostles lectures. Our formal exam timetables are published, and we begin the final push of our studies.
But nothing is normal. Theodora’s ghost still lives at my side wherever I go, and her absence weighs heavy on my shoulders, sometimes so heavy it crushes the air from my lungs. Every day, I still open my phone to dial her number. Every night, I wake up with the same shock of panic that awoke me the night before she left.
The first week back at Spearcrest goes by impossibly fast, torturously slow, the noose of hopelessness I carry around my neck progressively getting tighter.
Then, Monday morning, I emerge from the sixth form boys’ building on my way to my classes and almost trip on something. I look down to see a blonde girl hastily stand up.
Inessa. Her lips are pale, and her eyes are red and bloodshot.
“Do you know where she is?” she asks without preamble.
I shake my head. “She’s gone.”
“But where?” Inessa’s eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t think she would leave—I didn’t know this would happen.”
My blood runs cold, immediately followed by a red-hot rush of adrenaline. “What did you do?”
She shakes her head, her mouth opening and closing as if she’s trying to speak. She explodes into sobs, burying her face in her sleeves, her shoulders bouncing. I watch her, every part of my body turned to ice, bereft of any sympathy.
Because I know exactly what she’s done.
“You told her father.” There’s no doubt in my mind, and the sentence comes out of my mouth as a statement, not a question. “She told you, and you told her father.” I stare at her, a cold disgust making my skin crawl. “You’re the person she trusts the most in Spearcrest. You’re her best fucking friend. She loves you. I thought you loved her.”
“I do love her, of course, I love her!” Inessa glares at me through her tears. “But her father—he wants what’s best for her, and Theodora will never find a good husband if she’s—if she’s not a virgin, and—”
“Theodora deserves a husband that will value her for more than whatever price he puts on the idea of purity. The myth of purity, Inessa—because it’s not a real fucking thing and it certainly doesn’t dictate Theodora’s worth as a human being.”
“It’s easy for you to say!” Inessa cries out, wiping her tears with her sleeves. “Nobody cares what boys do, nobody will judge you for sleeping around. But it’s not the same for Theodora! She has a future to think of, she’ll have to get married, and then—”
“Do you really think that’s what she wants? All this time you’ve spent with her—you’re her best fucking friend, and you still think that’s what she wants for her future? To be some fucking trophy for her father to pass to some other man who’ll also treat her like property?”
“And what about you?” Inessa sneers at me. “You think you’re any better? You also used her like some object, just another girl for you to fuck!”
My fists clench at my side. Blackwoods may not believe in physical violence, but I have the cold, deadly urge to have her buried alive just for saying that.
“Theodora isn’t another girl,” I grit out through clenched teeth. “She’s the girl. She’s my match, my equal, my partner in fucking greatness. And if she let me, I would marry her, not for her name or her father’s power or the worth of her body. I would marry her because her mind and soul are worth more than all the money in the world, all the stars in the fucking sky. I would marry her if she had sex with another man, and if she had sex with a hundred other men—it wouldn’t matter. I would marry her because there’s nobody else in this world I love more than her and because she deserves that love more than anybody else.”
Inessa’s cheeks are bright red, and she doesn’t have the audacity to question my sincerity. I laugh in her face, a cold, ugly laugh. “And to think Theodora wasted her love on you.” I sweep her with a look of disgust.
Inessa’s eyes fill with tears again, but there are no sobs this time.
“Please. Don’t tell her.”
“I don’t know where she is, and I won’t give up on finding her. But when I do, I can swear to you I won’t say a word about what you did. Do you know why?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to; it was a rhetorical question.
“Because she loves you—even though you don’t deserve it, even though she’d be better off loving a poisonous snake. And it would break her fucking heart to know you were the one who betrayed her trust. And unlike you, I love her. I love her with all my heart and soul—something you clearly don’t know how to do. And the only thing I want for her is happiness and safety, even if it means protecting her from the ugly truth of what you’ve done.”
Inessa’s lips and chin tremble uncontrollably. I shake my head and clench my jaw, untouched by her sadness. Then I turn and walk away, the sound of Inessa’s quiet sobs vanishing in the wind.
