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Chapter One – Ash
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen blood.
I mean, being a girl, we kind of see blood on a monthly basis if you know what I mean—but I don’t mean that kind of blood. I mean the kind that came straight from veins. The kind that was so smooth and bright you couldn’t help but stare at it and wonder: is that inside me, too? The kind that was still warm, a certain type of blood loss I still blamed myself for.
But it was the first time I’d seen Declan Briggs’s blood.
Declan. My sweet, sometimes bipolar, caring roommate. Declan, the guy who lost his girlfriend to a hanging rope just under a year ago…or did he? Now that I had Sabrina Salvatore’s journal, now that I’d flipped through her diary at a ridiculously fast pace, I knew enough, and add that to everything I’d learned so far about the situation?
Sabrina and Declan were broken up at the time, which no one knew but Sawyer and Travis.
Travis.
Everything came down to the sexy, tattooed, crazy Travis.
I’d missed all the signs. I was too star struck at his presence. It was stupid, because I knew from the first moment he was my kind of trouble—I’d just thought I’d left that part of my past behind me. I didn’t want a repeat of high school. What happened then…it still gave me nightmares.
Sabrina and Travis had a history, and Declan found out. From what the last journal entry said, he wanted her to figure it out, but he would wait for her. He loved her still, even after she’d been unfaithful.
I would say I was jealous, that I wanted someone to love me like that, but I had someone like that already, and it didn’t turn out well.
I sat on the floor in the bathroom, the sterile white light too bright over my head. I stared at Declan’s motionless body, his neck bent near the base of the toilet, his skin paler than usual. His brown hair looked greasy, small breaths escaping him every so often. Still alive, but he wouldn’t be for long. His right arm held a gash, my shirt tied tightly around his upper forearm, a makeshift tourniquet.
The blood had stopped oozing freely, so I hoped I did it right.
I was in nothing but my bra and shorts, holding Declan’s phone in my uninjured hand. My other hand should hurt—I knew it should, because it wasn’t every day I dislocated my thumb to escape from chains—but it didn’t, probably because I couldn’t stop staring at Declan. At his body.
Would he survive until the ambulance got here? Would he make it to the hospital? The 911 operator had asked me to stay on the phone, but I’d hung up right after giving her the address, not knowing what else to say.
What else was there? The only thing that mattered right now was getting Declan to the hospital, getting him help…saving his life.
I was supposed to keep an eye on him. The dean of Hillcrest himself had come to me and asked me to look out for him, to watch him, and I’d been too lost in my own issues with Sawyer and Travis to do it.
I failed him. If Declan died tonight, it would be my fault. I would spend the rest of my life blaming myself for what happened here.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, slowly getting up. Or trying to. I might’ve slipped a bit on the blood as I stumbled out of the bathroom, holding both his phone and my injured hand to my stomach. I needed a shirt. Any shirt. Just to cover up.
I set his phone down on my desk as I went into my dresser, ignoring the agony deep inside me as I grabbed the first shirt I saw. A plain, holey shirt that had seen better days, but it was one of my favorites, a light grey color. As I closed the dresser drawer and returned to the bathroom, I couldn’t help but wonder about all of this.
Was it connected? Was this my fault? Had Travis returned to his dorm room, found me gone, and decided to come after me, finding only Declan instead? I knew I couldn’t put anything past Travis; he was the type of crazy who didn’t believe they were crazy. The kind of insane you heard about on the news: cold, calculating, and charming.
Shit.
If this was my fault, really my fault, if this was all some plan to get me alone…what was I supposed to do? Tell the cops? Tell Dean Briggs? Would they believe me? After all, I might’ve been the only female student in Hillcrest, but I knew what money could do. I knew what wealth could cover up—turned out, a lot. Money could sweep so much under the rug, it was a miracle society was even functioning. The rich and privileged got off while the poor were thrown in jail for the smallest of offenses.
Travis didn’t need to try to kidnap me again. He could use his family’s money. I could accuse him, and he could have a whole army of lawyers at his beck and call, ready to leap into action and protect his and his family’s name.
In other words, I was fucked, and not in the good way.
I moved back to the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the tub, needing to be near Declan. Both Declan and Travis had lost Sabrina, though with her last diary entry, I knew enough now to know Travis was hiding even more from everyone else.
Sabrina had been scared of him. I couldn’t blame her, because now I was a bit scared, too.
Another part of me wasn’t, though, which was downright stupid. The part that wasn’t scared of him was accepting. I thought I could run from my past? Life only laughed at me, throwing someone even worse at me to see how I could handle it.
I would handle it the best I could, but tonight was about Declan and making sure he didn’t die. If he died…I would never forgive myself.
I closed my eyes, willing this to be some kind of sick, twisted dream, but a hard knock on the dorm door alerted me to someone else’s presence. I didn’t think it was the ambulance, for it hadn’t been enough time. My stomach sank into my gut as I got up, cradling my sagging thumb to my chest as I peered out of the bathroom.
