Page 9 of The Revenge
Penny purses her lips.
“I’m in the very public dining hall. I’ll be fine.”
With a final glance at her phone, Penny gets up, answering it as she walks away. No doubt, word of Declan’s suicide has reached her grandmother’s gossiping ears.
Continuing to slowly eat my eggs, I zone out until a shadow stops in front of the table. As I look up, I barely have time to process it’s not Penny before something is poured over my head.
I jerk back, but my escape is blocked by my chair hitting the wall behind me. I stumble out of the chair as more liquid is thrown at me.
Bright red liquid.
Someone broke into my dorm room while I was asleep and painted the wordmurdererin red paint and dumped what was left in my bed. When I’d woken up, covered in the paint, I’d first thought it was blood, but it wasn’t.
This doesn’t smell of paint, either.
Some of it is in my mouth, and it tastes coppery—like blood.
“How dare you come here?” Lissa Carmichael snarls at me, her face twisting into a sneer. “How do you have theaudacityto walk into this dining hall? Declan is dead because of you.”
IV
Gemini
“Anything?” Syn is right behind me, breathing down my neck.
“If you want up my ass, let me drop my pants first before you bite,” I mutter.
“I swear to god, Gemini, stop fucking around.”
I stop typing and spin my chair around. Syn is only just quick enough to jump out of the way. “I know I make this shit look easy, but it takes longer than five seconds to hack someone’s phone records, and it will go a lot quicker if you back the fuck up.”
“It’s a waste of time, anyway,” Royal mutters. He’s pacing back and forth alongside my bed, like he has been for the last hour. “The best we might find is a number from a burner phone. Any messages will have been encrypted before they were deleted.”
“Itcouldbe suicide,” Syn says.
“If it’s suicide, there’s not going to be an untraceable number. If it’s a cover-up, then even if Salaway was a dumbass, his killer will have deleted all the evidence. Admit it, Syn, you’re just wasting Gem’s time.”
Royal’s not wrong.
I’ve checked the access codes for the house, and between us leaving and returning, there are only two entries, both matching the code we gave this year’s initiates. If Vixen hadn’t survived and hadn’t been able to tell us it was Salaway, then that clue might have helped before. I’ve been able to hack Salaway’s social media—idiot uses the same password for everything—and while there was some bitching about Vixen a while back, there’s no direct reason there.
The only thing linking him to her is his suicide note, where he confessed to killing Vixen, without giving a motive, and that he was taking his own life because of the guilt.
Syn’s got me hacking his phone company to see if he’d received any calls from unknown numbers, but as Royal pointed out, it’s not going to tell us much more. If Salaway didn’t attempt to kill Vixen because he wanted to, there’s only one place where those orders would have come from.
“Or do you want to check that nothing’s going to lead back to you?” Royal asks.
“Yikes,” I mutter.
Not that Royal isn’t saying what I’m thinking.
Syn’s made no effort to hide how much he hates Vixen.
“What?”
Royal puffs up his chest as he folds his arms and glares at Syn. “You couldn’t get rid of her when you released that video, so you got Salaway to finish the job.”
Like his system is rebooting, Syn seems to freeze. Then, with no warning, he launches himself at Royal. Royal barely dodges Syn’s fist, but he recovers quickly, spinning and wrapping his arms around Syn, flinging him on my bed.
