Page 49 of The Bargain

“If you don’t want a fiancée, then the problem is easy to solve.” I tilt my head. “Break off your engagement.”

He stares at me for a long time, and then he lets out a hoarse, lazy laugh.

“Dess is gonna eat you alive and spit you out.”

There goes my way into the Brotherhood, then. Guess I’ll be working hard at that Halloween party.

“Maybe.” I turn away from him with a half-hearted wave. “Or maybe that’s what Natalya will do to you.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Dimitri calls after me. “Better watch your back, Noxie!”

“You’re a big boy,” I call back. “Stab me in the front.”

I walk away to the grim rumble of his laughter.

@spearcrestinquisitor

Halloween approaches, and with it, Benjamin Montgomery’s much-anticipated bacchanal. Strange, isn’t it? Our resident boy-wonder Apostle, patron saint of political sobriety, suddenly decides to host an evening of debauchery. A lapse in judgement—or a trap laid for a certain venomous rival?

And what of Dimitri Kavinski? The most frightening thing about him is the creature tethered to his side: his fiancée, Natalya Valenkova, who trails him with all the obedience of a beaten hound.

But beaten animals, when they finally bite, tend to draw blood.

Meanwhile, Elias Lennox lurks in the periphery, rumoured consort of our very own head girl. Will she deign to lower herself enough to convince us of their love?

Three deceivers in their own ways, spinning their clever webs, but fortune, as ever, favours no one—not even liars.

18

Scary Monsters

Desdemona

I’m on my back in a dark place—there’s a mouth between my legs, and wet sucking sounds like squelching mud and the deep vibration of a masculine voice humming in contentment, and I’m so pent-up, so close, so ready that I could scream, fight, beg.

“Not yet, love.”

The face between my legs is ghostly, a pale skull with a scar and two black pits for eyes, and in the middle of those pits, pinprick stars, searing white glows.

“Soon.”

I shake my head, tight and aching with need, and I fall back, writhing, spreading open to⁠—

“Are you going to Benjamin’s party this weekend?”

My eyes snap open.

Spearcrest’s library materialises around me: towering bookshelves and gleaming bronze railings and glossy plants. Then the desk, covered with books and notepads and pens. And then, across the desk, a frowning face, eyes as green as the banker lamp between us, Emerald Carver.

“What?”

I sit up in my chair, heart hammering, squeezing my thighs together over the dull, throbbing ache between my legs. As if it’s not already embarrassing enough that I fell asleep while studying, did I have to dream about him? Well, not so much a dream as an anxiety-induced nightmare.

A nightmare that’s left me uncomfortably, humiliatingly wet.

This is all Elias’s fault. This was probably his plan all along. He said he wanted to get to know me, but what he really wanted was to get under my skin. And now that he’s lodged in there like a splinter, how is that supposed to⁠—

“That spineless worm, Benjamin Montgomery,” Emerald is saying, like she’s bringing up a perfect stranger instead of the boy we’ve both spent the past seven years trying to beat out of every academic leaderboard in Spearcrest. “Are you going to his Halloween party?”