Page 44 of Outcast

I licked my dry lips. “I’m… fine. Thank you.”

He closed his eyes, exhaled a relieved breath, and pressed a kiss on my forehead. I turned to Henry again, who shrugged. Did the triumvirate have a form of mental communication I knew nothing about, or was something else going on?

Edward’s brows drew together in a pained expression, and his posture straightened in an English way I’d only seen in period TV dramas. Slightly regimented, polite, yet dashing. He cleared his throat. “Miss Hobson, I apologize unreservedly for the way I’ve conducted myself since you joined Mercia Academy. You were right. It was unbecoming of the Duchy of Mercia, unbecoming of the school, and unbecoming of me. From this moment onward, I swear you’ll meet a different Edward Mercia.”

My heels ground into the gravel path, and I had to blink a dozen times to let his words sink in. Edward… apologizing? I wanted to ask why now, but it was probably guilt at having gone too far with their bullying. I would have asked Rita, but I doubted that any occasion would have arisen for them to make such assurances to her.

“Thank you.” I held out my hand to shake on his promise. “I accept your apology.”

Edward wrapped his fingers around mine, sending a jolt of sensation into my heart. Instead of shaking my hand, he brought my knuckles to his lips for the lightest of pecks. The sensation quickened, and I sucked in a sharp breath through my nostrils. Whether the gallant kiss had excited me, or the fact that a future British duke had done it, or because it had been Edward, I didn’t know, but I hoped that wouldn’t be the last time he would kiss me.

Henry placed his large hand on the small of my back and guided me up the stairs, through the doors, and through the hallways and stairs, just as Blake had on my first day. Back then, I hadn’t known what to expect from Mercia Academy. A little snobbery and a few barbed comments, perhaps, but none of the shockingly vicious attacks I’d suffered.

The footsteps of five men echoed through the hallways as Henry, Edward, Blake, Mr. Jenkins, and even Mr. Carbuncle, walked me to my room.

The janitor handed me my key and stepped back. “Here we are, Miss Hobson. It’s all there like you left it.”

I turned around and gave them what I hoped would be a bracing smile. “I’m fine, everyone. Just longing for a hot shower.”

Mr. Jenkins beamed, while the other four had the decency to glance away. The adrenaline that had kept me going throughout the kidnapping had crashed, leaving my body and my spirits too heavy to even comment on the incident with the tampered shampoo.

“Thank you.” I unlocked the door, stepped into the room, and rested my back against the closed door. A rush of mingled emotions swirled and expanded within my chest, threatening to spill out into tears. Relief at leaving that squalid room, sadness that Mom hadn’t been here to welcome me, and confusion about the triumvirate.

I ran a hand down the side of my face and blew out a breath. The most optimistic part of me, the one that believed in Henry, thought he would take weeks to change his friends’ opinions about me. Blake’s reaction hadn’t been completely out of character. He was never unpleasant if I encountered him alone. But Edward had shown me nothing but threats and hostility from the day we met. How could I believe he could change just because I got kidnapped?

I tore off my clothes, put on a robe, turned on the shower, and waited. Waited for the blue dye, for the water to turn cold, or for it to stop altogether, but it streamed down, hot and plentiful. My hair was a greasy mess from not having washed it for so long, and my skin a cesspool of sebum from a daily diet of Snickers bars and potato chips.

I stood underneath the hot spray, gasping with relief at the feel of clean, clear water. After testing my shower gel and shampoo for signs of tampering, I scrubbed myself raw. Washed myself of the grime, the mustiness, the squalor, and the fear of that awful place. There were only two things I held onto: the memories of my intimacy with Henry, and the list of items I’d been memorizing for days.

“City.” I dug my nails into my scalp. “Pot-holes, Mulberry Terrace, broken furniture in the front garden, three-story house, hippies, marijuana, Caz and Stokes, blonde dreadlocked photographer, man in the beanie hat, Loki.”

I repeated the words over and over until the steam and hot water made me so dizzy, I staggered out and scribbled the list out, along with everything else I could remember of my kidnapping.

The door burst open, and Rita ran inside. “Emilia!”

I shot to my feet. “Rita?”

She barreled into me, tiny body knocking me off my feet and onto my bed. “You’ve been gone for nine days. Everyone was talking about it, but the teachers were saying nothing.” She drew back, dark eyes wild. “I thought—”

Her face crumpled and she burst into racking sobs.

“What’s wrong?” I placed a hand on her trembling shoulder.

She shook her head and kept it bowed.

“Rita?” I pulled her next to me on the bed, wincing at the feel of her sharp bones. In the past week, she seemed to have lost all the weight she’d gained.

“I thought they’d kill you,” she rasped.

I stayed silent and waited for her to continue. Maybe this was the time she would confide in me about the extent of the bullying she’d suffered last year.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “That morning, when you’d gone missing for the whole day, I’d thought they’d left you somewhere like the edge of a cliff, or in the middle of the motorway, where you’d be sure to have an accident and break your neck. But when you didn’t turn up after following Bourneville into the forest, I thought he’d finished the job.”

I gasped. “Rita!”

“I’m not the only one who came to that conclusion. A few of the other scholarship students approached me with their suspicions, too. They thought you were dead, and he’d flown to a country without an extradition treaty with the UK.”

I shook my head. Normally, I would have smiled, but she’d seen more of the triumvirate and experienced more of their cruelty. “Don’t mention this to anyone, but Bourneville was kidnapped, and they took me because I’d seen them and tried to raise the alarm.”