Page 96 of Savage Elites

“The initiation.” He dipped his head. “The autopsy found pork ribs inside Corrine, too.”

I sucked in a sharp breath through my teeth. When the senior consultant had told me mine wasn’t the first case of raw meat stuffed inside a girl, my mind had gone to Corrine. But I didn’t know she had been dead at the time.

“W-what else?” I asked.

“Your blood-alcohol levels.” Cormack ran trembling fingers through his hair. “I’m saying this all wrong.”

Silence stretched out between us, filled by the pounding beat of my heart. Calculations whizzed through my mind, and I put together the puzzle pieces of Corrine’s death with the strange and murderous attempts on my life. Corrine had confided in Miss Claymore.

I gulped. One of the accusations she had made was that the kings had gang-raped her. What if the former deputy had headmistress struck out at Corrine to protect Sebastian?

Blinking away those thoughts, I squeezed Cormac’s shoulder. Now wasn’t the time to race ahead with speculations. “What are you saying?”

Cormac blew out a long breath. “The police didn’t mention you directly. But they said there was possibly a copycat out there targeting another girl. I immediately knew they were talking about you.”

My fingers around his shoulders loosened, and my hand slid down Cormac’s arm. I leaned back and stared at the roll of paper towels hanging on the wall. “So, they didn’t think I was paranoid.”

Cormac shook his head.

I placed both hands over my face and scrubbed them over my eyes. Right now, I didn’t know whether to feel petrified or relieved. All this time, I had thought the police reports had sat on a database only to be opened whenever I made another complaint. That the sheer number of times I had reported someone to the police had counted against me.

“Bloody hell,” I muttered.

Cormac gave me an absent nod. “The police said another girl had been abducted and dumped in the same location where Corrine’s body had been found.”

My brows drew together. “The cave by the blasted oak? I told Miss Claymore that’s where I’d awoken, and she gave me the oddest reaction.”

“That explains a lot,” said Cormac.

“You don’t think she—”

“I admired that woman completely until I found out why she’d been sacked.” Bitterness laced his voice. “Now, I don’t know anything.”

“Right,” I said.

“They took another look at the cave and found clues they’d missed the first time.”

“Like what?”

Cormac shook his head. “They wouldn’t say.”

I placed a hand on his knee. “How do you feel?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know. It’s taken a while to get to the point where I’m not breaking down every half-hour about Corrine. Now this whole can of shit has been reopened, and I resent being dragged back to how I was. Does that sound callous?”

“Your sister would want you to be happy.” I leaned my head against his.

Cormac placed his hand on top of mine. “Would she be disappointed in me if she knew I’d found someone to fill the hole she left in my life?”

“That’s not true.” I gave his knee a gentle squeeze. “I’m just warming your heart until the day you get to see her again.”

“That’s the sort of sweet thing she would say.” He chuckled. “It’s so uncanny how similar you both are. Not looks-wise. She had the same coloring as me, but you’re both so big-hearted, you know?”

“I think so.”

Cormac’s words made a peculiar sort of sense. While I’d never had a brother and never had a loyal and protective sibling, having Cormac had eased the pain of Ashley’s betrayal. I had barely thought about Ashley since she had left the academy.

My phone buzzed. It was probably Leopold, asking me where I was. Now that the police had reopened the investigation into Corrine’s death, we needed to find where Ashley had hidden her so-called evidence against Prakash more than ever.