Page 137 of Depraved Boys

“Sebastian rescued me.”

“I remember that evening,” he growled. “Garraway pinned you against the wall. If I hadn’t turned up, he might have—”

“Sebastian’s not like that. I trust him.”

Cormac folded his arms across his chest. “It’s the same with Geraldine and me.” He sipped his weak tea. “I know she hurt you, but you must understand that Bianca is the driver of all the malice. Geraldine’s trying to be a better person.”

“You believe that?”

He blew out a long breath. “It’s complicated. Without revealing things Geraldine told me in confidence, I can tell you that I believe she’s trying to get out from under Bianca’s influence.”

I shook my head. It was more likely that Cormac had been blinded by Geraldine’s beauty. A little voice in the back of my mind asked me whether I was suffering the same problem with the kings. Sebastian and Prakash were hiding things, and Leopold seemed desperate to tell me the truth.

“Has Geraldine approached you about the forensic samples?” asked Cormac.

“No, but—”

“Because she’s happy to give the police anything to prove her innocence. She wasn’t the one who did that to you.” Before I could protest, he added, “Geraldine’s guilty of playing along with Bianca’s madness, and it was wrong of her, but there’s more to her than the spiteful bully.”

“Cormac…” My words dried up in the back of my throat. My best friend despised the kings and believed them to be predators. It would be hypocritical of me to scold him for doing what I did to him—putting his trust in someone I deemed unworthy.

“I pray each night that you’ll be safe with those three,” said Cormac.

Our eyes met in the kind of meeting of souls that might have been romantic if we hadn’t fallen into a surrogate sibling relationship. There was no way to describe what we had. It wasn’t quite a bromance, but it was something close.

“How about I watch your back, and you watch mine?” I held out my hand.

He wrapped it in his larger hand and gave it a firm shake. “It’s a deal.”

Once we’d come to a tentative truce, Cormac relaxed and told me all about the clandestine meetings he had shared with Geraldine since the beginning of the academic year. A light shone in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before, not even when he thought I was ribbing him about his inability to make tea.

“She came up to me at the end of last year after Corrine… you know.”

I nodded.

“And she said she couldn’t stop thinking about teasing my sister about her infatuation with the kings and wondering whether that contributed to her…” He dipped his head.

“You became friends then?”

He shrugged. “I think Geraldine might have approached me intending to play the pull-a-pig game at first. She would blow hot and cold, but we emailed each other every day in the summer, and we made a deep connection, you know?”

My throat dried. I didn’t understand anything about their relationship, but I let him continue speaking.

“Things moved so fast, it was a whirlwind. She said it was the same for her, too.”

“Right.” I folded my arms, imagining Cormac having the same skeptical reaction to me talking about the kings.

“We’re going to Gretna Green in the summer.”

I choked on air and fell back into the sofa. Gretna Green was a place in Scotland historically famous for runaway couples desperate to flout the English marriage laws. “What?”

“She wants to make things official before we take our relationship any further.”

“Why?”

He stood and walked over to the cupboards and took out a packet of chocolate-chip cookies. “Geraldine isn’t like the other girls. She believes in keeping that sort of thing for marriage.”

My mind whirled back to the memory of Geraldine on her knees in front of Leopold, sucking his dick like it was made of white chocolate. Leopold all but told me he’d had sex with her afterward. Suspicion tightened my belly like a vise, but I held my tongue. I was still a virgin, yet I’d been to bed with two men. There was no guarantee that Geraldine had had sex with Leopold.