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I felt someone pressing an adhesive surgical dressing over my lower back a moment later. My eyes wandered over to the next girl. She’d just been marked, and I could see the little symbol on the small of her back: a crown with a dagger through it.
Official property of Crown and Dagger.I heard Tobias’s earlier words echoing in my head. At the same time, the men watching us continued to chant the words ‘deliciae dolor’.
The delights of pain.That’s what Greer told me it meant…
An indeterminate amount of time later, I felt a pair of strong arms dragging me to my feet. “Can you walk?” said a familiar voice.
I suddenly giggled. The drugs were hitting me really hard now. “It’s you. We both go to Roden.”
Elias sighed impatiently. “Yes. Answer the question.”
“I think I can walk,” I murmured, blinking rapidly. Everything seemed to be swimming in front of me. I blinked again. His sinfully-handsome face finally came into view. “I feel drunk. Or high. I can’t tell.”
“I know. You’ll thank us for that when you wake up tomorrow.”
I stared at him lazily, my head lolling to the side. “What do you mean?”
He supported me steadfastly in one arm and held the other out, letting the sleeve of his dark red robe fall away. The same mark that had just been burned onto my back had been burned onto his right wrist. It looked like an old wound, a pale pink area of slightly raised flesh.
“They do this during Tap Week when we’re first recruited, and we aren’t offered any drugs to alleviate the pain. Not that I’d want any drugs anyway,” he said with a superior smirk, as if refusing painkillers made him some sort of alpha god. “It’s one of the final tests before we officially make it into the first level, to prove that we’re dedicated. We’re given a Rolex to cover it, so people don’t notice the scar.”
“Huh. So it’s not all sex and partying at the first level. That’s what I thought when I first saw it,” I said, my voice coming out breathy and unfamiliar. Was I even here? Was this just a dream?
“Oh, that’s right. You sneaked into the Tomb party. I almost forgot about that,” Elias said in a nasty voice. He began to drag me along beside him, up the path leading through the forest.
I nodded dreamily. “You saw me there....”
“I did.”
“Well, I saw you at another weird sex party,” I said, my mind wandering back to last December. “I didn’t know what it was back then, but I guess I get it now.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Elias said. “You get what?”
Before I could answer, I stumbled on a tree root and yelped. He let out a short, angry breath, then picked me up as easily as if I were a baby.
While I was high on whatever drug they put in the pomegranate juice, I could pretend he was my boyfriend, just like I did earlier. Pretend we were at a dance where I got too drunk on the punch, and now he was chivalrously carrying me home.
We weren’t far from the main building now. The Finishing School, as I’d learned it was called. It was an enormous three-story Georgian mansion, sitting on top of a hill. That meant I was right about my cell being underground, seeing as I’d seen four levels in the elevator earlier.
Every light was on inside the mansion, making it glow like a warm, friendly beacon in the darkness. I knew better, though. The place was black and sinister as a snake pit.
“What were you talking about before? Something about a sex party?” Elias asked, his voice stiff. We were rapidly approaching the mansion, his feet flying over the rough terrain in long strides. He was obviously familiar with the area.
I blinked a few times. “Oh. That….” I hadn’t thought about this in a while, although it’d made me very curious at the time.
I went to a party at Willa’s Greenwich mansion almost a year ago, and after taking a wrong turn somewhere upstairs, I’d walked in on a very strange sight: a room lit by fire and filled with a group of men in robes and masks.
There was a topless woman on her knees with her hands bound behind her back, blowing one of the guys. Two other fully nude women were on the bed, tied up and blindfolded as two men fucked them hard and fast. The rest of the guys in the room simply stood around watching. One of them was Elias. He was masked but I still recognized him anyway, because I’d seen him downstairs earlier, staring at me.
As well as all the orgiastic stuff happening in the room, strange symbols were daubed everywhere in red paint, and some sort of ritual music was playing. At the time, the whole thing freaked me out, but now I realized it was probably just more of Crown and Dagger’s traditional ritualistic abuse of women. As much as the girls seemed into it, they could’ve been drugged.
I told Elias about it, and he chuckled. “I remember that,” he said. “I saw you walk in, remember? It’s not what you think, though.”
“What was it, then?” I asked.
“Just something the younger members do sometimes.”
“Why?”