Page 25

Story: Pretty Secrets

“My sentiments exactly.” Barclay’s warm voice coats my skin, locking my muscles and making a tremble run through me. “I believe the door you’re looking for is down the hall. Last one.”
Of course he would sequester himself as far away from us as he could. It was clear he was as sullen as I was about the situation. Only, he made it a hundred times worse for me.
I stomp down the hall and try the door. It’s locked. Of course.
“He has a master key.”
Peering over my shoulder, I find Professor Barclay leaning against the doorjamb as if he’s waiting for the show to begin. “Well, that explains it,” I mutter to myself while glaring at the knob. It’s one of those old school doors. They all are. At first, I thought it was a fitting decoration for the time period of the dorm, even though the rest of the building is modernized. However, now I’m beginning to realize it’s that way because the Jarvises want it that way.
He’s obviously got the key with him, so there’s no luck there. Fortunately for me, the keyhole is also of the old school variety and should be easy to pick.
Brushing past my professor, I head into the unicorn room and move straight through to the attached bathroom. Sitting on top of the vanity is exactly what I was hoping to find—bobby pins.
I grab two of them and march right back toward the door to the douche’s room. These were what I was missing last night from my own room. I even tore open some of Dee’s boxes looking through her toiletries and found nothing in the entire room that would help me escape.
“I’m wondering what you should call me,” he asks as he watches me work. “Alaric should be fine as long as we’re not around any students.”
“Yeah, sure,” I mutter.
After some finagling, the lock clicks free.
“I’m curious as to how you know how to do that….” Alaric’s voice is somewhat surprised with a hint of caution.
“Don’t all rich girls know how to work bobby pins?”
“Not in that way.”
I shrug. “Guess I’m not like the rest, then.”
His response is muted by the door being thrown open.
There stands Leonardo Jarvis, his low-slung jeans hugging his waist. He’s also shirtless, but unlikeAlaric, he doesn’t greet me with a wink and a grin.
He glares from me to the lock, brows pulling in, then he shoots out his hand. Before I can move out of the way, his meaty fingers wrap around my wrist and tug. I fall into the room with a surprised shout, the door slamming shut in my wake. Immediately, I’m encased in flesh. Jarvis’s front wraps around me like cellophane. My lungs squeeze. It’s as if I can’t breathe in his presence. “What are you doing, Little One? Don’t you know you don’t break into the wolf’s house?”
“If you’re calling me a little pig—”
“If I was, I’d blow your house down, Astor.”
“How can you when you’re currently living in it?”
His face turns hard, and his nose touches mine as he growls, “Let’s get one thing straight, little girl. This is my house. It always has been.”
His words dry out my mouth as I try to suck in air. His presence falls over me like a shroud wrapped in nightmares. Maybe it’s his reputation, maybe it’s the fact that he locked me in my room last night, but something tells me not to poke the bear.
I always did have trouble listening.
“It may be your house in name, but you don’t own the people in it.”
He gives me a devilish grin, moving a lock of my hair out of the way. “Wrong again. Do you know what I usually do to new girls in my house?”
I can only imagine. Just the way his hips shift into mine makes him go from something dangerous to something sexual.
“There’s a toll for sleeping here. A toll they must pay.”
I swallow, the heat between my legs burning with a mind of its own. Suddenly, I’m thrust into the scene from last night, watching my roommate get on her knees in front of him…how everyone else followed suit.
There was that initial disgust—the anger that they would lower themselves to do something like that—but then the heat started. It flickered in my cunt, then spread outward until I was practically sweating. I would’ve gotten on my knees, too, but not because I’m like the other girls. They did it out of duty. Out of a sick, misplaced need to do whatever the men in our world tell them to.