Page 1 of Barons of Decay (Royals of Forsyth University #10)

A rianette

September

They say I was dead for three minutes.

Three whole minutes where my heart forgot me.

Where I drifted, weightless, under the water, lungs full of ghosts and river rot.

When I started to decay.

I remember none of it, not the cold or the pull of the river or the boys when they found me washed up against the stones like a bloated bride.

But my skin remembers. My wrists do too. The raw bite of the ropes, the way they burned when I twisted and screamed inside my head, waiting for the rules to change. I don’t break rules. Not that one. Never that one.

But someone did.

There’s a man. Or a shape. Or a mask.

A beast.

Sometimes it looks like an animal, only wrong. Bigger. Wetter. Hungrier.

Other times, it’s faceless–just breath and commands and hands that don’t feel human.

I hear it in dreams I can’t wake from.

I hear him now, whispering from the fluorescent buzz of the hospital lights overhead.

‘Chosen,’ he says. ‘ You were already chosen.’

They ask me questions. A woman with soft hands and a man who doesn't know how to hide his rage. They say he’s with the Bureau. I don’t know them. I don’t trust them. I want to.

I just want someone to be real.

My feet ache from the run. The forest shredded me. My body, my memory, my name. I pick at the scab on my knee until I see red.

They stop me.

They call me Arianette . Like it’s a spell. Like if they say it enough, I’ll return to myself. But I don’t know who Arianette is anymore. She drowned. She bled. She saw too much. She heard the rules–and obeyed. But that didn’t stop the Beast from finding me. Catching me. Hurting me…

So I nod and I shake and I say what I must. I give them nothing, because if I speak, I’ll start to remember. And if I remember, he’ll come back.

He always does.

Even now, I smell the iron. The salt.

I feel the dirt closing in around me.

And I wonder if I ever really made it out.