Page 42 of Barons of Decay (Royals of Forsyth University #10)

D amon

Even with GPS coordinates, the trailhead is nearly invisible. I pass by it twice, cruising at less than five miles an hour, until I realize that the rotten stump on the side of the road is the marker.

Pulling off, the tires crunch over the fallen leaves. I park the SUV on the edge of the road. I know the river twists nearby, we’d already passed over it once on a bridge.

Arianette sits beside me in the truck, curled up like some Victorian doll left in the attic too long. Her dress is too delicate for the forest–lace cuffs, soft gray wool, ballet flats that won’t survive the mud–but she insisted on wearing it. Said it made her feel “more like herself.”

Whatever that means.

I haven’t been alone with her since the night in the crypt.

She’d spent Saturday prepping for the wedding while Hunter and I slept off the effects of the party.

Fuck, it had been amazing. Pure gluttony and excess.

Sex and drugs. Orgasms and victory. Overwhelming lust and the ability to claim it–her–as mine in front of the whole goddamn frat and crypt chasers.

Being confined in the small space of the vehicle is almost like having her in my lap again, pussy bared, wet and slick for me. It’d be so easy to drag her across the seat, to push up that dress, and do it again.

But that’s not why we’re here.

She hums low under her breath, fingers twitching in her lap like she’s a cat playing with an invisible string. I don’t ask about it. I’ve learned not to ask her much unless I want a riddle for an answer. She does seem to notice I’ve stopped the car. “Are we here?”

“You tell me,” I prompt, killing the engine. “Look familiar?”

She peers out the window and shakes her head. The leaves are turning, changing from green to yellow and orange. She’d been found in the late summer. It would’ve looked different.

“I don’t remember anything.” This is something she insists, but there’s a faraway look in those brown eyes that makes me think that isn’t true. The King obviously doesn’t believe her either.

“Well, let’s see what happens if we go out there.”

I climb out, sling my pack over one shoulder, and grab my compound bow out of the back seat.

When I open her door, she moves slowly, different from the other times I’ve been around her, like she’s unsure her bones will hold.

There’s no sign of the dancer. Of the killer I met in those woods.

I offer my hand, but she doesn’t take it, hopping out on her own.

It's colder than I expected for early fall, the damp kind that clings to the back of my neck. I lift my collar up, shielding my skin, and step into the woods. We move in silence, Arianette sticking close enough that her shoulder brushes my arm with every step. The forest smells like rot and water. The river isn’t far, I can hear it rushing ahead, aggressive and alive.

She stops suddenly, her head cocked like she’s listening to something I can’t hear.

“What? Do you remember something?”

I glance around. Broken branches. A patch of disturbed soil. Maybe a boot print half-swallowed by time. It’s old, too old to tell much, but it’s something. I crouch and run my hand through the dirt.

“There were others,” she whispers behind me. “Crying. Screaming, sometimes. I think... I think one of them had a necklace. I could hear it clink when she moved.”

“Here?” I ask, having a hard time thinking there was a crowd in here.

“Not here.” She shakes her head like she’s trying to remove cobwebs. “There.”

There . I try to sort through the riddle. Maybe Hunter would have been the better one to come on this little journey of futility.

“You mean the other girls–the ones missing?”

She says nothing, just tilts her head toward the sky and stares up.

“Do you remember anything about who took you?” I ask, still crouched.

Her voice drops to a murmur. “A mask. Like a beast. I thought it was him at first. I thought it was him .”

I look up. “The King?”

She doesn’t answer. Just turns in a slow circle, then takes the trek toward the river, her movements dreamlike, disconnected. I stand slowly and watch her as she stands at the edge of the riverbank, arms folded tight around herself.

“I’ve been here,” she says, frowning. “Right?”

I unfold the map in my pocket, the one Graves gave me before we left. There’s a spot circled, coordinates at the bottom, a photo paperclipped to the top.

“This is where they found you.” I clear my throat. “The two kids that were fishing.”

One had given her CPR while the other ran out to the street to flag down help. She was covered in bruises and had ties still bound around her wrist. I lift her hand now and push back the sleeve, rubbing my thumb over the ridge of scar tissue wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet.

“They said I was gone for at least three minutes.” She looks at my hand. Her wrist. “Do you know what three minutes feels like when you’re not in your body?”

“Yes.” I’m still able to feel the heat of the blood spilling in my hands.

Her eyes flick to the scar. To the story I’d told her in the locker room.

I can’t tell if the feeling in my chest is because I’m pissed that I’d let that slip in a moment of vulnerability or glad that it’s out of the way and I don’t have to tell it again.

“Then you know that it’s everything. It’s nothing. It’s...” Her mouth twists. “It’s what I had to do to get away. Risk it all. Embrace the ether. It was a decision, I could end my life on my terms or the beast could take it on theirs.”

“Are you saying you jumped in the river? To escape?”

From the notes I’ve read, the police report, they weren’t sure if it was intentional or not.

“It was the way.”

I notice she's wary to label the beast as male or female. I step closer, close enough that she can lean against me if she wants. Use me to dig into that place of darkness she’s clearly afraid to go. She doesn’t, but I feel the way her breathing slows, like my presence alone is enough.

“I’m going to find out who did this to you,” I say. “No matter what it takes.”

She blinks slowly, turning to look up at me. “That’s why he sent you. You’re not afraid to get your hands dirty.”

“I’ve been dirty since birth,” I say. “Might as well make it useful.”

The wind picks up, whipping the ends of her dress around her legs.

The memory of them wrapped around me in the crypt barrels into me.

Her skin was so soft and supple. My cock gets hard in an instant.

I glance out over the water, where the river churns, white and frothy, pure after going over the rocks.

I don’t think I understood why the King chose me until this very moment.

Arianette may have died here, but now, she’s his . The King’s.

Ours. Me and Hunter.

And it’s my job to make sure she stays that way.

The trail narrows as we climb, the dirt soft beneath my boots.

The river hisses below, seeming to grow louder the higher we go.

Arianette walks ahead of me, her steps light but unsteady, hands trailing along branches and mossy trunks like she’s blindfolded and feeling her way through a dream.

Predictably, her shoes aren’t up to the task and more than once, I place my hands on her hips to leverage her out of the muck.

“There,” she says finally, pointing toward a flat patch of stone overlooking the bend in the river. “That’s where I jumped.”

I nod. It’s just a slab of stone and dead leaves now, nothing remarkable, nothing that screams of a girl willing to throw herself to her death. It’s not the landscape I’m trying to read, it’s her.

She lowers herself slowly to the rock, skirt pooling around her dirty feet, eyes scanning the treeline as if something might flicker back to life there. I crouch nearby, resting my bow against a tree.

Arianette starts to hum again, soft and tuneless. “I used to count the windows,” she says after a minute. “To make sure none of them were open. Just in case one of the little ones thought about flying.”

I freeze. Little ones?

“There was a girl,” she continues, eyes glassy, like the world has peeled away and left her in memory’s hollow shell.

“Red. That was her color.” She lifts a hand to her face and flinches like someone’s just hit her, even though there’s only wind.

“At night they’d take her, after the music and dancing. After the entertainment .”

I swallow and ask in an even voice. “Did she have a name?”

She thinks, head tilted. “Em? Emily? Emma?” Her eyes flick to the dirt. “It was a long time ago.”

I’ve seen the transcript of Arianette’s conversation at the hospital after she was found.

That FBI agent and police officer probing her for details.

Much of it had been gibberish, and the toxicology reports did come back saying she’d had drugs in her system.

It makes her story even more unreliable and hard to understand.

There are times when she seems to confuse the present with the past. Or maybe they’re the same thing. There’s no real way to find out.

“I was there to dance,” she says. “But sometimes, that’s not all they wanted.”

“What did they want?” I ask, playing along.

She looks at me then, something sharp and unspoken in her eyes. “They made me watch , Damon. I had to watch . That was the rule.”

My throat tightens. I sit beside her now.

“The hallway outside the blue room always smelled like sweat and old flowers. Expensive, oily perfume. They’d leave the door open just a crack. Just wide enough. I could hear the crying. Other times laughing. One of them still had their baby teeth.”

She wraps her arms around her knees, rocking slightly.

“There’s a kind of sickness you get from seeing too much and doing nothing. I still have it. It lives under my tongue, behind my ribs. I carry all their screams in a glass jar inside me. Sometimes it rattles. Sometimes it breaks.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, gently. She leans into it without looking at me. “Who, Arianette? Who are you talking about?”