Page 11

Vincent

“It doesn’t hurt,” a girl is complaining as I slip into the nurse's room.

The medium room has a padded chair, a black leather bench, and posters promoting healthy eating and exercise on the white walls.

Ms. Arkwright, the head of the school, turns to me with a frown.

“I’m here to help in any way I can,” I say firmly before she can remind me that I have no business being here.

Ask forgiveness, not permission.

The omega with brown eyes gazes at me intently. Her hands are bandaged, with blood speckling her palms. “Can you check if the other girl escaped? They had a taser.”

“A taser ?” The nurse lifts a shaking hand to cover her mouth.

“Perhaps this might be better for the police to?—”

I talk over Ms. Arkwright. “What happened outside those gates? Tell me everything.”

Ms. Arkwright bristles. “Professor Vincent, you are not?—”

“A girl is bleeding.” I unmercifully cut her off. “And by her admission, another was left behind in some altercation outside the gates. Are all students accounted for?”

She blanches. “Oh God. The parents. They’ve already started pulling students out. This will ruin us.” Fumbling with the doorknob in one hand and a cell phone in the other, she slips out.

I refocus on the girl. She doesn’t look familiar, but I haven’t been here long enough to have taught all the students or recognize them all by sight. “This other girl. Do you know her name?”

“She was telling me when…” Her eyes fill with tears.

I grab the box of tissues from the nurse's desk and walk over to her. I don’t give the nurse any choice but to move out of my way before I drop into a crouch, offering her the box. “What’s your name?”

She takes a tissue and dabs her eyes. “Mercy.”

I lower the box to the floor in front of me. “And what were you doing outside Haven Academy this late, Mercy?”

Her sweet almond scent marked her out as an omega the second I walked into the room. She doesn’t look like she came from wealth with her ripped jeans, ragged haircut, and dirt crusting her nails.

The nurse clears her throat. “Professor Vincent, shouldn’t we?—”

“I understand you’re concerned,” I interrupt the nurse without turning around. “But clearly Mercy wants to talk about this. I’m just giving her an outlet.”

Control the narrative or lose control of the situation.

“Mercy?” I prompt.

Mercy sniffs and scrubs a hand over her eyes, wincing slightly as she lowers it back to her lap.

“I want to talk.” Her eyes dart to the nurse, and she sits up taller in her seat as she focuses on me.

“I wasn’t sure about Haven. My dad said I belong with other omegas because we kept hearing stuff in the news about… well, you know?”

Wealthy alphas taking advantage of omegas in free heat clinics. It’s been the front page of every newspaper for days, if not weeks.

“I do know,” I say.

“I just wanted to check the place out before I decided for myself.”

“And your father?”

She chews her lip, her gaze evasive. “Uh, he doesn’t know I’m here. I said I was going to a sleepover with a friend, but I came to check this place out instead.”

“So, you walk up to the front gate…” I prompt, surprising her from her slow blink. Maybe she expected me to offer to call her father or something.

“And a girl fell over the top.”

“ Fell over the top…” The nurse echoes. “What on earth?”

Mercy doesn’t take her eyes off me. Her fingers tighten around the soggy tissue in her lap. “She’s from here. Had a uniform and everything. And she was saying something about the place being haunted.”

I’d known who it must be. There was only one person it could be outside those gates this late.

The germ of guilt that something terrible has happened to Delilah because I chased her from this school forms into a ball, heavy in my gut.

“Then what happened?” I ask.

“We were walking back to my car. I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be going to a haunted school, and if she was running away, then that just proved this isn’t where I wanted to be.

Then this other car starts up. A BMW. I hadn’t seen it before, but they must have parked up as I was walking to the gate, or maybe they were waiting for a girl to come out of the school. ”

The ball in my gut develops spikes.

“Then?”

“The girl. Del… whatever her name is, she didn’t actually say. She shoved me toward the gate. Said I should press the button and yell, scream that someone was attacking me. She said I should climb it if I could, and I did. That’s how I cut up my hands. Then I ran.”

“And the girl?” I ask quietly.

Do not let this story end the way I think it will. I have more than enough blood on my hands. I don’t need more.

Mercy shreds the tissue in her lap. “She said she would give them hell.”

Delilah Farrow. No other student would say something like that. No one else has the fighting spirit that she does.

“And they took her,” Mercy whispers.

I stare at her.

“I don’t know why she was leaving here, but a haunted school has to be better than being tasered. Do you think they’ll kill her?” Mercy whispers.

A flashback of a news report invades my mind.

An omega’s body dumped on the side of a road, missing half her clothes.

We’re hunting an omega killer, and I chased Delilah out of here with threats of exposing her. She smelled like an omega, and she was wearing the Haven Academy uniform.

To what fate?

A door slams open behind me.

Ms. Arkwright stalks in with a phone clamped to her ear. “Cops are on their way. They’ll be here soon. They said?—”

I get up and walk away. Then I stop and turn back, meeting Mercy’s gaze. “Thank you for talking to me, Mercy.”

She blinks, surprised. “Uh, thanks for listening.”

I walk out of the nurse’s room, pulling the door closed behind me.

Outside, a handful of teachers stand in a small group.

Xavier and Levi are among them.

As a visiting instructor, Levi has the least amount of responsibility. I told him to check if Delilah had left the school grounds, and he would have.

I feel them watching me as I jog down the long gravel road to the front gates. If cops are on their way, I have limited time to have a look around.

As I enter my staff code on the keypad, nudge the side gate open, and walk outside the school gates, the distant sound of a police siren grows nearer.

“Professor Vincent?” the security guard calls out, glancing at me.

The dark-eyed beta is standing directly in front of the gate, hand on his gun, likely sent down here to ensure no trouble finds its way into the school.

I ignore him.

A battered Toyota sits in the parking lot. My gaze lingers on black tire skid marks from a car accelerating fast. The duffel bag on the ground is the only evidence that something happened in this parking lot.

I have dedicated ten years of my life to a single goal.

I have never turned away or been tempted to give it up.

Until now.

The sirens grow louder. I take another careful look at the parking lot and step back onto the school grounds, letting the iron gate slam behind me as I make my way up the gravel drive.

Xavier and Levi linger in the shadows of an oak.

“Ms. Arkwright has some teachers doing a roll call in the dorms,” Levi says before I can ask what happened to the other teachers. “I offered to walk around and check if any of the girls were wandering around. She said the most important students are safe.”

Of course she did. The wealthiest. The ones whose disappearance could threaten her job.

I fill them in on everything Mercy told me in the nurses’ office.

“Do you think they’ll find her?” Xavier asks.

There’s usually a hint of a smile in my brother’s eyes. Not now. Now he just looks tired and worried, with his hands stuffed deep into his gardener’s dark green overalls.

Besides the gray in our eyes—his warmer than mine—and our dark hair, we have little in common. Those similarities might have attracted unwanted attention, so he grew out his beard while preparing for our roles at Haven Academy.

“The cops will do their investigation,” I say. “Did Ms. Arkwright say anything about needing more help? Or is everyone going back to their rooms?”

Xavier vigorously scratches his beard, and Levi shakes his head with a smile. “Fleas?”

“Fuck you,” Xavier mutters. “Just itchy. Maybe we could go look around, you know, make sure she’s not there?”

“The cops are professionals. They will find her. The best thing for everyone is if we stay out of their way,” I say firmly.

Levi gives me a long look. “What about the janitor? Thomas Benson was hanging around the girls’ dorms.”

“That will have to wait.” The sound of police sirens grows louder as Ms. Arkwright emerges from the building, gripping her cell phone.

As one, we retreat deeper under the trees.

All our backstories are rock solid. If any cop decides to run a background check on any of us, they won’t find anything.

We spent months preparing for this investigation.

I lead the way to the teachers' dorms. “We won’t do anything until the cops finish what they’re here to do.”

“And Delilah?” Xavier softly calls after me. “What about her?”

“We keep our heads down and wait for the cops to finish their work. They will find her. We have our own reason for being here, and that reason is not Delilah Farrow.”