Page 89 of Riot Act

Oh god! My wrists! Blood flows like a crimson river down my arms as I hold my hands up to my face. Too much blood. There’s way too much blood. “Jonah, what have you done?”

“You shouldn’t have said that about my mother,” he snarls.

“Fuck. I’m—I’m going to die, Jonah.”

His ashen, blood spattered face registers the faintest amount of shock. Between his legs, his dick hangs flaccid and spent. He staggers back, dropping his hold on the knife, and the sound of it hitting the hardwood clangs inside my head. “You…shouldn’t have…said that about…my mom,” he whispers.

Panic makes me come alive, even as I can feel myself fading. My heart’s beating hard, thumping against my ribs, pounding out a desperate rhythm as it tries to process the shock…

“Jonah. Jonah, listen to me. If you leave me like this, they’re gonna know it was you. If you let me die, they’ll know that you attacked me.”

He shakes his head. “They won’t.”

“They will! They’ll do an autopsy. Oh, god, they’ll…” The room pitches. I’m so lightheaded, I can’t even see straight. Too much blood. So much blood. “They’ll know you…raped me. The bruises…”

“FUCK!” Jonah tears at his hair, doubling over. “This is all your fault. Why the fuck did you have to say that shit!”

Like a flip being switched, he drops like a stone to the ground, cradling his head in his own hands. He starts to cry.

“Take me…to the hospital, Jonah. Take me and…it’ll all be okay.”

“No! No, no, no! I can’t!”

“Take me!”

He whips around to face me, his face red and blotchy, his eyes manic as hell. “You’ll tell them what I did!”

“I won’t. I swear I won’t. I’ll say…I did it myself. They’ll never even…know.”

Jonah stops crying. He sniffs, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. he looks like a little boy—a child recovering from a temper tantrum. “You swear? If I take you, you’ll tell them you did this? Not me?”

“I swear.”

He thinks for a second. A second I don’t have. And then… “Okay. But if you breathe a word of this, I will fucking come back for you, Red. Just see if I fucking don’t. And I’ll make it hurt so much more next time. I’ll find your fucking mom and I’ll killher, too.”

I don’t care about his threats.

He picks me up and starts to dress me. I feel like a limp ragdoll in his arms. I’m fading so fast.

“I mean it, Presley. I swear to God. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll come back and I’ll kill you.”

It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.

I want to live.

I want to live.

I want to live.

33

PAX

“You’re not particularly warm. No fever to speak of. You said you felt sick?”

Wolf Hall has changed a lot in the past couple of weeks. The nurse’s office used to be glorified broom closet near Harcourt’s office, but now the academy has its very own medical bay. How veryU.S.S. Enterpriseof the school board. One of the lesser used classrooms was converted during break, and now the place is decked out with medical equipment that’s more advanced than anything you’ll find at Mountain Lakes’ hospital. I’ve heard they’re running advanced biology classes out of here now, for the students who are interested in going into pre-med. This is also where I had my check up after the bone marrow donation—being poked and prodded here instead of down the hill seemed like the better option than potentially running into Meredith.

I glare balefully at the guy holding the back of his hand to my forehead, letting him know precisely what I think of his arcane temperature-gauging methods. It’s not as if Iwanteda thermometer in my ass. One in the mouth would probably be appropriate, though.