She looks across the dining hall to the distant table where Rocco sits with his coterie of thugs, including the two that crashed my breakfast with Zoe.
Rocco radiates a dark energy. It simultaneously separates him from the boys around him yet binds them to his side like magnets. No girls sit at his table. In fact, nobody who isn’t part of his gang sits at any of the surrounding tables, creating a vacant halo all around him.
“What do you know about Rocco?” I ask Claire quietly.
Jules gives her a sharp look, like he doesn’t think she should answer. Sadie likewise turns her attention on her food, disengaging herself from the conversation.
But Claire answers, without hesitation, “I know what everyone knows. That he’s not a criminal . . . he’s a killer.”
“What do you mean?” I say, trying to swallow.
“Some of us have murdered when we had to,” Claire says, in her calm, hypnotic voice. “And most of us will kill in the future. Very few mafiosos make it to the grave with lily-white hands. But only a few of us enjoy it.”
I stare across the dining hall at Rocco, at his pale face and his fever-bright eyes. He’s not touching his food, either. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him eat. He seems to prefer to use the time to watch everyone around him.
As if he can feel the scrutiny, he slowly raises his gaze to meet mine.
I drop my eyes at once, face flaming.
“He went to school for a year with my friend Emilia Browning,” Claire says, picking up her water glass and taking a sip. “He had a group of friends there similar to the one he has here. Les tyrans.” She searches for the word. “Bullies. Assholes.
“They had a boy who followed them around. A sort of hanger-on. They used him as an errand boy—made him buy cigarettes for them, write their papers, that sort of thing. Then one day the groundskeeper found the boy’s body dumped in the river behind the school. He had been tortured and beaten for hours, the police said. Cigarettes put out on his body. Eardrum punctured with a pencil. Teeth knocked out.”
I feel like I’m going to throw up. With every word Claire speaks, weight settles on my shoulders. Each syllable another brick added to the stack.
“Emilia said that Rocco and his friends bragged of doing it. There was no reason, no provocation. The boy thought they were his friends. There was an investigation, but the boy was no one important, and Rocco and his clique all came from powerful families. Rocco had to switch schools though, because it was so ugly that his parents didn’t want it talked about for long.”
Jules Turgenev makes a disgusted hissing sound. “Savages,” he says, with a flick of his head toward Rocco’s table. “No taste. No feeling.”
I feel very stupid for not recognizing what was happening right in front of my face.
Since the moment our father signed the marriage contract, Zoe has been sinking deeper and deeper into depression. I knew she didn’t like Rocco. But I had no idea what she was actually being forced into.
I got a hint of it that morning at breakfast when I saw him grab her thigh. He’d always been polite, if a little creepy. That was the first time I saw violence between them.
It’s not the fact that he grabbed her that disturbs me. It’s the way he did it: under the table, secretly, so nobody could see. The way his expression never changed for an instant. There was no hint of rage in his voice. He was calm and collected while he hurt my sister.
All of a sudden, Zoe’s absence takes on a new flavor.
I jump up from the table, my tray of food untouched.
“I’ve got to go,” I mumble.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says, putting her hand on my arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I thought you should know. If your parents aren’t aware—”
“Thank you,” I say numbly. “I appreciate it.”
I don’t know how to tell her that our father wouldn’t care even if I told him that exact story, even if he believed it.
I’ve been such an idiot.
Zoe has known all along about Rocco Prince. She knew he was a full-blown psychopath. She just didn’t tell me. To protect me—because I’m too weak to handle it.
I hurry out of the dining hall, determined to find my sister.
7
Zoe
Dr. Cross tells me that I can stay in the infirmary as long as I like, but I leave that evening, after a long nap that helps ease the throbbing pressure in my skull.
I think I hit my head when Jasper Webb caught hold of my ankle. But that’s not the only reason for the pounding headache. It’s disappointment, too.
I don’t want to be dead. Not really. But god did I want to escape.
Now I’m back in the thick of my own life, and the weight is suffocating.
I’m exhausted from scratching the walls, banging my head against the locked doors. Everywhere I turn, there’s no way out.
I’ve only been back in my dorm a few minutes when I hear a gentle tap on the door.
“Zoe?” Cat calls softly.
I open the door to see my sister anxiously waiting, her dark eyes huge in her delicate face.
“There you are,” she says, pushing into my room with a sigh of relief. Then she gets a proper look at me in the lamplight and her face crumples up. “What happened?” she cries.
I touch the tape high up on my cheekbone, which I know fails to cover the beginnings of a nasty black eye.
I open my mouth to give some excuse, to downplay what happened. Instead, I find myself bursting into tears.
I never cry like this. I’ve never fallen into my sister’s arms, sobbing. I’m so much bigger than her that I almost knock her over. I’m instantly ashamed of myself, but I can’t seem to stop. My whole body is shaking and I’m making an awful, animalistic sound, a ragged howling.
I never wanted to dump this on Cat. But I can’t seem to stop. I’m crying and crying as if my insides are liquefying and pouring out through my tear ducts.
After a long time I realize that Cat has sat down on the bed, and I’m laying with my head in her lap, while she gently strokes my hair.
This is something I did for her many times when she was sick or sad. Especially after our mother died.
I’ve never been the one in this position before.
The feeling of her gentle little hand on my head is incredibly soothing. It’s hard to accept comfort when you feel that you should be the one giving it, never demanding anything in return. It’s hard to trust that it might be okay to receive solace, just this one time.
Once my body stops shaking, once I’ve relaxed, the words come pouring out of me just like the tears—without moderation or control. I tell Cat everything Rocco has done to me, everything he’s said, from the moment I met him in the garden of our villa. Up to what happened this morning on the ramparts.
Cat listens silently, absorbing it all. I can feel her legs getting more and more rigid under my cheek, but she doesn’t interrupt.
When I sit up to look at her, her lips are so pale that I can barely see them against her skin.
“What can we do?” she asks me.
“Nothing,” I tell her. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“There has to be something!” she cries.