The Chancellor interrogated Chay and me. We told him everything that Rocco had done since the very first week of school. It didn’t matter. All they cared about was Wade’s death.
The guilt is choking, crushing, suffocating me.
I can’t even apologize to Ozzy because he took his mother’s body back to Tasmania, and he won’t be returning to Kingmakers.
I write him letters, letters to his father, too.
He hasn’t responded. I don’t expect him to.
He already said what he wanted to say, in a note left on Miles’ bed, addressed to both of us:
It’s not your fault. Be safe and be well.
Neither Miles nor I believe it.
It is our fault.
We wanted what we were forbidden to have.
The mood at Kingmakers is somber and dark in the weeks following Mrs. Duncan’s death. None of the students had witnessed an execution before. We all knew the rules, but the reality was distant. Now it’s right in front of our faces. Fun and games are at an end.
People whisper as I pass. They stare at me.
I feel like I’m cursed.
Anyone who tries to help me is cursed, too.
I’m scared to be around anyone, even Anna and Chay and Cat. Especially Cat.
Now that Rocco has wounded Miles so successfully, shaming him and cutting away his best friend, I can’t help but fear that he’ll attack Cat next. He wants to isolate me from everyone I love. He won’t allow me any help or support.
He’s started following me again. He watches me everywhere I go. Always staring. Always smiling.
Chay is devastated by what happened to Ozzy, and even more unhappy that he’s gone. She begged him to stay at school, or at least come back in the fall, but he refused.
Since he left she’s fallen into a deep depression, stumbling to class barefaced and red-eyed, her hair in a tangled bun, a state in which I had never seen her even once before.
She’s developed a hatred for Rocco that almost surpasses my own. She always disliked him from their days in secondary school. Now she harbors a burning rage that frightens me, because I worry that she might act impulsively, given the chance.
Rocco is a plague unleashed by me.
There’s only one way to stop it.
Two weeks after Ozzy leaves, I visit Miles in his half-empty dorm room. As soon as he sees my face, he knows why I’ve come.
“Don’t,” he begs me. “Don’t say it.”
“I have to.”
I swore I wouldn’t cry, but something hot and wet is already running down both sides of my face.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I tell him.
Miles looks at me. He’s still thin from his week in the tower. I doubt he’s been eating since. Shadows mark his under-eyes and the hollows of his cheeks. His gray eyes look large and dark. Veins stand out on his arms and the backs of his hands.
Yet he’s beautiful. So fucking beautiful.
He’s beautiful when he’s sad and when he’s scared. When he’s happy or when he’s angry. He’s a diamond with a hundred facets. Each one is pure and perfect to me.
But he doesn’t belong to me and he never did.
I was never meant to have such a treasure.
“I’m going to marry Rocco at the end of the school year,” I say. “There’s no point putting it off any longer. He’ll only make life miserable for the rest of you.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Miles says quietly.
“It’s not your choice,” I tell him. “It was never a choice, for any of us.”
Miles looks at me the way he always does, fully and completely, taking in every part of me.
“I made you a promise,” he says.
“It was an impossible promise. I know you would have kept it if you could.”
He looks at me. Then he stands up from his bed in one quick motion, and closes the space between us. I think he’s going to kiss me, and I don’t know how I’ll find the strength to push him away.
Instead, he takes my hand and lifts it to his lips.
He looks into my eyes, his mouth pressed to my knuckles, his touch telling me more clearly than any words could do that he loves me, that he’ll always love me.
And I love him. I love him and Cat and Chay and Anna, Ozzy and Leo and Hedeon too.
Which is why I can’t be selfish any longer.
I leave Miles’ room planning never to return.
20
Miles
I had a long time to think in the Prison Tower.
Even longer in the weeks that followed, when Ozzy was gone and I was alone in the dorm room.
What I realized is this:
If not for Zoe, it would have been my mother who was executed.
I was in a rage that night.
I wanted to kill Wade, Jasper, Dax, and most of all Rocco.
They pushed us and pushed us, crossing every fucking line. In that fight—with Zoe in danger, and Chay and Ozzy hurt—I lost control. I could have killed any one of them.
It was Zoe who screamed for me to stop.
She was the one who dragged me back. The only person who could have brought me to my senses in that moment.
Ozzy struck the killing blow.
But it could just as easily have been me.
Then it would have been my mother who traded her life, who took the punishment, who paid the debt. I know she would have done it, unhesitatingly. Just like Ozzy’s mom.
It would have killed me. It would have poisoned my soul.
For all the guilt and horror I feel at what happened to Mrs. Duncan, still one thing is certain: I need Zoe. I fucking need her. I’m no good without her.
Zoe brings out the best in me. She makes me smarter, stronger, more determined. And most of all, she holds back that dark and reckless part of me.
She’s my rudder, my guide.
I can’t fly without her, or I’ll crash and burn, I know it.
And I fucking love her. That’s the most important part of all. I like her, I love her, I admire her, I adore her. I’m not abandoning her to Rocco’s torment. She doesn’t deserve that. I don’t care what it costs to save her, or what I have to risk.
It wasn’t a mistake to oppose Rocco. My mistake was letting this go on too long.
I need to end it. Now.
So when Zoe leaves my room, I wait less than a minute before getting to work.
No more planning. It’s time to act.
The first thing I do is call Ozzy.
I don’t expect him to pick up first try, but to my surprise, he answers almost immediately.
“If it’s another apology, I don’t want to hear it,” he says. “I’m fucking drowning in guilt, I can’t handle you wallowing in it, too.”
“How are you?” I ask him. “How’s your dad?”
“He’s a fuckin’ mess. Wants to kill the Chancellor. My uncles had to tie him down. Literally.”
“He didn’t know . . .”
“No. My mom got the letter from the school. Hid it from him. He didn’t even know she had left Tasmania until . . . well. We don’t need to talk about that. Suffice it to say we’re in a fuckin’ state. But surviving.”
“I am so, so sorry, Ozzy.”
He takes a long breath with a catch in the middle.
“I know, mate. I know you are. I’m sorry, you’re sorry. We got ourselves in a mess together, but it was me that grabbed the knife. So just fuckin’ save it. I can’t think about should’ves and would’ves or I’m gonna drive myself insane. She didn’t want that.”