Thank god the school year is over. I muddled through my final exams, distracted and foggy-headed. Yet I passed them all, retaining enough of the hard-won information I learned this year.
Now I’ve allowed Miles and Zoe to convince me to accompany them to Chicago, at least for a couple of weeks. I’m going to see America for the very first time.
I can’t feel any emotion as pleasant as excitement. But I will be relieved to be away from this campus, where I won’t have to pass that stretch of wall where I committed the ultimate crime.
I hope a long summer will dull the pain, and I’ll be able to return here in the fall, pretending that nothing happened.
It helps that no one wants to talk about Rocco Prince. By September, they may truly have forgotten him entirely.
The wagons have come to take away our bags, and to ferry us down to the harbor. All the students take the same ship back to Dubrovnik, so I’ll be with Zoe this time. We’re going to fly directly to Chicago.
I’m nervous to meet the Griffin family, but I know Miles will make us comfortable, and that Zoe can’t fail to charm them with her intelligence and beauty. I’ll be her quiet shadow as always, safe at her side.
The Undercroft is nearly deserted, most everyone having carried up their luggage early this morning, then spent the rest of the remaining time laughing, talking, and wrestling in the summer sunshine.
I’m lingering down here because I want to be alone. I want to sit in the cool, dry darkness a little longer.
I have my sketchbook out, unpacked, and I’m trying to draw a picture of a girl sitting on the rim of the well in the commons—the well next to the dining hall that provides the coldest and most delicious water on the island.
I love that moss-stained well. Yet in my drawing, it looks sinister and dark, like a blank eye leading down into the center of the earth.
I hear a scrape of metal in the lock. I think it’s Rakel turning her key. She must have forgotten something in her dresser.
Instead, the door sweeps open and Dean Yenin steps inside.
His broad shoulders fill the doorframe, his head only an inch below the lintel. His fair skin and hair look white as ash in the dim light. As always, his person is flawlessly neat—trousers pressed, shirt crisp and snowy white, hands clean as marble. The only color on him is those violet-blue eyes, beautiful in a way that only deadly things can be.
I haven’t taken a breath since he stepped into my room.
I’m frozen in place on the bed, my pencil tumbling numbly from my fingers. It rolls away from me across the floor. Neither of us looks to see where it lands.
Reaching behind him, Dean closes the door with a soft snick.
That motion, more than anything, tells me his intentions aren’t good.
He walks toward me, slow and deliberate.
I stand to meet him. Even at my fullest height, the top of my head lands far below his chin. I’m looking at his chest, where the hard slabs of muscle strain the buttons of his shirt. I have to tilt my head all the way back to look him in the face.
Dean has a terrible beauty up close. He’s the sort of monster where it could kill you to look at him.
Gracefully, he stoops to pick up my sketch pad. He examines the drawing, dark lashes swooping down as he looks at every part of it.
“This reminds me of Timoclea,” he says. “Do you know it?”
His words are a cold frost that sweeps through my body, freezing the blood in my veins, stopping my heart.
The Baroque artist Elisabetta Sirani painted a scene recounted by Plutarch in his biography of Alexander the Great.
When Alexander’s forces seized the city of Thebes, a Thracian captain raped Timoclea. After the assault, he demanded if she knew of any hidden money. Telling him she did, Timoclea led him into her garden, where she promised gold could be found inside her well. As he bent over to look, she pushed him in, and threw stones down upon his head until he was dead.
I look in Dean’s eyes, and I see that he holds my life in his hands.
With awful tenderness, he strokes his finger down my cheek.
“I know what you did,” he says.
I can’t speak. I can’t even blink. All I can do is tremble.
“I saw the strangest thing as I walked to the infirmary. You. Climbing in a window.”
I shake my head, silent, horrified.
“Yes,” Dean assures me, his eyes fixed on mine. “I saw you. You lured him up on that wall. And you pushed him over.”
He knows. He knows. He knows.
“Alexander pardoned Timoclea,” Dean says. “But no one will pardon you.”
My tongue is ice in my mouth, but I have to speak.
“Please . . .” I whisper.
“You want me to keep your secret?” Dean asks me, his voice as soft as a caress.
I nod. I would fall on my knees before him to beg, if I were capable of moving.
“I won’t tell,” Dean promises. “But understand this . . . I own you now. When we come back to school, you’re mine. My servant. My slave. For as long as I want you.”
Dean cups my chin in his hand, pressing his thumb against my lips. Sealing me to silence.
Then he leaves me there, plunged into dread deeper than any I’ve ever known.
Epilogue
Zoe
Chicago
It’s Sabrina Gallo’s birthday.
We celebrate at the Shedd Aquarium, where the dinner tables are arranged around floor-to-ceiling glass windows looking in upon the sharks, rays, and turtles floating around in their underwater world. The pale blue rippling light makes it feel as if we’re all underwater, too, particularly the couples circling dreamily on the dance floor.
I’m glad I’ve met most of Miles’ family separately by this point, because they’re quite the intimidating crowd. The Gallos are all beautiful, with the nut-brown skin, thick dark curls, and surreal gray eyes that I’ve come to know and love on Miles. That, at least, makes me feel a sense of familiarity, though each of them differs enough in their sharp and provoking personalities to keep me on my toes.
No one is more beautiful than Sabrina Gallo herself. I’ve never seen a girl so exotic and breathtaking. She’s entirely in her element receiving her pile of presents from family members, and the kisses and well-wishes of friends.
A continual rotation of boys orbit her, battling for her attention.
“How old is she turning?” I ask Miles.
“Seventeen. One more year until she comes to Kingmakers.”
“I can already see she’ll be popular.”
“She’ll be trouble, more like,” Miles shakes his head. “Sabrina causes more problems than the rest of my cousins put together.”
Even Miles’ uncle Dante has flown in from Paris with his three children and his supermodel wife who I remember from the magazines and billboards of my youth. Dante is so big that he makes Silas Gray seem petite by comparison, and his eldest son Henry is his mirror image, only a little darker-complected, with a slightly gentler face. While Dante is terrifying, Henry has a softness to his deep brown eyes and full lips that has almost as many female eyes turned in his direction as the flock of males circling Sabrina.
The Griffins have come to the party as well, including the elegant Riona Griffin with her handsome rancher husband and their four redheaded sons. The sons cluster around a table in the corner, playing some sort of card game that evokes plenty of laughter, but also moments of tension where it seems like all four burly country boys might break out into a fistfight that would smash the table and chairs like kindling under their combined mass.