Chapter 11 River
RIVER
Every time I go for the knife in Pandora’s hand, she pulls it away. I could overpower her and take it by force, but probably not without getting that knife between my own ribs.
Would she really have gone through with stabbing Blaze? Would Asch have stood by and watched? I know they’re fighting, but I can’t imagine Asch abandoning Blaze entirely.
On the other hand, being friends with Pandora hadn’t stopped her from getting her dads to mutilate my hand.
People change when they’re pissed off.
“Give me the knife, Pandora,” I tell her, still aiming to keep my voice calm and level.
“Not until you give me your finger, River,” she answers, smiling. “You promised.”
“The knife first,” I say, smiling back at her. “I’ll keep my word.”
Pandora shakes her head and backs away from me. I notice the lack of her warmth instantly, and I hate how much I enjoy having her pressed against me.
She walks over to my bedside drawer and opens it up. “Where did you stash it? You need to take proper care of your finger, River. I’ll never forgive you if you ruined it.”
And I’ll never forgive her for taking it, but that’s not something I’m going to tell her while she’s still holding her knife.
“Bottom drawer,” I tell her. “Give me the knife, then let’s talk about… that.”
Whatever that had been, with Blaze on his back with his cock out, tied to the bed looking flushed and freshly fucked.
Pandora opens up the drawer and squats down to pull out the three little bones.
Seeing her “lucky charm” makes bile rise in my throat, and it’s all I can do not to gag. I stare at it, trying to reconcile the bones with the missing finger on my own hand. Even the way they’re linked with wire is an eerie reminder of the way they’d once fit together naturally.
I’d placed it against the stump on my hand, and the immediate, visceral flashback, the pain of having it cut off, had overwhelmed me. After that, I had stuffed it into the drawer so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
I should have thrown it away.
“What the fuck did I walk in on?” I blurt out, trying to get my mind off of the macabre token she’d taken from me.
Pandora kisses the charm, making my stomach roil again, then drops her knife on the floor. Before I can grab it, she kicks it under the bed.
“There. No more scary knife,” Pandora says. She sits down on the bed and rubs my finger bones over and over. “And I don’t know, you walked in on me attempting to cut Blaze open? I thought it was pretty obvious what I was doing.”
“After you fucked him?” I ask. “What, was that a going away present or some shit?” I shake my head. “How the hell did you get Asch in on that?”
Pandora’s eyes practically sparkle as she grins at me. “Asch knows what Blaze did.”
“What Blaze did,” I repeat. “You mean to Rachel?” My own expression darkens, and I wish she hadn’t kicked the knife out of my reach so I could go back into the other room and take my own pain out on him.
“No, what he did to Asch. Why would Asch care about Rachel?” Pandora puts my bones into her pocket. “Keep up!”
Out of sight, but not out of mind.
“Anyway, the files I grabbed from that basement room—”
“The basement? Files?” I huff in annoyance. “You mean the secret room in the frat?” It’s not like it’s new for Pandora to flit from topic to topic, but I need her to slow down and explain what she’s talking about instead of expecting me to follow her trainwreck of an attention span.
She nods. “Right! The one where they took pics of pretty college girls. And a few boys, but mostly girls.”
Pandora takes her phone out and taps for a few seconds before holding the screen up for me to see. There’s a photo of a printout, which has what looks like a modeling profile for a random student.
“I checked, and this girl was a student for one semester like five years ago. Then she abruptly dropped out.” Pandora puts the phone away again.
“Uncle Slayer wasn’t able to find anything more about her either.
Just poof, vanished. Her sister reported her missing six months later, but that’s way too late to find anyone.
Everybody knows if you don’t find them within the first forty-eight hours, they’re probably dead. ”
She says that last sentence so cheerfully, but there’s something wild behind her eyes.
It reminds me of how she looked that night at the gym.
“How many others?” I ask, licking my lips. My mouth is so dry. Is this what Rachel had stumbled into? Some scam that made girls think they could become models, only for them to disappear?
“Just a few.” Pandora flops across the bed. “You should have let me stab Blaze a little. I wasn’t actually going to kill him. A puncture between the ribs might have done him some good, even.”
It probably would have.
“Well, with both your knife and his cock out,” I point out, “I wasn’t too sure what the end goal was.
” I watch her. “What about Rachel, Pandora? Did you find a modeling contract for her?” My heart is pounding in my ears, and it’s all I can do not to storm into the other room and demand answers from Blaze. “How is Blaze involved?”
“No, I didn’t find Rachel.” Pandora reaches into her pocket again, and this time her hand stays there.
She’s touching my bones.
“But she must have been here, right? And Zayden, I know he was involved. He delivered dahlias to my roommate, River. Blood red dahlias, like he was fucking taunting me.”
I try to sort through what she’s told me.
The secret room in the frat house had contained secret files, files of people with modeling contracts — mostly women — who had gone missing. There hadn’t been a file with Rachel there, but Pandora thinks it’s related.
She thinks Blaze and the Bouchards are responsible, or at the very least, know what’s going on.
She’d turned Asch and Blaze against each other.
“Are you sure it was Zayden who sent them?” I ask. I used to be good at following her lines of thought, but I’m more out of practice than I thought. I cross the room, going to sit beside her, and I grab her hand. “I need you to focus, Pandora.”
“I am focused!” Pandora argues. “This is the most focused I’ve been!
Yeah I got caught up in the romance or whatever, three perfect hot guys who all want me, but that’s all trash, right?
The three of you don’t actually care about me.
Rachel’s the important one. Samantha is the important one.
Zayden got what was coming to him, Tate will get what’s coming to him, the entire fucking frat will get what’s coming to them.
I’ll find Samantha, I’ll get revenge for her and Rachel and every other person the Kafka Asshole Omega Shitheads ever talked to—”
“It’s not trash,” I snap at her. “I—”
I can’t tell her I care about her. I still want my own revenge on her. It’s hard to forget that when she keeps rubbing my fingerbones in her pocket.
“Fine, we don’t care. What’s Samantha got to do with it?”
Pandora rolls her eyes at me. “She’s missing.
I said that. I think I said that. She’s been gone since that night.
She took her phone, but not her tablet. All her clothes are still there.
And the fucking blood red dahlias. I got Anastasia to unlock the tablet for me, and Samantha was dating Zayden, and he went to get her and then she was gone! ”
Fuck.
Another missing woman, another piece of the puzzle… and the answers are potentially in the next room.
Maybe I was a little hasty in stopping Pandora from slicing and dicing Blaze Bouchard until he told her what he knows.
He’s not going to be caught unaware again, though, and I’m not entirely sure how to proceed.
“Okay. So what are we going to do?” I ask her.
“Figure out where they took Samantha,” Pandora says. “And cut up everyone who was involved. Was that part of my plan not clear?”
There’s no way Blaze is going to give us answers, especially not now. That means we’re going to have to take another approach.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I instinctually take it out to check who messaged me.
It’s the frat chat, and it’s yet another video of Pandora. I think I’ve seen this one before. It’s hard to keep track of all the videos they send.
I click the screen off, but it’s too late.
Pandora tilts her head at me. “Oh. You like those vids?”
“What? No,” I say. “The frat—” I cut myself off. She doesn’t need to know how obsessed they still are with her. “I don’t watch them.”
It’s a lie.
I’ve watched them so many times I know them by heart.
But it’s not for the reasons she thinks.
It’s a form of penance, forcing myself to watch something that had made a void open up within my chest, something that I feel completely separate from now. It would be easy to forget that I was there, that I’d had anything to do with it, but I can’t do that.
So much for wanting revenge.
“We could watch one now,” Pandora says. Her voice is completely flat. “I haven’t seen the porn of me either. Do you think they’ve got one of my cunt stretched wide around the bottle?”
“We aren’t watching them,” I snarl at her.
“Because you’ve already seen them,” Pandora says.
“Because you’ve been having fun spreading them around to all your friends.
Do you get off on those videos?” She leans in closer and drags a nail down my throat.
“Did you get off that night? Did you like seeing my cunt getting demolished by all those guys?”
“No!” I say. “No, I didn’t.” She’s not going to believe me when I say I hated seeing her getting fucked by that bottle, that I’d gotten so jealous that I’d barely been able to see straight. That if any of them had tried to get their cocks in her, I’d have taken her knife and cut them up myself.
“Didn’t seem like it.” Pandora gets off the bed. “You’re good at following orders though. Did everything Blaze and Zayden told you to do, including luring me there.” She giggles briefly. “They knew I’d drop everything for you. I got played hard.”
The worst part is that she isn’t wrong.
But what else was I supposed to have done? I’d been so angry.
I’d let myself be played, too.
“You’re the one who wanted me to infiltrate them,” I remind her, and I stand up, too. “You’re the one who pushed me into all of this. You don’t get to hold it against me now.”
“I didn’t think you’d become their sheep.” She wraps her arms around herself. “You aren’t so perfect, really. Won’t help me stab Blaze, won’t stop frat guys from holding me down and… and…”
My stomach twists. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, my voice strangely hoarse. “Pandora, I—”
“Sorry?” Pandora starts laughing. “How sorry? Will you give me another finger? Will you let me mark you up?”
No.
I’m not losing another finger to her for her to carry around like a grisly trophy, a reminder of my stupid fuck-up.
“You already took a finger for something stupid,” I tell her. “This was just… payback, that’s all.”
She should be glad she got away so lightly.
She’s fine now.
Nobody stole one of her body parts.
Pandora’s barely even traumatized by what happened.
Hell, she went out and murdered somebody. That’s some catharsis for her. I had to suffer by myself, with my father’s rage raining down on me and knowing I’d never, ever be able to touch the Pavones unless I wanted to feel their wrath, too.
“Payback,” Pandora repeats. Her smile gets wider. “That means I’m justified in getting payback too. We’ll keep going until the entire world is blind.”
“You know what, Pandora? You can do that all you want. Just keep going around in circles, keep trying to get revenge. But you can do it by your fucking own,” I snap at her. “I’m not your bitch, and I’m not going to meekly roll over for you.”
“But you’ll roll over for Blaze,” Pandora says. “You can take Asch’s place, since they’re on the outs now.”
“I’m not rolling over for Blaze,” I retort.
But haven’t I done just that? I’ve been doing what he wants, and I’ve been letting him manipulate me. I’ve been quietly ignoring the secret room in the frat because I didn’t want to get on Blaze’s bad side.
Pandora gives me a condescending look. “You’ve never been a leader, River. Just blindly following along. You jumped before I even asked. It wasn’t even hard to get you to join the frat. So much for your backbone.”
“I have a fucking backbone!” I yell. “I just wanted to find Rachel’s killer. That was the best lead we had!”
“Then you should have let me stab Blaze!” Pandora shoots back. She gets down onto the floor and reaches under the bed.
I grab her wrist and pull her away before she can reach her knife again. “No. Leave that here.” I know she’ll get another one, but I’m not letting her get near me with a weapon in her hand. “And while you’re at it, get out.”
“What?” Pandora shakes her head. “No, I’m not done here. Blaze still hasn’t told me anything.”
“Yeah, well, too bad,” I tell her, yanking her in the direction of the door.
“He’s not going to tell you anything, and you know that.
” She missed her chance because I interfered, and I’m not going to forget that any more than she is.
But I hadn’t known what was going on. “Go. Get out of here. You’re right; none of us want you, and we especially don’t want you here. ”
I want to hurt her.
I want to break her.
But she only laughs. “Fine. I’ll remember this, River.” She blows me a kiss. “I gave you a chance to get off my shit list. But you don’t want nice Pandora either.”
She leaves the room and slams the door shut behind her.
I stare at the door.
Part of me wants to go after her.
Part of me wants to say good riddance.
I don’t know which is stronger, but I do know one thing.
She isn’t done with us. Not by a long shot.