Chapter Thirty
The dining commonsis packed to the gills, full of friends laughing, couples bickering, and study groups huddled together over their class materials. It’s loud?—
Until it’s not.
The clamor of voices sinks into shushes and gasps, like the hiss of steam as a fire is extinguished. A few faces stand out to me in the crowd—Marissa, glaring like a hawk; Rashel, her lips tilted in a knowing smile; Yuki and Roxanne, the first of whom looks gobsmacked, the latter sympathetic.
Ryker’s hand tightens around mine, and I clutch back with equal strength, clinging to him amid the sea of wide eyes and lingering whispers. I’ve gotten used to the odd looks just about every time I’ve been in public over the past week—but in those cases, I was either alone or with a couple of the girls from my dance class. Here now, at Ryker’s side, it’s a whole different story.
He stops in the center of the room.
Oh, no, you don’t. I tug at him, but he ignores it. What does he think he’s doing? Does he like being gawked at? Because I sure don’t, and I don’t know how much of this I can take before I?—
“You all mind your business,” Ryker growls. His voice isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. At the sound of his words, the students around us slowly start up their conversations again, raising the volume of the room back to a gentle murmur. Several people still stare, but I force myself to ignore them as Ryker leads me towards a table populated by a few guys that I recognize from the GODs parties—including none other than Freddie, who flashes me a wink and a two-finger salute.
“Need an order put in, boss?” one of them asks. He’s slim but powerfully built, clad in a black vest with no undershirt that shows off the smooth olive skin of his long arms.
“Get me some of that brisket. Lia, tell TJ what you want.”
The man in the vest, TJ, shifts his angular, smoky eyes in my direction. Not saying anything, just waiting.
Naturally, my mind goes completely blank.
“Brisket sounds good.” I manage to keep my voice from squeaking. Barely.
TJ nods and swings to his feet. “Back in a jiff.”
Ryker sinks into one of the vacant chairs. His effect is immediate—even though the table is round, he’s somehow seated at its head. There’s almost a gravitational bend around him, drawing everyone’s attention despite his understated demeanor.
I make a move towards the chair beside him, but his grip on my wrist stills me.
“Here,” he says, gesturing towards his lap with his free hand.
Seriously? I don’t know how I feel about this version of Ryker, so blunt and austere and commanding. I miss the almost-smile under the budding rain.
But the whole table is waiting, and most of the cafeteria is watching, even if they pretend otherwise. So I obey, perching carefully on his left thigh, pretending not to be far too aware of my proximity to his crotch.
“She’s a lovely one,” one of the other GODs chuckles.
Ryker’s fingers parse my hair, flooding my body with chills. “Of course she is. You know I don’t settle for less.”
“Not just a pretty face, either,” Freddie chimes in. “There are some morbid thoughts behind those innocent eyes. She accused me of murder earlier.”
I scowl at him, but he just grins back.
Ryker stiffens beneath me. “You two were together?”
“I ran into her high-tailing it out of a class. At least, I assume that’s where you were coming from.” He raises his eyebrows. “Maybe you were fleeing the scene of a crime.”
“Yeah, well,” I mutter. “Calling Marko’s lit class a crime isn’t much of a stretch.”
That ignites a chorus of appreciative laughter, at least—from everyone but Ryker.
“If he’s bothering you,” he murmurs in my ear, “you just tell me so, and I’ll take care of it.”
I shake my head. I don’t want to answer aloud, nor do I want to make a scene by whispering back to him. Judging by the tension that still permeates his body, he’s not satisfied with my silent response—but I’m saved moments later by TJ returning, balancing two plates heaping with fragrant smoked barbecue.
“Anything else, chief?” he asks, setting them in front of us.
“Lia?” Ryker prompts.
“No, I’m good…” I reply, sliding off his knee and taking a spot in the open seat next to Ryker. “Thank you.”
TJ looks a bit surprised, as though he’s not used to hearing those words—and, I suppose, he probably isn’t. “Hey, no problem, lady.”
“You don’t need to thank him,” Ryker mutters as he gathers a forkful of food.
“Sure, I don’t need to, but I don’t want to be a jerk,” I counter, scooping up a bite of my own.
“It’s not about being a jerk, it’s about knowing your place. Knowing your power.”
I don’t want power, though. And I’m not all that convinced that he does, either. Just because he’s comfortable acting like this doesn’t mean it makes him happy.
I won’t dare say that aloud, though. Especially not in public. That would for sure make me stand out when all I desire is to fit in. Instead, I eat in silence, head down. It’s good, saucy and flavorful, but my appetite seems to have dissipated beneath the dozens of pairs of eyes that burned into me when I entered the student union. The sooner I can be alone with Ryker again, the better.
“So,” TJ says, “are we gonna be seeing more of you, or what? With the last girl?—”
He breaks off abruptly. From the expression on his face, I imagine a glare from Ryker is what silenced him. That’s a relief. Unless there was someone else in between, the ‘last girl’ in question must be Marissa, and if there’s one topic sure to dampen my appetite even more, it’s her.
Freddie takes that moment to intervene. “Maybe so, maybe not. But I bet she’s gonna be steering extra clear of the house if nosy fuckers like you keep interrogating her.”
“I’m not interrogating. Just… curious.”
“Indulge that curiosity much further, and Ryker’ll have your sorry ass,” Freddie says—from the sound of his voice, that’s something he wouldn’t mind seeing.
“I’m… whatever.” TJ frowns and looks away.
Ryker didn’t have to so much as lift a finger to subdue him. That must feel insane, to have so much control over people that they bend under the weight of a single pointed glance. So much command, but so much responsibility, too.
The rest of the GODs leave me alone after that. I push the food around on my plate a bit, but any trace of hunger has left me entirely. I’m keenly aware of the table full of OPs nearby us—Marissa hasn’t stopped glaring. Harper’s nowhere to be seen, but Faith and Vaya flash me friendly waves when they catch me looking in their direction, at least. They seem sweet, though I doubt I’ll get to know them well now that I’ve lost my chance with the OPs. Thanks to none other than Marissa.
I’ve never really hated anyone, but she might just be vile enough to change that.
After a few minutes, Ryker seems to notice, and his lips brush my ear again.
“Want to get out of here?”
“Please.”
“Come on, then—let’s go,” he replies, standing.
Whispers and giggles follow us every step of the way out of the student union.
I’m starting to think that I’m in way over my head.
But moments later, the cool kiss of evening air eases the anxiety burning under my skin. It’s better out here—the last of the sun has faded, immersing the campus in a lavender twilight, and the only sounds are the twittering of nightingales and the distant, constant rasp of the waves against the cliffside.
“I know they can be a lot,” Ryker says as we ascend the stairs to the quad.
“What do you mean?”
“The other guys. They’re no better than a pack of fucking wolves sometimes. Girls are just sex toys to them. Nothing else.”
“And to you?”
He doesn’t reply. I didn’t expect him to. I sneak a glance out of the corner of my eye, hoping that his expression might betray something, but he’s still as stony-faced as he was back in the student union.
“It must feel overwhelming, being in charge of them.”
“It is what it is. I’m used to it.”
“How did you end up as the head of the house, anyway?”
We’ve reached the grass now, and we settle into a matching stride as we make for the castle, his steps shorter than usual to keep pace with mine.
“Nepotism, mostly. Not a very interesting story.”
“Your parents went here?”
“Yeah. Double legacy.” He sounds vaguely revolted by the fact. “I’d just as soon change my damn name and pretend to be a nobody, but…”
“But?” I prompt.
He gives his head a sharp shake, teeth clenching. “Not an option. Not for me.”
“I mean…” I shouldn’t be pushing the point, but I can’t seem to resist it. “We always have options, right? Even a year ago, I never would have imagined that I’d be able to come here. Or that I’d be able to go to any school. As far as I knew, I’d spend the rest of my day stuck at home until?—”
Too much, too fast. I shake my head and take a quick breath, giving myself an internal slap on the cheek.
Ryker shoots me a strange look, unreadable as he all too often is behind those blue-ember eyes. We’re walking close by one another, shoulders brushing with every few strides, and I find myself caught up in the minuscule details of his face—a small scar on his lower lip, his uneven stubble, the faintest of premature worry lines gathered at the corners of his heavy-lashed eyes.
“Until what?”
“Until nothing, I guess. That’s the problem. Only thing that was gonna break me out of that would have been… dying, I guess. Straight from a cage to a casket—if that were to happen, I may as well never have existed at all.”
We’ve reached the front of the castle steps now, and he leans against one of the weathered balustrades, head tilted slightly to the side as he contemplates me. Wind ruffles his short-cropped hair, casting a tangle of shadows over his forehead.
“But instead you came here,” he murmurs. “To an isolated island, surrounded by shallow wannabe-socialites who were born into golden cradles. That’s freedom to you?”
“Compared to what I had before? Without a doubt.”
“Hm.”
I find myself moving closer to him, seeking the draw of his heat within the evening chill. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I could swear the rise and fall of his broad chest picks up pace as I approach.
Our kisses before were secretive, shrouded in the dark—but now, out in the open, what is there to stop me? The whole campus knows that there’s something between us, and if I have to endure the humiliation of the stares and the gossip, I may as well get to reap the benefits—namely, being able to lean into him now without fear of being seen, to?—
“I want to show you something.”
His words stop me short before my body can make contact with his.
“In the woods again?”
He makes a small noise in his throat, something that could be a scoff as easily as a laugh. “Not in the woods. Not this time. In the castle.”
“Don’t they lock the doors after classes?”
“Exactly. Only time you can get a little privacy.” He lifts himself from the pillar and starts around the side of the castle, looking over his shoulder a couple of times to make sure I’m following.
Okay, so I’m a little intrigued. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this—well, fine, I definitely shouldn’t be doing this; I can’t afford to get into any trouble, and I’m about ninety-nine percent sure that whatever Ryker’s got in mind is very much against the school rules. If I’m caught, it could mean a call home to my father, and I pretty seriously doubt that he’d be up for giving me any second chances.
Then again, sneaking away in the nighttime to attend a secret society meeting is also against the rules, I imagine. So it’s not like I’m breaking any new ground here.
“What do you know about the history of this place?” he asks as we loop towards the back of the castle. His voice is light, careless—a world away from minutes ago, when he was asking me about choices, about freedom.
“Not much. I heard a little from Harper—she’s my friend?—”
“I know who she is.”
He does? I know for a fact that I never introduced her, and I don’t remember telling her about him—maybe he’s just saying that so that I’ll skip to the point. “Well, she told me during our first day here that there was a guy who ran this whole place back in the day, Count something…”
“Verdo.” He pronounces the name with a mocking lilt. “Verdo the Vile.”
“Is that what they called him?”
“Among other things. Verdo the Villain, the Venomous, the Vulgar, the Vindictive… take your pick.”
“Verdo the Vampire?” I offer.
“If you want to be on the nose about it, sure.”
I think I hear a smile in his voice, but I can’t be sure—by the time I look up, it’s gone.
“Whatever you want to call him, he was a nasty motherfucker. You know why they named it the Crimson Sea?”
Ew. “I’m gonna go ahead and guess it’s got something to do with blood?”
“Yeah. He’d exsanguinate people who displeased him. That means?—”
“—That he bled them to death,” I say automatically. “Wounded them non-fatally, so that the blood loss is what eventually kills them over several hours. Or days.”
He pauses and turns to stare at me, frowning. “Right. Exactly right.”
“I, um—I read a lot of books. Vampire books. Vampire… romance.” Those are a thing, right? I think Harper mentioned something along those lines.
“Gotta be one hell of a romance, if exsanguination is a prominent theme.”
“Oh—Yeah… I totally like stuff on the darker side.”
I know I sound like an idiot, but that actually seems to amuse him—his lips twitch infinitesimally and he starts walking again, his strides long and easy. “In that case, you’ll love Count Verdo’s story. He was richer than God, and took advantage of the needy townspeople however he could. Drowned them in debt, then demanded their children to be his indentured servants as compensation. If anyone tried to lift a finger against him…”
“Exsanguination?” I suggest.
“Exactly. Who knows how many men and women he bled out into the sea? Kept up his reign of terror until the day he died, slaughtered in his home by servants and townspeople who’d decided they’d seen enough.”
“Wherever you’re taking me, you’re giving it a pretty ominous buildup.”
He raises his eyebrows in my direction. “I thought you liked it darker?”
“I never said that being ominous was a bad thing.”
“Good. Because we’re just getting started.”
Ryker comes to a halt at one of the castle’s backmost towers, near-identical to the one where our philosophy class is held. He shoulders open the heavy wooden door like it weighs nothing, then gestures for me to go in ahead of him.
“Should I be afraid?” I ask, half-teasing.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.” The answer comes easily—too easily, maybe. I know I need to keep my wits about me. But the playful glint in Ryker’s eyes only excites me.
“Well, perhaps you ought to trust your instincts.”
I don’t reply, just raise my eyebrows as I step past him into the tower. A spiral staircase clings to the flagstone walls, illuminated only by a slant of light from the adjacent castle hallway. It smells different here than it does in the main building—damp, almost mossy. I’m definitely not getting the impression that students come here often. I crane my neck, peering upward to where the steps creep away into darkness, lending the eerie impression of infinity.
Ryker shuts the door with an echoing thud.
“Wrong way, dove. We’re going down, not up.”
I turn to find him crouching on the ground, busying himself with the lock of a battered trap door.
“The basement?” I guess.
He shakes his head. “Basement’s just for classes. Like your Lit course.”
Did Freddie tell him that, or does he just have my class schedule memorized? Either way, I can’t decide if I’m more flattered or unnerved—and I don’t get the chance to ask before he’s hauling the door open, revealing another, narrower set of stairs, these ones built of rust-spotted iron.
“Beneath the basement,” Ryker continues, “is the Crypt.”
I blink, jaw dropping slightly. “You did not just say that.”
“I’m pretty sure I did.”
“You’re taking me to a crypt?”
He smirks at that. “Consider this the VIP tour.”
Just how much does he know about this school, really? First the cliffside woods, now this… I can’t shake the creeping suspicion that he might be more deeply embroiled in the darker side of Crimson Elite than I first expected. Based on what I heard about the GODs, I’ve suspected that he’s probably involved with the Order… but maybe there’s more to it than that.
He fascinates me. Once again, I’m aware that I should be rightfully freaked out—but I’m not. As a matter of fact, I’m blazing with curiosity. A real castle crypt—one with ties to the school’s history, judging by Ryker’s earlier words. There’s something intimately forbidden about it all, something that makes my heart skip and my blood tingle in my veins.
“Just promise me there aren’t hordes of rabid rats waiting down there.”
“I promise.”
I lower a foot onto the first step. The stairs feel solid despite their rust stains—that’s good, at least. I descend a couple more of them before Ryker clears his throat behind me.
“You might want a little light.”
“I don’t have a flashlight.”
“You have your phone?”
I peer back over my shoulder, expecting to see that smirk again, but his face has returned to its usual guarded expression. “Are you serious? Do they—I mean, I’ve never had one before college, so I never?—”
He pulls out his own phone and flicks something on the screen, startling me with a beam of bright white light.
Wow. “Phones can do that?”
“Phones can do a lot of things.” I think I hear a smile in his voice now, though I can’t make out his face past the glare of the light. “Here—take mine. I’ll be right behind you.”
I accept it and hold it at arm’s length. The staircase is a long one—two stories’ worth of steps, maybe, which would place the Crypt right below the basement.
“It’s like this place goes on forever.”
“You have no idea.”
Does he mean that there’s more? Pulse fluttering with anticipation, I make my way carefully down the steps and through the stone arch that waits at their base.
A cold swoop of air tells me that I’ve just entered a much larger room. The phone’s flashlight doesn’t reveal much—a stone floor below me, a brick wall to the left…
Then the beam catches on a coffin, and my heart leaps into my throat.
No—no, that’s not a coffin. Sure looks like one, though. It’s a metal box big enough to fit a grown man, and its insides… am I seeing this right? Its insides are lined with spikes.
“That’s an iron maiden,” I breathe.
Ryker chuckles softly, sounding almost impressed. “You know your torture devices.”
“Yeah… from books,” I add hastily. This thing must be well over a hundred years old, but those spikes look as sharp as new. A strange compulsion ripples through me, an urge to reach out and touch one of them. “Verdo used this?”
“Chances are that he used some of this stuff—not all of it, though.”
All of it?
I shift the phone towards the center of the room.
My breath catches.
This place—a room as wide as a gymnasium—is full of glass cases, glistening beneath a heavy layer of dust. Inside of them, perched on velvet cushions, are countless artifacts—weapons, mostly; ornate daggers and axes—but also vases, books, glassware… all of it undoubtedly older than any living being.
“We call it the Crypt,” Ryker explains, “but it’s more of a museum.”
“It’s amazing.”
“Yeah. Freddie and I found this place freshman year, fucking around in places where we shouldn’t be. As far as we know, nobody else has been down here in decades—and he lost interest after the first couple of times. Didn’t understand why I kept coming back. So the only real visitor this place has had in God knows how long is me. And you, now.”
“Who put all of this together?” I walk slowly towards the nearest display case. A curved knife with a pearl hilt sits inside, glinting beneath the harsh light of Ryker’s phone.
“There was a museum here—way back before the school was established, preserving Verdo’s history. Didn’t end up drawing much of a crowd, mostly because people thought it was haunted—these were his actual torture chambers before. So they closed the main entrance, locked it up, and that was that.”
“And nobody knows about it?”
“Administration knows, sure—they just don’t care.”
I lose myself over the next few minutes, traipsing through the aisles of cases, taking it all in. Ryker follows me, close enough that I can feel his heat, anchoring me amid the dusty chill of so many bygone eras. Larger pieces like the iron maiden are stationed against the walls, including a massive painting that depicts the castle itself in shades of murky gray and deep red, looming tall and ominous beneath a stormy sky.
I pause in front of it and turn to face Ryker, who watches me with quiet curiosity. “You said no one else has been here.”
He nods.
“Why me, then?”
He takes his time, frowning slightly as he figures out the right words.
“Because I can see something in you. I don’t know quite what it is, but… you remind me of myself. Freddie’s into all this shit because he’s a bloodthirsty lunatic. But I think… to me, there’s a different sort of… allure… to it all.”
“Dark,” I suggest, “but magnetic.”
Just like him.
“Magnetic,” he repeats slowly, drawing the word out, seeming to taste its syllables. “I like that.”
A quick shiver runs down my spine. As lost as I’ve been in the midst of the artifacts, I haven’t stopped to process the fact that we’re alone down here—very alone. This isn’t like the nightclub or the diner or even the forest. Nobody’s going to follow us down those stairs. This strange, eerie, beautiful place is entirely our own.
“I can see why you like it here so much,” I murmur. “Thank you for showing me. I…”
I feel like I know him better now. Like I’m that much closer to finally reaching the side of him I sensed that first night at the party, that blue flame that struck me to my core. Both familiar and indescribably mysterious.
The phone light wavers across his face, and I realize that my hands are shaking.
He clasps my wrists to steady them. Maybe it’s just the shadows, but I think I see something shift in his face when his skin meets mine, a narrowing of his eyes or a tightening of his jaw. My whole body flares in response, leaning into him of its own accord.
Dark, but magnetic.
“Come back to my room,” he rasps. “Right now.”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice.