Sick Like Me (Blackgrave Academy #1)

1. Caelus

Caelus

B lackgrave Academy is best at night.

Rigid and imposing, the castle stands in the centre of misty moorlands, directly between two dense forests on either side, each one of them belonging to opposing, old money families.

The huge, stone structure is formidable. Every column and pillar wrapped in vines. Twin gargoyle statues guarding the gates from high above, their aged, grey eyes tracking every person that enters through the wrought-iron entrance.

Moonlight beams down onto the grounds as I start to make my way out of the rear entrance. Fog cools my overheated skin as it curls around my ankles, the damp air pricking goosebumps along my forearms, rippling up to my exposed biceps.

I’m not going to have a lot of time to deal with this. I’ve just finished teaching my ten-pm class, and now I’m trudging my way into the woods, wearing ballet tights, trainers and a fucking stringer vest, to deal with a problem for my father.

Branches slap at my bare arms as I manoeuvre my way through Carnell Wood.

Sweat sticks the flimsy, thin cotton of my vest top to my back, the early summer wind cooling my hot, damp skin as I inhale the thick scent of fir trees carried on the breeze.

Rustling leaves and snapping twigs are the only sounds I detect atop my hard breaths and the pound of my heart buzzing in my ears.

That’s why it’s such a surprise to find her here.

There are many cabins and crumbling old cottages out here in these woods, but something there absolutely should not be on my family’s land, is a Stone.

Moonlight catches her familiar white-blonde hair as it breaks through the canopy of Oaks and Birch, turning it a silvery grey. Her skin is much the same, making her appear sallow and ghoul-like, carving her side profile up like a haunting skeleton mask.

I study her movements as she approaches the man, whispering words I am unable to hear from this distance. The man says nothing, but that’s enough to capture my attention.

Wesley Clarke.

At twenty-five years old, he’s a failed-professional footballer with a giant chip on his shoulder because he made his daddy bank when he took over a big chunk of west London by spilling copious amounts of what he calls ‘designer heroin’ onto the streets.

It doesn’t impress me, but the way in which she moves does.

Elegantly pressing up onto her dainty toes, her feet arching into a slender curl, her calf muscles tensing, knees straightening, all of it prominent to me even beneath the thick material of her black leggings.

Her thighs tighten, and even without using her hands, she is perfectly balanced, her core muscles keeping her still and upright.

It takes some dancers years to perfect that, but without any practice at all, she holds it.

Her long, thin fingers come to the front of Wesley’s shoulders, the tips just barely pressing against them, but he’s enthralled by her in the same way as I.

His eyes are on the stretched length of her slender body.

She’s five-ten to his six-one, so she’s not far away from her target with those toxic lips.

His eyes are already shuttering, lids only half open as she leans in, allowing his hands to land on her hips, but I catch the small tremor that runs through her as they do.

It makes my teeth grind.

Especially when her mouth finally brushes his.

Immediately, he tries to deepen the chaste kiss, his lips parting, fingers tightening on the flare of her hips, but she doesn’t allow it, settling back on her heels.

She blinks up at him in the way she always does, this innocent little flutter of lashes, a blank look, something I am all too intimately familiar with.

That’s how they stay for too many minutes.

Locked in an embrace, him holding her, her hands resting delicately against the front of his shoulders, his back to a tree.

He speaks lowly, a murmuring, their lips too close, sharing breath, and she listens, keeping a small distance, enough not to touch, but never replies.

Finally, when my short nails cut into my palms, blood filling the underside of my nails where I fist my hands so tightly, she steps back, breaking his hold on her as he coughs. A dry sort of throat clearing, just the once.

“Ostara,” he splutters quickly, shooting heat through my veins like strikes of lightning at hearing him call her name like that. “What the fuck did you do?” he asks immediately, his voice low, a disbelieving whisper.

Knowing, I’m sure, as well as everyone else on this campus, that Ostara Stone has a dark little secret, and he just found out exactly what it is.

Poison.

Only, he won’t ever be able to share it with anyone now. So, her secret will stay just that, and he will die, realising in his final moments, just how stupid he was to underestimate her. In the same way that everyone else always does.

“You’re sick, Ostara!” he shouts, shoving at her small frame with his much larger one. “Fucking sick!”

To her credit, she doesn’t let it affect her, she doesn’t fall or twist or stumble, she simply glides back, her white, high tops smoothing through the dewy foliage, so she’s a few safe feet away.

“Bye bye, Wesley,” she says then, this lyrical little whisper that she completes with a head tilt.

The idiot drops to his knees, his hand to his throat as he gasps for air.

And Ostara, she stands there, just out of his reach, wiping the white cuff of her sweatshirt across her pretty, red-stained mouth.

It smears across her cheek before she cleans it off completely.

And then, still staring at the man, white foam starting to fizz from his mouth, blood seeping from his bulging eyes, a sharp, gurgling, hiss escaping his chest. She lifts the small vial attached to a long silver chain, concealed beneath the neckline of her oversized sweatshirt to her lips and swallows its contents.

Slowly, re-tucking the chain beneath her clothing once more, she turns her head towards me, her sapphire blue eyes darkening as the moon’s beams disappear behind a cloud, leaving us in shadow, and Wesley’s head thuds against the ground.

“Caelus,” she greets politely, like we’re old friends.

We’re not, despite the way we keep meeting in the dark, pulled towards one another like lost spirits finding the light.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I rumble, my voice a deep, low warning, that doesn’t have the desired effect.

“Why not?” she asks whimsically, her body still angled away from me, hands relaxed by her sides, head canted, that siren blue gaze on me from the corner of her eye.

“Because this is Carnell land, Miss Stone,” I tell her more sharply.

Irritation flaring beneath the sudden tightness of my skin, that’s how it always is around her, a hatred carved so deep into my bones that it’s settled in my marrow. She smiles then, tipping her head further right, angling herself so she can look at me more fully, her chin brushing her shoulder.

“That could be argued, though,” she replies softly, “couldn’t it, Master Carnell?” she mocks with a tinkling laugh that hits me right in the balls.

Anger thrums just beneath the surface of my light skin, skin that suddenly feels like it’s not quite my own whilst I’m in the presence of this girl.

This twenty year old fucking nightmare with poison laced lips and a blank stare that makes the hair raise on the back of my neck and my heart pound inside my chest like a battering ram trying to crack through my ribcage.

It’s why I stay away from her.

Ostara Stone makes me forget myself.

And that’s just about the most dangerous thing that could ever happen to me.

When I stride towards her, closing the too large, yet too small, distance between us, I’m honing in on her like a predator.

Every instinct screaming at me to kill. My natural born enemy, my grandfather’s once-best friend’s granddaughter, the rival blood to everything I know.

She is as forbidden to me as I am to her.

Which is why we always meet this way.

Nothing ever happens.

But she speaks to me.

And she never communicates with anyone, not anyone she plans to keep alive anyway.

Except for me.

Suddenly, we are a collision.

The way our teeth clash as we come together, her hands claw at my bare shoulders, nails cutting in deep, as my fingers dig into the soft flesh of her arse. She’s light in my arms, tasting sweet and impermissible, and I lap at her mouth like it’s melting ice cream as I heft her up high into my arms.

The wrap of her long legs twining around my waist, the rubber soles of her shoes jabbing into the tops of my glutes, dragging me into her as we fall against a tree.

My cock is hard, weeping at the tip, and her hips are rolling, grinding and crushing her cunt against the ladder of my abs, bunching the very light fabric of my stringer vest up between us.

She hisses as I bite her bottom lip, tasting the bitter remnants of her poison-tinged weapon.

It isn’t something I stop to think about though, the fear of death.

Not with the heat of her pussy rubbing against me, her nails drawing blood down the juts of my shoulder blades.

The scent of her arousal seeps through the stretchy material of her leggings, my nostrils flaring in the cold wind as I bite off our kiss.

Dipping my face down into the hollow of her throat and curling my tongue up the length of her bared neck.

Her head drops back as I suck on the underside of her chin, swirling my tongue around the clamped circle of the inside of my teeth.

She grunts as I bite into her, the hollow space not much more than skin and bone, so I know it hurts.

It doesn’t stop her though, a whimper dropping from her throat, quickly stripped away by the whip of the summer breeze.

Her knees tighten against the ridges of my rib bones, heels digging in harder against my lower spine.

“Cal,” she breathes, her eyes opening as I release my bite on her chin, licking up the length of her jaw.

Those long, skilled fingers claw upwards of the muscles in the top of my back, dragging sharply into my thick mess of dark brown hair, the curves of her nails breaking the skin of my scalp.

“Ozzie,” I bite into her neck, my hazel eyes flicked up on her blues. “Tell me to stop.”

I demand it like I would do it.

Stop.

Even though I wouldn’t.

We are destruction.

The third eldest daughter to the Stones.

The third eldest son to the Carnells.

Neither one of us particularly important.

Enemies and so much more than that.

There are lies and betrayal and backstabbing that runs far deeper than either her or I could even dream.

But this, the wetness seeping through her leggings, sinking into the flimsy cotton of my baggy top, her tongue twisting around mine as our mouths inevitably connect once again, this is not something that’s supposed to happen.

Her teeth nip the tip of my tongue sending a jolt of need straight down into the pit of my stomach. Heat flares across my eyelids as I clench my eyes shut.

“No,” she finally whispers against my tongue, the tinge of copper in the back of my throat. I’m a runaway train off of its track heading straight for the edge of a cliff, “No, Cal,” she whines lowly. “Don’t stop.”

And I don’t.

One of my hands snakes up her spine beneath the heavy fabric of her sweatshirt, stepping back from the tree.

My fingers twist in the band of her bra, drawing it away from the bumps of her spine just enough to let it snap back against her as I let it go, forcing her to flinch closer, pressing her breasts up into my face.

“Get this off,” I grunt, biting at the heavy material before she releases her claws from my scalp and lifts the bundle of white fabric over her head.

I bury my face in the crevice between her tits, lapping the flat of my tongue up the centre of her chest. Swirling the tip over the length of long silver chain hanging around her neck, and then slam her back against the tree.

Air huffs out of her nose at the impact, our mouths coming together once more before one of her hands is back, fisting in my hair and yanking violently on the sweaty, dark strands, tearing my head back.

Adam’s apple bobbing in my throat with a dry swallow, my lips parted, I stare up into her eyes, sapphire blue carved with shadow, her cheekbones high and cupid’s bow stained red.

“You’re going to die tonight, Caelus,” she whispers, thumbing across my plump bottom lip, before sucking the tip into her own mouth with an open eyed stare.

She’s the definition of strange. Unusual in the way she speaks, her stares, the silence, her lonesome persona.

She drifts like a spirit, floating through the academy halls, keeping to herself, attending no more than two classes a week, but she still has one of the most fearsome reputations Blackgrave Academy has ever seen.

It’s part of the attraction I feel. Pulled into her orbit, only to be spun around and knocked eight feet to the left of her. Leaving me with dizziness and a brain fog with the ever present question of how the fuck does she draw me in?

We’re enemies.

I hate her.

She hates me.

And yet, as her bare back scrapes up the rough bark of the tree, my mouth suctioning over her collarbone, teeth driving into the bone, marking her with the intent to scar, I forget all of that.

I forget the why.

I forget who I am.

Ozzie’s legs tight around my waist, her back to the tree, pinned there by my weight, allows me to release my grip on her arse to fist the elastic material at her crotch and rip.

‘You’re going to die tonight, Caelus.’

“But not before I fuck you, you filthy little nightmare.”