Chapter 27
GALINA
You know the saying… If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
Or in this case, it’s more like “if at first someone doses your entire party with ecstasy and makes everyone super fucked up to the point where the college is looking into it…throw another party a week later because why not.”
Because here we are, exactly a week after the infamous “spiked absinthe” night at The Spire that resulted in a hundred dosed guests, three of whom went to the ER, and The Reckless are throwing another party.
This one is being thrown at The Garrison, Knightsblood’s unofficial student-run bar and social club built into the ruins of Fort Hawthorne, which at one point stood watch over the Long Island Sound during the Revolutionary War in case the British decided to invade Connecticut.
…Which they did, which is why Fort Hawthorne is now just stone ruins overgrown by the surrounding forest.
It makes for a really fun place to party on campus, though.
“Galina!”
I grin when I whip my head around and see Bella waving at me from across the open space ringed by crumbling old stone walls.
“Willing to give us another shot, huh?”
I snort, holding up the can of hard seltzer in my hand. “Yeah…hope no one minds that I brought my own this time?”
Bella snickers. “Honestly, I’m surprised everyone didn’t bring their own tonight after the last party.
Especially since we’ve got the usual suspects here again,” she says dryly, arching a brow as she looks past me.
I follow her gaze and see Kirill Tsarenko, Adrik’s number two, sitting at the bar set up on the far side of the ruins, trying to chat up a clearly disinterested Yelena and Wren.
“The other two are around somewhere,” Bella grumbles, rolling her eyes.
She’s already filled me in on some of the “drama” at the first party. So I know that by “the other two”, Bella means Jude Nikolayev and Selene Drakos.
No one is clear on the details, but Jude and Kirill got into a huge fight in the middle of the party last weekend, which appeared to be over the absinthe having ecstasy added to it.
Jude has denied any involvement. But, then again, Jude is also “Machiavellian tendencies” personified, and there’s clearly some rivalry between him and Kirill that goes beyond The Order vs The Reckless.
That’s where the general campus rumor mill stops. But Bella has a very spicy theory that the whole thing involves her, Lochlan, and Achilles’ other cousin Selene in some love-triangle with Kirill and Jude.
It sounds too complicated to exist outside of BookTok to me, but who knows.
“Where’s your usual crew?”
“Oh, they’re around.” I take a sip of my drink and scan the party.
I clock Lucia laughing with her new friends Aaron and his boyfriend Chris.
Yelena and Wren are still over at the bar trying to ignore Kirill and his pick-up attempts.
I mean, the guy is objectively hot. But he also is known to fuck anything with a pulse, sooo…
Weirdly, Arianna has gravitated to the far corner of The Garrison, where a makeshift boxing ring has been set up. Two tattooed guys I don’t recognize are beating the living shit out of each as my friend watches with rapt attention.
Since when does Ari like sports at all?
I point out my friends to Bella. “You know…” I shrug. “You should hang out with us all sometime.”
She makes a face. “Eh. Thanks, but…” she shrugs and looks away.
“Bella.” I grin as I prod her shoulder. “You said yourself you don’t have many female friends.”
She frowns. “True. The Reckless is a bit of a sausage-fest,” she grumbles. “But I dunno…” She frowns and kicks at a tree root poking through the crumbling stone floor. “Like, they’re your friends, right?”
I sigh. “Seriously, they’d love you.”
“Then I will consider it.” She grins, a rare blush on her face as she lifts a shoulder, then nods toward the fight ring. “Wanna go watch boys beat the shit out of each other?”
“Um, yes?” I laugh as we both head over in that direction.
Bella glances at me as we pass the huge bonfire roaring in the middle of the ruins, sending sparks and smoke curling up to the stars as shadowy trees loom over the jagged remnants of the old fort. “I feel I haven’t seen you all week. And when I have, you’ve been…”
I groan. “I know, I know.”
Bella pretty much only sees me during our Psychology of Deception and Performance class.
I spend the time staring at Lochlan, trying to decide if that jawline is the one I touched and kissed.
If those hands are the ones that pin me down and spank me before he fucks my ass and plays with my clit until I lose control.
If that mouth is the one that I’ve never kissed, but which devours my pussy until I can’t stand.
When I’m not in Lochlan’s presence, I’m either thinking about him or The Ghost Prince, or else I’m actually with Ghost, having so many orgasms that I’m starting to worry about my hydration and electrolyte levels.
“I’ve just been...” I frown. “Distracted, I guess.”
“Anything you wanna talk about?” She grins. “That’s what friends do, right?”
I snicker. “See? You’re getting the hang of it.” I sigh. “Thanks, but… It’s complicated. And boring.”
Such a lie. Nothing about what’s been going on with The Ghost Prince is boring. Nor is there anything boring about figuring out if my TA is also the mystery man who finds me in the dark and shatters me into millions of pieces.
“It’s not my cousin, is it?”
My eyes rip around to stare at her.
“W-what?” I stammer.
She frowns. “I mean, it’s not Lochlan being a douchebag, is it? It’s already complete bullshit that he made you partner up with him in class.”
I let out a shuddery sigh of relief.
His “Hidden Identities” project in our Psychology of Deception and Performance class, where we pair up and “peel back the layers through targeted questioning” to read our opposite number's Shadow vs. Persona, is still a thing.
…With the same partner.
Which means I’m still spending one class a week face-to-face with Lochlan, trying to keep a neutral expression while he asks me about my “dark secrets”.
I shrug as casually as I can. “No, your cousin is fine.”
Even though I think he's a masked content creator with a laundry list of kinks that match my own.
I know it’s insane, just like I know no one would believe me if I said it out loud. Even I don’t believe it half the time.
Lochlan Kildare is, on the surface, a locker-room high five personified. A smug, cocky golden boy with a trust fund smile and a gaggle of girls mooning over him.
He is not supposed to be a masked man who shatters me to pieces.
For weeks, I’ve told myself I was wrong. That my brain had just decided to slap Lochlan’s face onto the fantasy because he’s the one sitting in front of me twice a week, asking me inappropriate questions about my “Shadow self”.
But I’ve started to notice small things that have been starting to make me wonder if Lochlan really is that frat boy jock he wants the whole world to view him as.
For one, I kind of assumed he’d gone out of his way that first day he was teaching our class to sound professional.
Like he’d memorized some lines from a book to sound more authoritative and “professorial”.
But any time I’ve tried to throw him off by asking him really difficult questions about the subject matter, he stays in that ultra-knowledgeable mindset.
So much for my theory of him being Professor McGrath’s TA due to his charm and campus celebrity status.
Lochlan Kildare is really, really smart.
I would know. Because now, I’ve checked his transcript.
I ended up bribing Abby Caruso, a fellow romance book nerd who works at the registrar’s office, to walk away from her desk for ten minutes. All it took was my limited hardcover edition of The Billionaire’s One Obsession, complete with sprayed edges, gold leaf cover, and NSFW character art.
…But I used that ten-minute window to look up and print out Lochlan’s academic transcript during his time here at Knightsblood.
Holy. Fuck.
I knew he did well in school. I just assumed it was the Kildare name or his notoriety on the football field greasing the wheels. But I was not expecting second in his class.
It gets better.
He’s only second in his class, Achilles Drakos being first, because of four quizzes: one at the very start of each academic year.
The rest of the time, Lochlan gets straight, unblemished As. But every year, he completely bombs that first quiz.
I don’t think it’s by accident. I think he does it on purpose to make sure his cousin is first in their class, ahead of him.
At first, I hated how much learning that made me want him to be Ghost.
But that shifted when he spent the night in my bed last weekend. That sounds pathetic on the surface, but it’s not the fact that he stayed. It’s that he did it just because wasted me asked him to.
When I woke up in his arms that morning, I knew he hadn’t tried anything while I was asleep, even though I was naked and super fucked up on drugs.
I also knew when I woke up that morning that I really, really wanted Ghost to be Lochlan. When I envisioned slipping that mask off when I thought he was still sleeping, that's the face I imagined underneath it.
Lochlan’s.
I didn’t have to make myself go there in my head. It was literally his face that I pictured in the fantasy.
And it hasn’t gone away since then.
So now, I’ve gotten sneakier.
I bought one of those Smart-Tag trackers, thinking that I’d hide it in his clothes or stick it to the bottom of his shoe the next time we played, to sleuth out who he really was once and for all.
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
That’s all he said the other night, when I was walking away unsteadily from a rendezvous in the shadows outside Pembroke Hall.
Ghost had had me bent over at the waist, my palms against the old, weathered stone, my skirt flipped up and my panties stretched around my knees, his tongue buried in my ass and one of my mid-sized toys plunging in and out of my pussy.