4. Addie
ADDIE
PARAMORE – FAST IN MY CAR
“Well, that was intense,” Fleur muttered in her lilting French accent as we dashed across the pristine, manicured lawn towards the dark, Gothic-style architecture that was Blackwing Academy—and away from the lingering stench of testosterone.
Its limestone walls were the colour of old bones—timeworn, but still sharp as a knife.
“He’s one of Beckett’s merry men. Of course he’s intense,” I huffed back, eyeing the ancient building with a mixture of wariness and dread.
It was beautiful from a distance with its grandiose design, but you could never be sure how many sets of eyes were trained on you at any given point.
Every window housed an opportunity for surveillance.
Every darkened alcove and every sombre shrub could be watching.
Even the trees on the mountain peaks kept no secrets.
Everything had eyes. Blackwing was always watching.
The instructors knew everything—or had ways to find out. So, it was only a matter of time before Instructor Pearce—and therefore, Instructors Beckett, Lockwood, and probably Commander Varco—learned all about my altercation with Sebastos along the zipline.
And probably only a matter of time until I was inevitably punished for it.
It wasn’t until we got closer—until the tall, stone building pressed down upon us—that a shiver skated down my spine and I finally realised how its elegance was really just a veneer stretched over something darker and colder.
Something inherently more dangerous.
Blackwing Academy was the kind of beautiful that made your stomach drop, not the kind that gave you the warm fuzzies.
And as if the storm that plagued us for the majority of our assessment heard my disparaging mental description of Assassin Academy, as it was more commonly called, the clouds thundered and the skies opened, drenching us anew.
Fleur and I hurried up two sets of rain-slickened garden steps and past the grotesque statues of twisted creatures scattered around the base of the buildings.
We halfheartedly tried to beat the next downpour by jogging towards the Academy’s dull stained-glass windows, but only succeeded in skidding into a cohort of first years as we rounded a blind corner.
“Watch where you’re going!” Fleur shouted, scattering them like a flock of pigeons.
“Sorry, Deveaux,” a blank-faced male muttered. I had no intention of committing his features to memory. What was the point when he’d only end up dead—sooner rather than later?
We didn’t speak again until we were back in our dorm room, after dodging a handful of other recruits and staff members—and their keenly trained ears.
The winding hallways and darkened stairwells took much longer to navigate than when we were under threat of punishment from Beckett this morning.
And not the good kind of punishment; the kind where we’d have had to run a marathon as a warm-up or something.
So, by the time Fleur and I reached our cohort’s designated quarters, she was bursting at the seams with questions.
Fleur Deveaux had been my closest friend for a little over a year.
When I first arrived—after being told my life was forfeit if I tried to escape—I hadn’t wanted to get close to any of the other recruits.
They were all dropping like flies, and I was loath to get attached to someone who would just die a day, a week, or a month later.
But Fleur was determined. Apparently, she’d inherited more than a little of her mother’s backbone, and just a touch of her father’s well-placed charisma.
She had grown up in the spotlight, as the daughter of a financial advisor and a French bureaucrat.
Antoine and Nadine were influential in all of society’s inner circles.
And while Antoine told rich people how to spend their money, it was Nadine who ultimately profited.
She was the CEO of some huge biotech company that all of Antoine’s clients invested in, and therefore had her finger in a lot of other political pies—including the running of the Academy, according to Fleur.
Nadine hated that her daughter and I were so close. Me, from my almost-homeless background, with no family to speak of and no monetary worth to my name—and her daughter, the heiress of her own company, currently worth a few billion.
But Fleur was incredibly stubborn when she’d made her mind up about something, and so far, Nadine hadn’t pushed the issue.
Maybe because she knew that Fleur was exactly like her in that regard.
Maybe because she knew that, when push came to shove, I had her daughter’s back.
Despite the fact that my friend was only here because her parents had enrolled her themselves—a foolish endeavour to harden her, to smother her wily ways, not realising she was steel-forged already—Nadine didn’t want her only daughter dead.
And we all knew how easily that could happen at Blackwing.
“So. Do you want to tell me what that was all about, or do you want me to guess?” she prodded, waggling her eyebrows and flicking her golden ponytail over one shoulder, sashaying over to my allocated bunk.
I pursed my lips, not sure if she was referring to Varco or Pearce. Waiting until we reached my cot nestled in the far corner of the room, I decided to answer with the former, mindful of the ears that surrounded us.
The Academy didn’t tend to nurture strong relationships within recruit cohorts.
Their view was that you never knew who was going to wind up dead before Graduation; ours was that you never knew who’d be digging the knife into your back to get there.
Any one of the other five people in this room could rat me out to Sebastos if they overheard—or worse, carry it straight to Commander Varco for talking shit about his son.
I scowled. “Seb and his goons were going to throw me off Widow’s Drop.”
Fleur gasped softly, whipping her horror-filled gaze my way.
“I evaded them across the zipline, but dropped my gloves in a scuffle beforehand.” I grimaced, holding out my mangled palms for her keen blue eyes to inspect.
“Ouch,” she said with a wince, pulling a hand closer to her face. “These might need stitches.”
I shook my head firmly. “No stitches. I still need to be able to use them. Glue will do.”
Fleur’s lips flattened as though she disagreed but knew better than to argue. She also knew that I’d just do it myself while her back was turned if she didn’t run with it.
“Very well, then. And what about this shoulder?” One perfect blonde brow rose in question.
“Seb again. Dagger, while I was traversing the line,” I snarled. My fingers twitched, itching to stab him again, but my palm wounds flared, tempering the urge.
Fleur, contrarily, seethed, leaping to her feet. Her fists clenched by her sides, notably un-mangled. Her face darkened in barely restrained fury, and I was struck once more by the juxtaposition of such a girl in such a place.
She was runway-ready. She had a face—and a name—that could see her pasted across the front page of every tabloid just for attending a certain party, or because she was dating this year’s hottest actor.
Instead, she was here. Dropped unceremoniously into a literal den of assassins. She had been pitted against the sneakiest, deadliest people the Academy had kept tabs on for god knows how long—and she was rivalling all of them.
She flourished in this darkness like a moonflower vine—a flower that bloomed because of the night, not in spite of it.
“Wait until I see that waste of space, fils de pute—”
“Woah-kay, you adorably overprotective, multilingual goddess.” I laughed, grabbing her arms to yank her back down, ignoring the sting in my hands as she acquiesced.
The other recruits were staring, captivated by Fleur’s outburst.
“I got him back,” I explained, gesturing vaguely to my thigh. “And he’s got more coming to him, don’t you worry about that.”
She exhaled forcefully, flicking the loose, damp strands of hair around her face outwards, then plonked back down onto the thin mattress.
“Sorry,” she spat. “I just… after what he did today, and what he’s already done to all three of us…”
“I know,” I agreed, my mind flicking back to the moment Fleur, Ethan, and I decided we were in this together, till death do us part.
My lips twitched at the memory of that awkward three-way handshake, after one high-stakes assessment wherein Seb, Eric, and Bodie decided to be extra-malevolent bastards and throw the evaluation altogether for the sake of murder.
Ethan had been paired with Bodie, I got Eric, and Fleur drew the short straw and got stuck with Seb.
After the hellspawn trio went rogue and started taking out other recruits in the fake-compound-takeover, Fleur and Ethan bolted, coincidentally hiding in the same tiny crawl space, wedged in together like a pair of sardines.
Eric had turned his pistol on me, but I got away by a well-timed punch to the dick.
Fleur ended up leaping in front of a knife meant for Ethan, copping it in her left ass cheek, after which he immediately fell in love with our resident French model and her ass.
And then I came racing in like a comic book heroine, saving both their asses—well, I guess technically not Fleur’s—shooting Bodie’s pistol hand before he could take either of them out of the assessment permanently.
The rest was history. It worked because each of us owed our lives to the others, and had enough dirt on the other two to fill a grave—ironically.
“Alright.” Fleur straightened, yanking me out of the memory and back into the painful reality of my ruined body.
“Grab some clean clothes and meet me in the bathroom upstairs. I’ll get the first aid kit, and maybe some alcohol if I can find any.
” She shot me a wink, then set off to raid the supply cupboard—and probably a few of the other recruits’ trunks, or the desk drawers of an Instructor or two.