17. Addie
ADDIE
PARAMORE – HELLO COLD WORLD
Surprisingly, Commander Varco hadn’t been kidding about the beer. There were two kegs and several boxes of pizza littered across the tables of the mess hall when our team hobbled in shortly after being dismissed.
Injuries were immediately forgotten thanks to the welcoming sight, the smell instigating eighteen months of pizzaless longing in the form of drool. Ethan threw himself at a box of pepperoni like a typical carnivorous boy, while I beelined for that sweet, yellow-topped goodness: Hawaiian.
I moaned—obnoxiously and obscenely—as the pineapple flavour touched my tongue.
Ethan, with sauce-stained lips, snorted. “That good, huh?” He laughed.
I met his gaze with nothing but sweet sincerity. “Better.”
Mercy dropped into the seat directly across from me, bearing two plates loaded with every different flavour of pizza on offer. Dakarai and Ace shuffled in beside her, each carting four styrofoam cups filled with warm but wanted beer.
Dak held one out to me, and I took it graciously—and by graciously, I meant that I snatched it with a grin and downed the whole thing in one smooth effort.
Ace whistled appreciatively, tipping his own back equally as quick, then pulverising the cup in one hand when done. “Never pegged you for a party girl, Sinclair.”
“Who said anything about parties?” I quipped back. “When you grow up like I did, you take what you can and claim it quickly so nobody else has a chance to take it from you.”
Everyone froze except me—still munching happily on a fresh slice.
It wasn’t until Eth cleared his throat and muttered, “Well, shit,” that I even noticed them staring.
“Oh, stop it. It wasn’t all bad,” I said around a mouthful of food. “In fact, I got very good at petty theft.” I shrugged.
“Okayyyy,” Dak drawled, eyes wide. “Well, that just begs the question then, doesn’t it?”
My brow lifted, practically of its own accord. “What question?”
“What have you missed the most—that you’re excited to have access to on the outside?” he asked, dark eyes sparkling with mischief.
“The food,” Ace answered immediately, lifting his fourth slice by way of explanation.
“Call of Duty,” Dak answered his own question longingly—like we hadn’t spent the last eighteen months playing it in full immersion.
“Vibrators,” Mercy said straight-faced, eliciting a series of sniggers from the men who undoubtedly immediately conjured an image of her with one in hand.
“Women,” Eth said slowly, an equally slow smile sliding across his face.
Mercy threw her leftover crust at his head.
“What was that for?” He scowled, though he picked it up off the table and ate it anyway.
Heathen.
“What are we”—she gestured between herself and me—“chopped liver?”
Ethan’s smile twisted in a way that promised trouble. Somehow it was still attractive beneath the layers of blood and bruising covering his skin. “New women. More women. Multiple women.”
Dak and Ace nodded appreciatively.
“Women I haven’t already fucked the daylights out of… unless you’re finally offering, Adelaide?” He turned that megawatt grin on me, dragging his fingertips up my thigh playfully—completely oblivious to the fact that my skin prickled in their wake.
I scowled and shoved him off his chair, the table erupting in laughter.
Once he’d picked himself up, snickering, I looked over and met Dak’s eye.
“Music,” I said quietly. “I miss music.”
Specifically all the new movie scores my fingers would itch to play the second I heard them, and all the new Paramore albums I could drown my nostalgic angst in. I fucking loved that band. Riot! got me through some tough years for a while there.
Dak offered a gentle smile, which quickly turned into a glower when the mess hall doors crashed open somewhere behind me.
“Well, well, well. What do we have here?” a familiar oily voice drawled, sending imaginary spiders skitting up my spine. “I do hope you’ve left some for us, Red Team.”
Sebastos plonked down into an empty seat at the end of our table, kicking his feet up and slamming them down atop the surface. His blood-covered boots crushed a pizza box, but he appeared unmoved.
“And suddenly, I’ve lost my appetite,” I said, rising.
“Oh, don’t be like that, little bird. It was only a bit of fun.”
“Yeah? It’ll be fun when I slit your throat, too. Just like you did to Fleur.”
He jolted forwards to rest on his elbows, feet slamming down on the floor. “I did no such thing.”
Rage enveloped me so severely, I couldn’t even formulate a response. Luckily, I didn’t have to.
Ethan stood up next to me, wrapped an arm around my shoulders, and glared daggers at Sebastos. “Let’s go celebrate elsewhere, team. There’s a stench of something rotten in here.”
Every one of our team except Bodie stood quietly.
Mercy glowered at him as she collected random pizza boxes, while Ace and Cohen nabbed one of the beer kegs, hoisting it up between their shoulders.
We exited out the side door, into the crisp, on-the-verge-of-snowing night, and made our way down into the academic building.
Dak ran ahead, checking doorways until he found an unlocked one, then held it open for the rest of us. The boys hastily set up and passed out the beer, while Mercy handed out various boxes to various people.
Minutes passed in comfortable silence—the most comfortable I’d ever been within a group of people at Blackwing—until Ethan broke it with a loud brrrrrp.
“Gross!”
“Nice one, dude.”
“Ethan,” I whined.
He leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head, offering the most unserious apology. “Sorry, guys. Had to clear the pipes.”
Cohen took his brazenness for invitation and added another fetid frrrrt to the mingling aromas of beer, pizza, burp, and now fart.
But farts were rarely not funny, so Mercy and I sniggered, excusing ourselves away from the subsequent smells. She dropped into the instructor’s chair, and I parked my ass on the desk, smiling at the boys’ raucous laughter.
It hit me then, like a tonne of bricks, that Fleur was dead and I shouldn’t be laughing with another girl in her place. She’d barely been gone—well, I chose not to count the individual days because even one was too many—and I was already finding joy without her.
It wasn’t right.
It wasn’t fair.
Mercy must have caught my internal mood shift, because she cleared her throat and started rifling through the desk drawers. “What do you think Lockwood keeps in here anyway?” she asked, a trace of mischief tugging on the corner of her lips.
“Lockwood?”
“Yes, dummy. Whose classroom did you think we were in?”
I glanced around, realising she was right. All that was missing were the rows of laptops on desks and the man himself.
“What in the…” She trailed off, holding a creased piece of paper so close to her face, I questioned the capability of her eyeballs. “Sinclair, what the fuck is this?”
She shoved the paper at me, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
I grabbed it reflexively—and almost tore it in two when I registered what was printed on it. Because, preserved in a grainy, black-and-white security camera image in the top left corner… accompanied by tiny, impersonally typed details I thought no one knew… was me.