2. Deformed Garnet
Deformed Garnet
Desdemona
When I started my final year at Spearcrest, I wrote my goals for the year on the first page of my student planner.
It read as follows:
My Spearcrest 7th Year Goals — Desdemona Sutton-Knight
1. Maintain Head Girl position with exemplary conduct.
2. Secure required grades for Harvard Law early decision DART programme.
3. Support the twins with their final year in Lower School.
4. Schedule weekly check-ins with Ophelia.
5. Limit distractions. No regrets. No mistakes.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I believe there’s nothing wrong with holding yourself up to a high standard.
Only—you better make sure you don’t slip, because the higher you hold yourself, the harder the fall.
Austen and William are identical twins; most people can’t tell them apart. But it doesn’t matter what they’re wearing or doing or saying. I can always tell them apart.
My voice comes out like the cracking of a whip.
“Austen! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Where have you been?” Austen stops dragging me through the trees and stares up at me through messy dark hair, eyes wide and wild. “Shit, Dess, something’s happened, something really—”
“Where’s William?”
“He…” Austen’s eyes flicker to the side. He shakes his head, catching his breath. “We—”
I shove past him. William is slumped on the mossy ground with his head hanging low and his arms propped over his knees.
It’s dark out in the arboretum: the trees are still heavy with leaves that are barely just turning gold.
The starlight is too weak to filter through the clouds or the dense canopy.
But I can see the blood clear as day.
I rush to William and drop to my knees, ignoring the cold and damp seeping through my dress. Grabbing his face in my hands, I force him to look up: his skin is warm and wet.
I glance at my fingers. They’re smeared in blood.
Earlier, on the tennis court, I felt like a mobile, living thing, with no distinction between my mind and my limbs. Now, it’s the exact opposite: my body stiff and distant, like unwieldy machinery.
“Are you hurt?”
My voice comes out cold and sharp.
William meets my gaze. I see Dad’s eyes in his face and my heart lurches painfully. If Dad were here, he’d know what to do. But if Dad were here, none of this would be happening in the first place.
“He’s fine, he’s fine,” Austen is saying, “but we’re in trouble, Dess, we’re in so much fucking trouble.”
He’s holding onto my arms with both hands, his grip strong from spending too much time in the gym and not enough time developing common sense.
“Whose blood is that?” I ask, still looking at William.
William’s eyes glint in the darkness. “Birnam’s.”
I stare at him, speechless with surprise.
Birnam Hastings has been friends with my brothers since they all started Spearcrest. They’re in the same classes, go to the same parties, even go on holidays together.
I’ve never known them to argue or fall out. My brothers’ friendships have never seemed deep enough for anything as complex as a falling out. Most importantly—Birnam’s family is old, rich and powerful. He’s not the kind of person you want for an enemy.
So why is William’s face covered in his blood?
“Alright, enough already.”
I surge to my feet. Grabbing William by his collar, I haul him upright.
“Tell me what happened. Now.”
William and Austen exchange a look, a whole conversation unfolding silently between them. Finally, Austen nods, and William looks back at me.
“You might as well see for yourself.”
Birnam Hastings lies unconscious, facedown in a corner of the old boathouse.
It’s cold inside—colder than outside—and I wrinkle my nose at the thick smell of rusted metal and old wood. The floorboards under my feet creak as I step closer, slick with lichen. Tendrils of ivy coil through the broken window frames, pushing into the space like creeping fingers.
I draw a deep breath in and step closer.
Oh god.
Birnam is half-curled, one arm bent awkwardly under his body, the other stretched out, as though he’d tried to crawl before his body gave up on him.
The back of his head is dark and sticky, strands of pale hair matted against the nape of his neck.
His school shirt is torn at the shoulder, dark with blood.
His face is turned just enough that I can make out the swollen bruises. A jagged line stretches from the corner of his eyebrow down to his jaw, a thick, oozing tear in the flesh that looks like it was made by something sharp. A rock? An oar?
No. My stomach clenches.
A ring.
No. No no no.
For a second, the whole room seems to tilt and sway. I have to brace my knees to stop them buckling, to breathe deep into my diaphragm like Dad taught me.
“Alright,” I say. My voice doesn’t even sound like my own. “Alright.”
“He’s alive,” Austen says quickly, like he’s trying to reassure me. “I checked his pulse, Dess. He’s breathing.”
I ignore him. Turning abruptly away from Birnam’s inanimate body, I grab William’s arm, raising it into the thin ray of moonlight slicing through the open doorway.
His fists are black with blood. On his pinkie finger is the signet ring he’s been wearing since he was sixteen. I wrench it off him—he doesn’t even try to stop me. Inside the seal, blood has coagulated like a deformed garnet.
I look up at William. He’s staring me in the eyes, refusing to look away. I know what he’s saying. Yes, we did it. No, we’re not going to lie to you about it.
So I ask the next most important question.
“Why?”
And finally, William’s gaze drops. He looks away, hesitates, glances at Austen. Austen sighs, wipes his hand over his face, smearing blood spatters across his cheeks.
“We have to show her,” William whispers.
His voice comes out raw and broken. I’ve never heard him like this.
My heart tightens. I’m struck by the sudden and jarring realisation that my brothers are no longer the little boys who would hold my hand on the beach, running out to find me perfect seashells, then straight back to me if they’d tripped and hurt themselves.
They’ll always come running to me when they trip and fall—only their falls are different now.
Now, when I’m going to be wiping blood off them, it’s not even going to be theirs.
“Alright, yea,” Austen says, voice breaking. “Let’s show her.”
He pulls out his phone. His phone case, too, is covered in blood. He swipes his thumb across the screen, hesitates, taps on something. The blue bubble of a message pops up. Austen’s face darkens, his jaw clenches; the phone shakes in the force of his grip.
And then he shows me the text—the one Birnam Hastings sent before all this happened.
When I’m done reading, I give Austen his phone back, kneel by Birnam, take his phone from his pocket, shivering with the disgust of touching such a thing. I place it in my own pocket, alongside William’s ring. Then I make the twins take off their clothes and rinse themselves in the lake.
I watch them as they wade into the black water, and I feel nothing as Birnam’s blood washes away from them, nothing more than an inconvenient stain. The wind is cold at my back; my voice is colder still as I issue my commands.
“Don’t tell anyone about this. Not a soul.
Not Mum or Dad or Blaise or Dimitri. Especially not Dimitri.
Keep your mouths shut. As far as anyone knows, you were at the party till I turned up, and then I walked you back to your dorm.
Don’t touch anything when you get in: straight into the shower, then to bed.
Everything back to normal tomorrow. Understood? ”
They nod, eyes wide.
“What about Ophelia?” William asks.
Ophelia.
A wave of nausea rolls through my stomach, dense and heavy. Birnam’s message flashes in my mind—an afterburn I can’t erase, a permanent scar. The things he didn’t say in that message are somehow a thousand times worse than the things he did say.
I swallow back the nausea, shake my head.
“I’ll talk to Ophelia.”
The boys nod again. Finally, they glance towards the wreckage at my feet. Austen looks at William, who is the one to speak.
“And what about him?”
I look down at the broken, misshapen body of Birnam Hastings. Something cold and solid settles over me, as if my entire being has become steel.
“He’s alive. He’ll be fine.”
He’s alive, I think. He should be dead.
I wish he was dead.
“You’re not to speak of this again. To anyone. I’ll handle it.”
“How?”
“That’s not for you to worry about.”
“But—”
“Go back to your dorms. Now. Forget about this, alright? Don’t make me repeat myself. I said I’ll take care of it.”
The boys’ mouths snap closed. They know when I say I’ll handle it—
—it means I will.
Birnam deserves what happened to him—but that doesn’t matter.
I don’t really know what happened between him and Ophelia—I’m going to have to work hard to get her to tell me, because Ophelia barely talks to me these days. Whatever Birnam did, the damage has already been done. The best I can do is tend to the wounds.
I’ve worked so hard to ensure my siblings would all be fine, but I failed. Now, an actual crime has been committed. A crime that will destroy my brothers’ lives, taint our family name. The backlash on Mum, after all the criminals she’s put away, would be unfathomable.
No matter what, I cannot allow this to happen. Whether or not Birnam wakes up, his parents will be coming for blood. Every crime needs a culprit. Someone has to pay. It can’t be my brothers, so it’s going to have to be somebody else.
And in Spearcrest, there’s only one person who would ever risk doing something like that. The question isn’t whether he’ll agree.
The question is what price he’ll make me pay.