6. Venetia
Venetia
I have no shame. I pull Viper’s tee over my head, standing naked in the middle of the dining hall while I reach for the dress.
All eyes are on me.
Impressed, amused, exasperated, envious, lustful… it all heads my way.
Viper, on the other hand, is fuming with a rage so deep, he rises swiftly and blocks my body with his.
I smile slowly, making no move to hurry this along.
“Enjoying the show?” I murmur, watching his jaw twitch with barely controlled fury.
“Get. Dressed.” Each word is a bullet, low and dangerous.
I take my time stepping into the white dress. The fabric is cool against my skin as I pull it up and gather my hair. Turning my back to him, I say, “Zip me up.”
His fingers brush the bare skin of my back, sending goosebumps over my skin. I feel his warm breath on my neck, and I know he’s still seething. His hands grip my hips, pulling me back against his hard body.
“No one gets to look at you naked,” he growls in my ear, low enough that only I can hear.
“Not even Raff and Blake?” I whisper back, feeling reckless and powerful.
He zips me up with a sharp tug, his fingers lingering like fire on my skin. “We’ll discuss this later,” he promises, the threat in his voice making my pussy clench with need. That shower was frustrating as fuck. I thought we might finally have sex, but he has the control of a thousand men.
I turn to face my court, my men. The white dress hugs my curves perfectly, with a low cutout neckline that shows off the girls.
I catch Blake’s eye across the table, and he raises his coffee cup in a silent toast, his expression smug.
Rafferty’s eyes are dark with hunger, his gaze tracing the lines of my body like he’s memorising every curve.
“Staff,” I say, bringing us back to business. “We need to know who’s still here and who’s part of this.”
“We know the kitchen staff are gone,” Rafferty says, still watching me with that predatory intensity that makes my skin heat. “The rest… let’s go find out.”
I stride out of the dining hall to the whispers and stares of the other students. Let them look. Let them learn what power looks like. The white dress is a statement, a fuck you to the chaos and destruction of the night. It feels like a uniform for the queen I’m becoming.
We head for the staff offices in the admin building. The corridors are unnervingly silent, my heels echoing on the stone floors.
“We’ll start here,” I say, stopping before a door with a brass plate that reads Professor Hargreaves . “The man who practically gave a seminar on psychological warfare.”
Rafferty doesn’t bother knocking. He kicks the door. The frame splinters around the lock. The office is empty. Too empty. His desk is wiped clean, his shelves bare. Not a single personal item remains.
“He’s fled,” Viper states the obvious.
“Let’s see who else,” I say, and turn to the door opposite. Viper does the honours of kicking this one in, and we find it’s also cleaned out. As are three more down the hallway.
“So, this floor appears to be a ghost town,” I mutter. “What about the others? Maybe all the ones in on it stuck together?”
“Good thinking,” Blake says, and we head to the floor above.
Our efforts are proving just as fruitless.
“So, it looks like every single one of them left,” I state, glaring at the empty desk in front of us. “How good of them.”
“In a way, it is better for us,” Viper says. “Less arseholes to worry about.”
“So, they were all in on it.”
“Looks that way.” I turn to face them. “It also means this whole fucking place is ours now. No staff, no administration. Just us.”
“And a hundred-plus students who will expect their degrees to be worth something at the end of this,” Blake points out, ever the pragmatist. “We need to establish a new order, a curriculum.”
“We’ll get to that,” I wave a dismissive hand. “First, we find those tunnels. The ones they used to escape. They’re our biggest vulnerability right now. An unsecured back door into my fortress.”
“They could be anywhere,” Rafferty says.
“Not anywhere,” Blake counters. “They’d need to connect to the outside from what used to be the Keep. The idea was to get the Lord out, not really anyone else.”
“Okay, so what was the Keep?” I ask.
He pauses. “I need to get eyes above.”
“How?”
“A drone,” he says as if that’s the obvious answer.
“And you happen to have one in your pocket?”
He chuckles. “I happen to have several in my room.”
I nod, and we leave the empty office behind. I linger for a second, feeling eyes on me. My gaze sweeps over the cleaned-out space, but there is no one there.
“Venetia,” Viper calls out, coming back for me, and then he reaches for his weapon at his back.
It takes me a moment to register the threat.
The cold steel of the blade at my throat is an unexpected, searing line of ice. A hand snakes around my waist, yanking me back against a hard, unfamiliar body.
“Don’t move,” a voice whispers in my ear, one I don’t recognise.
Viper’s face is a mask of pure, murderous rage, his gun already in his hand but unable to fire with me in the way.
“The Graduates don’t tolerate interference,” he hisses, the blade digging into my skin. A tiny pinprick of pain. “Your little coup has upset a very delicate ecosystem.”
“Let her go.” Viper’s voice is a low rumble, a promise of a slow, agonising death.
“I don’t think so. Her head is worth more money than I can count.”
My eyes lock with Viper’s. I see the plan form in them, the same one forming in mine. I relax my body, a subtle shift that makes him think I’m surrendering. Then, I drop my weight, stomping my stiletto heel down hard on his instep. He yelps, his grip faltering for a fraction of a second.
It’s all Viper needs.
One shot between the eyes and my would-be attacker is taken out.
His blood sprays across my dress, more of an annoyance than anything else.
“Venetia,” Viper says, coolly. “Kindly get your arse out of this office, and do not move an inch from my side again.”
“In all fairness, you shouldn’t be moving an inch from my side,” I counter, only to fire him up.
It doesn’t work. He knows me too well by now. “Move.”
“Wait,” I say, which pisses him off further.
“Now,” he snarls.
“No, seriously, wait,” I say, holding my hand up. “Where did he come from?”
“My thoughts exactly.” Blake says, pushing past Viper into the room and stepping over the dead body. He scans the walls and then smiles. He crosses over to the wood panelling and starts tapping.
A section of the panelling pops open with a soft click. A secret passage.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Rafferty murmurs.
“So that’s how they got out so quickly and efficiently.”
I step over the body of my attacker as Blake opens the door wider. The passage smells of dust and old secrets, a dry, forgotten scent. “And how this one got in.”
Blake pulls out his phone again, its torch cutting through the gloom to reveal a tight, dark corridor with recent scuff marks on the dusty floor. “This isn’t the exit tunnel. We are too above ground, but I’m betting it leads us straight to one.”
“Everyone armed?” Viper says, striding forward and slapping a smaller handgun he pulled out of somewhere into my hand.
“We are now,” I say with a smile.
“Your dress is ruined,” Blake says, raking his gaze over me.
“Buy me a new one.”
We lock gazes.
“I’ll buy you an entire wardrobe full.”
“I think you look hot as fuck,” Raff says with a wicked grin.
“You would,” I murmur and move into the passageway.
Viper’s noise of frustration echoes down the gloomy passage as he falls into step behind me. There is only space to go single file, but dim lighting starts a few feet in, showing me the way.
The tunnel descends, twisting and turning like the guts of some ancient beast. The air grows cooler, carrying the scent of damp earth and something old.
“Anything?” Blake’s voice echoes from the rear.
“Just a lot of wood and a bad smell,” I call back, my voice tight.
The corridor opens abruptly into a small, circular stone chamber. It’s a hub. Three more passages branch off from here, each one a dark, gaping mouth leading to God knows where. A cool draft whispers from the one directly ahead.
“Well, fuck,” Rafferty breathes from behind Viper. “It’s a fucking maze.”
“And we don’t know who’s waiting for us in it,” I murmur, my hand tightening on my gun. The darkness ahead isn’t just an absence of light; it’s a living, breathing threat. They have a map, and we’re walking in blind.