Chapter 16

Rose's words echoed in my head as I sprinted across the quad.

Please save her—from herself.

I hadn't wanted to leave her, but objectively I knew that she was fine, that the suffering she had endured had not been her own, but Lissa's. And Lissa was my charge. Rose had said that she was in danger, that she was hurt—by her own ministrations. She needed me now.

First, I had to get Alberta. As always it only took one knock on her door before she was there, ready and alert for whatever needed to be done. I relayed the information that Rose had disclosed, and together we hurried toward the chapel. Rose had said that Lissa was holed up in the attic and bleeding heavily from her cuts, so there was no time to waste.

We found her unconscious on the dusty floor of the attic, pale arms coated with blood. Alberta went down on one knee to check the pulse by Lissa's neck, while I inspected the cuts. They weren't too deep, thankfully, though she had lost a lot of blood.

'Let's get her to the clinic,' Alberta said, straightening. 'Poor girl... Who could have known that she was suffering like this?'

'Rose knew,' I said quietly, too quietly for Alberta to hear. I slipped my hands beneath Lissa's slim frame and lifted her into my arms. Then I was rushing back to the clinic.

When I returned a flurry arose at the clinic. Lissa was taken away to emergency, feeders were provided, and at the periphery of it all was Rose, anxious and adamant and yelling to know what was going on. I tried to calm her down, to reassure her, but nothing worked. I resorted to stay out of the way of the doctors while they did their work, which left me with plenty of time to think.

Rose had known about Lissa's self-harming tendencies, and yet she had not told. Because she hadn't trusted us, because she had been trying to protect her friend. It hurt to know that two such young girls had been forced to deal with those problems on their own, that they believed that they couldn't even trust the teachers at their school to help them.

I kept wondering whether that was all there was to it, but somehow, I knew it wasn't. One secret had been uncovered, but there were plenty still buried. The self-harming had to be connected to whatever else was happening with Lissa, this stalker that was leaving dead animals for her to find. It had to be more than just twisted bullying.

I would have to get Rose to confide in me about this, and I kept trying—but it never seemed like the right time. After all, Rose was hurting too. This wasn't the time to drill her with questions, this was the time to be supportive.

Lissa was eventually released on the condition that she'd have to come back for daily visits to the counsellor. When I ran into Rose that day, she seemed muted and resigned. I knew she must have spoken privately with Lissa by now, and by the look of her, it hadn't gone down well. I supposed that also factored into why Rose hadn't told; Lissa herself had not wanted her to.

I wondered what I would have done in a similar situation with Ivan. Would I have kept his secret, or broken it for his own good? I wasn't sure if it was any consolation that I would never find out. But I would have traded our mutual trust in a heartbeat if it could have brought him back to life. Broken trust could be repaired—there was no path back from death.

'The doctors are planning on putting her on medication—to help with the depression,' I informed Rose gently, knowing she would want to know what was happening with her friend.

She had only nodded numbly and returned to her room.

We had hoped to keep news of the incident secret, but as always with the Academy—news always managed to somehow spread. Students whispered about the incident, theories were swapped, rumours were exaggerated...the usual.

Rose moved around the Academy like a ghost, and I never saw her with Lissa, who seemed to stick to her royal circles. The words "blood whore" began to resurface here and there.

Rose was tight-lipped during our training sessions. She didn't complain about what had happened, she didn't vent, and the usual snark was absent from her conversation. She seemed to find some small solace in being able to hit things, so in that way I was at least able to help her.

When the dance came that weekend, I was relieved to learn I wouldn't have the guardian shift. I was pretty sure that Rose was in no mood to attend, either way, but I wanted to be far away from the dance, just in case. Seeing her and that dress in action would have been more than I was able to handle. It felt perverse to even admit it to myself, but at least admitting the truth allowed me to do something about my own weaknesses. If I couldn't handle Rose in a dress, then the simple answer was that I had to hide away. Cowardly, yes, but terribly convenient.

So Alberta and I were headed back to our rooms that night, both content to take an early night in and charge up for another busy week. We were discussing the guardian schedule—one of the guardian's kids had taken sick, so she needed to be away from her duties for a couple days, and I had promised to cover for her—when we ran into Mason Ashford.

His arm was linked with a woman that was nothing like the Rose I knew but also, obviously, none other than Rose. I had to blink several times to make sense of what I was looking at. Their arms weren't actually linked, I noticed, he was just holding her arm; to steady her, I thought, because she was wearing high heels, on frozen ground, no less.

And the dress...that damned dress. It was everything I had dreaded it would be. I could have called her on the dress code right there and then, not only to spare myself but the rest of the male students too. The black fabric clung everywhere, outlining the hourglass shape of her body, the swell of hip and chest...and from where it ended, just above her knees, her legs were bare. Victor's necklace hung just above her cleavage, and it was an effort to keep my gaze from locking there.

How many times had I seen Rose, and in how many different outfits? I'd seen her in thermal shirts and hoodies and sweaters and t-shirts and turtlenecks, in jeans, in sweatpants, in slacks...and there was that cursed incident where I saw her in nothing but a bra and tight pants. I'd seen her angry and frustrated, happy and carefree, sweaty and fresh out of the shower. So many sides of Rose, and none of it could have ever prepared me for this.

Her face was mostly bare of make-up, not that she needed any of it, though her lips gleamed with the lip gloss I had gifted her, slightly parted—from the shock of seeing me, I thought—and something that might have been mascara or eyeliner darkened her eyes a little, but other than that, it was Rose. The dark hair cast around her shoulders, semi-wavy and slightly silvered by the glow of the moon, that was all Rose.

So why did she feel so different?

Probably because in this moment, she didn't look like a student. I couldn't call her a girl. She seemed so much more mature than that. The way she looked at me...into me, like there was nothing I could hide from her, like she knew every secret, every forbidden desire I had ever had—she knew them all and welcomed them, because she felt the same. I couldn't be sure of course, I could never be sure, but the way her dark eyes gleamed when they locked with mine, the way her lips would twitch just a little when she saw my gaze drift up and down her body...

And it was wrong. So wrong and so depraved on so many levels that I couldn't stop staring at her. I felt my face lock up in the way that it always did when I was afraid of emotion leaking out. I could have no witness to this meltdown, I could have no one knowing what was going on inside my head. Shame, hot and cold, washed through me. Somewhere next to me I knew that Alberta and Mason were talking, but I didn't hear a word of what they said. There was room for nothing else but Rose.

In the end, Rose was the one who ended up saving me. She moved so that Mason's hand dropped away from her arm, and that small movement reminded me that he was there, that it had been him touching her. I was surprised at the black jealousy that overcame me then as my gaze flitted to the side, to land on Mason, who was completely oblivious to it. What I wouldn't have done to trade spots with him in that moment, to be the young novice standing by Rose's side, and not the aged mentor forbidden by law and morals and decency to show even a tiny fraction of what he felt.

Seven years. Seven long and gaping years, a gaping chasm between us, and no bridge to cross it.

Shame didn't work, so instead I hardened my heart, like I had been doing ever since I had lost Ivan. Attachments made you weak. Love made you weak. And desire...giving it to desire made you lesser than a man, left you nothing but a beast with no brain to control his urges. I was better than that. When Alberta and Mason finished their conversation, I tore my gaze away from Rose—and I didn't look back.