The Devil of Westbrook Academy

Four years ago… The dark has a taste tonight copper and static, like biting down on a live wire. I don't remember deciding to run. One second I'm swaying on my feet, the room tilting sideways like the floor, forgetting how to hold still, and the next I'm backed into a corner with my spine against cold plaster and a stranger's shadow swallowing the doorway. Cola. I only drank cola. I remember being smug about it, actually proud of myself for skipping the wine coolers Brittney smuggled in, for being the responsible one at my very first real party. So why can't I make my eyes focus? Why does the air feel like syrup going down? "Please." The word comes out wrong, thin, cracked, nothing like my real voice. Tears are already sliding hot down my face before I've even registered I'm crying. Screaming won't help. I know that with a strange, clinical certainty even as panic claws up my throat the nearest house is half a mile down this ridiculous hill, behind gates and hedges and all the useless grandeur money can buy. Out here, silence is just another luxury Westbrook Blues charges for. "Please leave me alone." My voice breaks on please, and I hate it, hate how small I sound. Smoke reaches me before he does not cigarettes, tobacco, the kind that clings to fabric for days. For one absurd, hopeful second I think of my father, before I remember he's on a plane somewhere with my mother, chasing some business I never bothered asking about. He wasn't supposed to be gone. Nobody was supposed to be gone tonight. Which means whoever is breathing like that in the dark isn't him. "Well, well." His voice slides out of the shadows, almost delighted. "Look who finally wandered home early." The words land wrong finally, like he's been waiting. Like this is a schedule, not an accident. Understanding hits me slower than it should, dulled by whatever's swimming through my blood. He knew I'd be here. He knew I'd be alone. Which means somebody put something in my drink, and somebody has been watching me long before tonight. "I have money," I blurt, grasping for the only currency I understand. "My father I can get you anything, just let me" Laughter cuts me off. Real laughter, ugly and delighted, like I've told a genuinely funny joke. It's worse than if he'd screamed at me. "Cute," he says, stepping close enough that I can make out the ski mask now, the eyes glittering behind it. "You think your daddy's money is what I'm owed." Owed. Not wanted. Owed. I don't get the chance to ask what that means, because he's suddenly against me, pinning me to the wall with a weight I can't budge no matter how hard I shove. He smells like rot wrapped in cologne. My stomach heaves. "This isn't about him," he murmurs, mouth too close to my ear. "Not really." Then what who I don't ask. Some animal part of my brain understands that questions are currency I can't afford to spend on a man like this. What I can do is fight. So I plant both hands on his chest and shove with everything I have, and it does absolutely nothing, like pushing against a wall that's decided to be a person. You're going to have to save yourself, Lyra. The thought arrives calm and clear, cutting through the panic like a blade. "Get off me!" I spit literally, aiming for his eyes and it earns me a backhand that snaps my head sideways and drops me to the hardwood so hard the air punches out of my lungs. I taste blood immediately, bitten tongue or split lip, I can't tell which. "Above me," he snarls, kicking my ribs when I try to curl away. "That's what all of you think, isn't it? Up on your hill, looking down." I crawl instead of answering, dragging myself toward the door on hands that keep slipping in my own blood and tears. He lets me know that's the part that scares me most, how unbothered he is by my crawling, like he already knows exactly how this ends and my scrambling is just the opening act. "Do you have any idea what I've built for this town?" His voice rises behind me, thick with a fury that has nothing to do with me at all, not really. "What I've bled for it? And they think they can just discard me? After everything I did for that bastard who calls himself king?" King. The word snags somewhere in my chest, though I don't understand why yet. I use his rant as cover, eyes darting to a lamp on the side table by the door, heavy brass, within reach if I can just get two more feet. He's pacing now, worked up in his own rage, monologuing to a girl he's decided has no fight left in her. He's wrong. I lunge. My fingers close around the lamp, and I swing with every ounce of strength eight years of childhood tantrums and thirteen years of being underestimated ever gave me. It connects with a crunch that makes my stomach turn, and he howls, stumbling back with his hand pressed to his skull. I don't wait to see if he's bleeding. I'm already moving, already screaming, already throwing my whole body against the door hard enough to feel it give at the hinges. Then I'm running. Hallway after dark hallway, his boots pounding somewhere behind me, gaining, always gaining. My ankle rolls on the last turn and pain detonates white behind my eyes, but I don't stop can't stop, not with the front door visible now, not with freedom that close. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. I need George. I need my brother. I need all four of them. I need Ace. His name arrives out of nowhere, urgent and useless, because Ace isn't here, none of them are here, and I am completely, catastrophically alone. I make it down the last stair. I reach for the handle. He tackles me before my fingers touch brass. The impact drives every ounce of breath from my body, my hip screaming as it meets the floor, but I keep fighting, keep clawing, until he flips me and straddles me like a trophy he's finally collected. "There's that fire," he says, almost fond, studying my face like it's something rare. "No wonder the boy can't stay away from you. Hates you and can't stop thinking about how funny you work." I don't know who he means. I don't care. All I care about is the black, endless hate simmering behind his eyes, the kind of hate that isn't about me at all, that's using me as a door to walk through toward somebody else entirely. I fist both hands and drive them into him, twice, hard enough to buy myself a half-second of slack. It's enough. I twist free, scramble upright and that single backward glance to see if he's following costs me everything. He catches my arm. Twists. The sound that tears out of me isn't human. Pain detonates through my shoulder in a white-hot wave, and I know, with sick certainty, that something has come apart that shouldn't have. "Where's your hero now?" he pants, shoving me down onto the cold marble of the foyer. "No knight coming to save you tonight, sweetheart." I claw upward with my one good hand and catch the edge of his mask, ripping it free before he wrenches my wrist away. For one suspended second, I see his face. I will never, as long as I live, be able to unsee it. He flips me before I can process what I've just memorized, pinning me chest-down against the floor with a weight that makes escape a joke. My vision starts to gray at the edges from pain, from panic, from the sheer animal knowledge that I have run out of moves. "This is for him," he breathes against my ear, voice gone low and strange, almost reverent. "And a little something for her, when she gets back." Her. Him. Pronouns with no names, a debt with no accounting, a war I never signed up to be collateral in. "Please," I whisper, not a plea he'll honor, just the only word my body has left. "Please don't." He laughs, soft and terrible, and leans down until his mouth brushes my ear one final time. "You should ask your mother sometime," he murmurs, almost gentle, almost kind, "whether that man upstairs in the portraits is really your father at all." The words detonate somewhere behind my ribs, louder than anything else happening to my body in that moment and it's that sentence, more than the pain, more than the fear, that I will replay a thousand times over the coming years, long after the rest of the night dissolves into a blur I can't and won't look at directly. I don't remember the exact moment my mind decides to leave. I only know that somewhere between his weight and his whispered secret and the merciless cold of the marble beneath me, something inside my chest simply stops. It goes quiet. Goes dark, the way a house goes dark when the last light in it finally gives out. I stop fighting. I stop screaming. I stop being, in any way that matters, present for what happens next. There was a girl on that floor that night. And there is whoever crawls out from underneath it hours later, hollowed and silent, staring at a ceiling she doesn't recognize in a life she no longer trusts. They are not, I will come to understand, the same person. Something in me doesn't just break that night. It dies. Quietly, permanently, and completely and takes four years, a twin brother's funeral, and a town full of buried secrets to even begin dragging what's left of me back into the light.