The Devil of Westbrook Academy

CHAPTER 2

Lyra POV

Present day…

Westbrook Blues smells the same as I remember money and pine and something rotting just beneath it, like a bouquet left in water too long. I catch it the second the cabin door opens, before I've even started down the stairs, and my whole body responds like it's been waiting years for the cue.

I want something to smoke. Badly.

Not because the flight was hard, the flight was nothing, six hours of recycled air and a movie I didn't watch but because being vertical in this particular zip code makes my skin feel too small for my bones. My hands won't stay still. My jaw keeps working like there's something to chew on.

Could be nicotine. Could be the truth, showing up early to collect what it's owed.

I'd bet on the truth.

Back in London I'd have a name on my phone and a corner to meet within the hour. Out here, I don't even know what the drug economy looks like when it's dressed in cashmere and country club memberships. Probably a better product. Probably worse people.

Home. I turn the word over like a coin with the face worn off. There was a version of it here once a real one, not the performance my parents built to photograph well. A version where this exact stretch of coastline felt less like a threat and more like the only safe place on the map.

I found three boys in this town who didn't belong to anyone else, and I greedily added them to the one I'd never had to share with my brother, my other half, the one person who came standard-issue with my DNA. Four boys. One sky, a very particular shade of blue that I used to think was named after me.

That was before the color drained out of everything.

"Something on your mind, Miss?" Trumbull's voice finds me through the mirror patiently, careful, the same tone he's used on me since I was small enough to fit in the seat beside him instead of behind it.

"Just noise," I say, flattening it before it can climb any higher. He reports things. He always has. Loyalty, in this family, runs uphill.

"Reflection tends to clarify things," he offers, gentle as a man defusing something live.

If he only knew. I've done nothing but reflect for four straight years, and all it's ever handed me is the same dead end wearing a different disguise. Reflection isn't healing. It's just re-watching the crime scene tape until you've memorized every frame and none of it makes sense anyway.

"There's nothing quite like coming home," I say to the window, "to remind you of everything you spent years trying to forget."

Because that's the entire function of this place now. A theme park built on secrets, my mother playing the role of resident evil queen the same woman who shipped me overseas and locked the door behind me, then called it care.

Don't. Not that. Not yet. I have three days here at most. I can survive three days without opening that particular door.

"I only wish you were coming back for a kinder reason," Trumbull continues, and something in my chest cracks a half-inch wider.

"Yeah, well. I hate this town," I mutter, watching the houses glide by in that slow, smug parade they always do, like even the architecture knows it's better than you. I wish he'd drive faster. I know better than to ask.

Something about Westbrook has always sat wrong under my skin. The air is too clean, the smiles too rehearsed, the way people here gossip like it's a competitive sport with prize money attached. Maybe that's the only way to survive under this much manufactured perfection. Talk about someone else's collapse loud enough, and maybe no one notices yours.

Four years. I didn't miss a single second of them, not really not the town, not the people, not one square foot of this gilded cage. What I miss is that I don't live here anymore.

Four years, and I've somehow gotten worse instead of better. Everyone else's life moves forward. Mine just kept circling the drain, night after night, dragged under by something with teeth, then spat back out each morning no better than before except for me there wasn't ever a morning. Just an endless stretch of the same dark, dressed up as daylight.

No recovery. No finish line. How could there be, in a place that built the wound in the first place?

Their town. His town.

"I do apologize again for your parents' absence," Trumbull says, filling the silence because silence apparently offends him. "They were"

"Busy," I cut in. "Got it. Loud and clear."

Quiet settles over the back seat. I wait for the next excuse, because there's always another one queued up behind the first.

"There's been... a great deal happening," he tries, then stalls out entirely, and that's when it lands what he's actually circling.

I shut my eyes and wait for enough air to come back to breathe on.

"It's fine," I whisper, though it very much is not.

As if I could forget the actual reason I flew across an ocean. It certainly wasn't for Amanda and Richard Vale, Westbrook's reigning champions of dysfunction. Four years of trying to scrub this place out of my system, and my own parents made it abundantly clear I'd been quietly erased from the family roster. No holiday cards. No calls on my birthday. Just silence dressed up as boundaries.

We were never the kind of family that told the truth in our own house. I doubt we were the only ones on this hill who weren't.

"How have you been feeling, Miss A?" Trumbull asks, voice dipping lower.

I still go. My pulse picks up a notch before my brain even catches why.

"Meaning?"

"Forgive my asking, but I understand you weren't well for some time. I only hoped you might be feeling stronger now. I prayed for it, actually."

It lands like a fist to the sternum.

"You heard I was sick," I say not a question, because I already know the shape of the lie. Four years overseas needs a story that isn't the real one, and medical treatment abroad is so much tidier than the truth.

"Yes, Miss."

I don't ask where he heard it. I already know exactly who wrote that script.

"You're not wrong," I murmured. Sick is generous, actually. Sick would be an upgrade.

"And are you healed now?" Ever polite. Ever careful not to actually want the answer.

Healed.

I almost laugh out loud. As if healing is even on the table for someone who's just been dropped straight back into the exact environment that broke her in the first place. As if you can mend anything standing in the wreckage.