Icebound hearts

Episode3

BELLADONNA

Corvin drove me back to my dormitory exactly three minutes after six. The entire dormitory was still asleep. Just the morning people doing morning things. I slipped into my room. It was empty at first glance.

“Angel? Lyra?” I called, shutting the door quietly. There was paper on the table. A letter from my roommates. They went for the campus bonfire. Great!

I settled in, sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the wall for a long time.

Three months.

I had agreed to three months with Kael Draven.I laid back and pressed a pillow over my face.

Terrible, I thought. Absolutely terrible.

By daybreak, the entire dormitory was a hassle. The attendees of the bonfire were trooping in, loud and drunk. While the rest of us were heading to class. I waited at the lobby for a few minutes before spotting Lyra.

“Hey!” I called her attention.

“Hey. Did you see Angel last night?”

“I should be asking you that,”

Our eyes drifted into the rowdy lobby for a second, searching.

“She left the bon fire. She wasn’t feeling so well,”

“I’m sure she’ll be okay. I’m late for class,” I tapped her shoulder and walked off.

The entire academy was buzzing with something I couldn’t immediately place.

I found out what it was at breakfast.

“Kael Draven is back,” the girl at the next table whispered to her friend, eyes wide. “He walked into the admin building this morning.”

I kept my eyes on my tray.

“He looks different,” the friend whispered back. “Angrier. Or maybe just—”

“Dangerous,” the first girl finished. “He always looked dangerous. Do you think they will reinstate him as captain?”

I took a long sip of my coffee and said nothing, their conversation blurred a little the moment I looked up.

Across the cafeteria, I spotted Ryder at his usual table, surrounded by teammates, laughing at something, completely at ease in the way that beautiful, golden people always seemed to be. He hadn’t noticed me. He never did. I was still the scholarship girl, invisible in all the ways that mattered to someone like him.

I was still looking at him when a tray landed on my table, across me.

I looked up.

Kael sat down like he owned the chair. Like he owned the entire cafeteria, actually. He was in his academy jacket, dark hair slightly damp from the cold outside, and he looked exactly the way the girls at the next table had described. Dangerous. Unhurried. Completely unbothered by the wave of whispers that grew the moment he sat down.

“Why are you sitting with me?” I whispered in hushed tones.

He paused for a second, shock filling his expression. “Do you have a short term memory?” He picked up a fork. “We start today.”

“We haven’t discussed terms properly.”

“We discussed everything that matters.” His eyes moved briefly across the cafeteria, a sweep so casual most people would have missed it. I didn’t miss it. He was clocking who was watching. “Ryder is here,”

My spine straightened involuntarily. “I know,”

“Don’t look,” he said flatly. “That’s the first thing you need to understand. You don’t look at him like that anymore. Not in public.”

I set my coffee down slowly. “Like what?”

“Like he’s the only person in the room.” His voice carried no cruelty. Just fact. The same way he’d called me the scholarship girl the night before, accurate and unbothered. “It gives everything away. If people believe you’re with me, you need to look at me like that. Not him.”

The table felt very small suddenly. “I don’t look at him like anything,” I said.

Kael said nothing. He just looked at me with those ice-blue eyes and let the silence do the work. I picked my coffee back up, stealing looks around the cafeteria.

The girls were obviously talking, their eyes swinging from corner to corner as they spoke.

Kael made a deep sound in his throat. “If you care much about what people would say, then you should call it off now.”

“So you don’t care?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nope!” Then took a large chunk of sandwich.

“You don’t care being paired up with the scholarship girl who works her ass off to remain in school?”

“Not when I chose the girl,” he answered.

I sighed, almost believing him. I was about to take a bite from my sandwich when he lowered his head and whispered. “The guy by the right,”

I followed his voice by turning right. Then he continued.

“He was one of the people you encountered last night,”

My heart skipped. I turned away immediately, pretending to me eating as the boy walked past our desk. “How do you know that?”

The bell rang, abruptly interrupting our conversation. I looked back, then faced my desk again.

Kael was gone.

I saw him walking ahead with his friends. Corvin, Luke and Jeremy.

What the f**k! I hissed, grabbed my bag and started my way out.

Exactly ten steps away from my desk, someone walked into my path. Pretty, ginger hair, and those green-piercy eyes. Janelle. Kaels ex-girlfriend. An unfriendly smirk tore across her face.

“What’s someone like you doing with my boyfriend?”

“Your what?” I cut in real quick.

She sighed, eyes rolling all over just as her minions gathered around. “Janelle you broke up with Kael last month. If there’s a recent change then Kael obviously didn’t let me in on it,”

She growled, snapping her right hand claws and pushing them hard against my neck.

“Don’t make an enemy out of me,” she warned. My throat was beginning to hurt as my lungs struggled to send air through my pipes when Kaels voice cut through the drama.

“Janelle,” he called.

Her wrist weakened immediately.

Keal didn’t say anything else. He just walked past Janelle’s clique of friends and stood by my side. I saw the anger and hurt in Janelle’s eyes when he stood beside me.

“Kael…” she muttered.

He cut her short. “You now taunt girls who make you feel intimidated?”

“What? No! How can I be intimidated by a wolfless girl? You can’t possibly…”

Kael did something that muted her instantly. He wrapped his arms around my shoulder and pulled me closer. Janelle swallowed the pain, fighting back the tears in her eyes.

“She’s with me. You of all people should respect that,” he said. “You’re coming with me, songbird,” he pulled me along.

We left the cafeteria holding hands. But the moment the doors closed behind us, I pulled away.

“What do you think you are doing?”

“Saving you,” he answered mom chalantly.

“For f***s sake! Jenelle’s father is the principal of this school. He’s a powerful man, making her the daughter of a powerful man”

“And I am?” He asked.

I shrugged, folded my hands across my chest, took them off, looked away, doing everything but giving an answer.

A bell rang again. Louder this time, and it went on and on for a while.

“That’s weird,” I commented, moving closer to the window. I saw students running towards the building which had the hockey pitch. “Something is wrong,”

We took off.

The crowd was a wall of backs and shoulders, and Kael cut through it like he had every right to. I followed, heart hammering for no reason I could name yet.

Then I saw something that made me pause for a second. Angel’s bracelet.

Silver, thin, with a tiny moon charm, the one she never took off, not even to shower. It caught the morning light, dangling from a wrist bent at an angle no living wrist should bend.

“Wait, no.” The word left me before my brain caught up with my eyes.

Hands and legs lay wide apart. Blood soaking into the ice beneath her, smeared into letters across the pitch:

MY KILLER IS HERE

“Angel?” I stuttered, reeling through shock and fear at the same time. I tried to move, but Kael held me back. Across the pitch, Lyra was crying in Luke’s arms. They were closer to the corpse.

A female investigator walked towards us, holding out her paper and pen. I thought she came for Kael, but then, she stood directly in front of me.

“Miss Bella, can I have a word with you?”