Monstrous Mate: The Cursed Bloodline

Chapter 2 — Red Boxes

I did not open it.

Not because I was obedient. I have never been obedient in my life. I did not open it because Gabriel Laurent was still standing on the other side of that concrete door, and I could feel him listening.

Shifters hear different than we do. Mémé told me. Humans hear words. Animals hear intention. The hesitation before the words. The spit in your mouth when you lie.

I put my hands flat on the metal desk. The desk was cold enough to burn.

"Define keep," I said to the door.

A pause. I heard a small sound. A laugh, but not out loud. Through the nose.

"Exactly how it sounds, Moreau."

His footsteps went away. Not hurried. He had all the time in the world. I had been at Alliance for six hours and I had already made the most dangerous boy on campus notice me. Excellent work, Elise. Mémé would be so proud.

I waited until I counted to one hundred. My trick for fear. Then I looked at the file again.

MOREAU, S — 2004-2006 — RESTRICTED. Red stamp. The paper was old, edges soft. Someone had handled it a lot. Someone had tried to hide the handling by putting it in a new box.

I did not open it. I picked it up and shoved it under the desk, behind the trash can where the cameras couldn't see if there were cameras. If Gabriel wanted it, he would have taken it. He left it as bait.

The job was supposed to be simple. File. Alphabetize. Do not ask. That is what scholarship kids do. We make ourselves useful and invisible.

I started on the west wing.

The west wing was not a wing. It was a long hallway with no heat where the files were organized by what they called lignée. Bloodline. Each box had a family name and a symbol burned into the cardboard. Wolf paw. Bear claw. Feather. Scale. The Laurent box was the biggest. It took up an entire shelf by itself. Gold scales stamped on black.

I worked. My fingers went numb. The bleach smell got stronger the deeper I went. At some point, I realized why. They mopped this floor every day with bleach to cover something else. Under it, faint, sweet rot. Like meat left in a drain.

At 20:00, the lights buzzed louder. A bell rang upstairs. Dinner.

I was not hungry, but you go to dinner at Alliance even if you are not hungry, because if you don't go, they talk about you. And scholarship girls cannot afford to be talked about.

The refectory was concrete too, but they tried to make it warm with wood tables and bad art. The rich kids sat in clusters by species. You could tell by how they sat. Wolves together, shoulders touching, loud. Birds together, picking at food, eyes moving. Dragons alone or in pairs, never looking at anyone, like everyone else was furniture.

I took my tray. Lentils. Bread that was hard. An apple with a bruise.

"Elise."

Anaïs, my owl roommate, was behind me. She had changed into a silk nightgown under her coat. For dinner. Of course.

"Come. You sit with us neutrals. We don't bite. Much."

The neutrals table was near the kitchen door. Two girls who looked like deer, a boy who kept turning his head too far, like an owl does. They all looked at me and then looked away too fast. The nothing smell. Anaïs was right.

Then the main doors opened and the room changed temperature.

Four boys walked in.

I knew them from the brochures, from the whispers on the forums Mémé made me read before I came. The four popular boys. Alliance's kings.

Gabriel first. He had changed his sweater. Now it was grey. He didn't look at me. That was intentional. When a boy who just told you that you smell like a grave pretends you don't exist, it's a move.

Behind him, two boys who looked exactly the same and not at all the same at once. Julien and Théo Laurent. Cousins, not twins, but they could have been. Same height, same dragon-blood sharp jaw, same hair that was almost white. Julien had a chipped tooth. Théo had a tattoo on his throat, a small black line like a collar. They shared everything, the forums said. Clothes. Girls. Obsessions. They walked in sync.

And behind them, not with them but like she was herding them, was Camille Dubois.

She was beautiful in a way that made you angry. Peacock shifter, but not soft. Tall, legs that never ended, hair dark brown and shiny like she was in a shampoo ad even here where the water is rust. She wore a white dress in winter. Who wears white in a place that is all mud?

Head of Discipline. That meant she got to punish you. That meant she liked it.

She saw me. Her eyes — green, lined perfectly — snagged on my tray. On my grandmother's coat. On my bruised apple.

She smiled. It was a perfect smile. It never reached her eyes.

"Scholarship," she said, not to me, to her table. Loud enough. "They let anyone file papers now."

A few people laughed. Wolves.

Anaïs kicked me under the table. "Don't."

I was already calculating. If I answered, I would be the angry scholarship girl who doesn't know her place. If I didn't answer, I would be the scared one.

So I did a third thing.

I stood up, took my bruised apple, walked to their table, and placed it directly on Camille's white plate. The bruise was facing up. Brown and soft.

"For you," I said. "You looked hungry."

Silence. Real silence. The kind where even the radiators stop leaking for a second.

Camille looked at the apple. Then at me. Her smile froze.

Gabriel looked at me finally. His grey eyes were amused. That was worse than angry.

Julien — the one with the chipped tooth — laughed. Loud. Wrong timing.

"Oh," he said. "She has teeth."

Théo didn't laugh. He stared at my mouth.

Camille picked up the apple between two fingers like it was a dead mouse and dropped it on the floor.

"Thank you, Moreau," she said, sweet. "We will remember your generosity during the games."

The games. Punishment rituals.

I went back to my table. My lentils were cold.

Anaïs whispered, "You are going to die. Fast."

"Good," I said. "I'm bored."

After dinner, I went back down to the archives. Night shift. That's what they pay me for. Ten euros an hour to sit in a basement that smells like bleach and rot and pretend to file.

Madame Chevalier was waiting at my desk.

She is not what you expect a headmistress to be. She is small, round, sixties, hair in a bun, wears pink cardigans. She smiles too much. Her file says panda shifter. Panda. It sounds cute until you remember pandas can break your spine hugging you.

"Elise! My little archivist!" she said, and clapped her hands. Her teeth were very white. "How was your first day?"

"Informative."

"Good, good. Did you meet Gabriel? He is such a helpful boy. His family is very generous to us."

"He left me a coffee ring."

She laughed. It sounded like wind chimes. It made my skin crawl.

"Oh, he does that. He marks his territory." She leaned over my desk. Her smile stayed, but her eyes went black for a second. Real black, no white. "I hear you met Camille too. At dinner. That was bold."

News travels fast in concrete.

"She was hungry."

"Mm." She tapped the desk. Her nails were short, clean, but strong enough to peel bark. "Let me give you some advice, since you are new and your grandmother is not here to give it. At Alliance, we have rules. They are not written. First rule: don't touch what is not yours. Second rule: red boxes stay closed. Third rule..."

She looked at the trash can where I had hidden my mother's file. I felt my blood go cold.

"... if you find something that was lost, you bring it directly to me. Because we worry when things get lost. We worry a lot."

She straightened. Smile back.

"Have a good night, dear. And remember, curfew at 22:00. Even for archivists."

She left her perfume behind. Powder and something medicinal.

I waited until her steps faded, then I pulled the file out from behind the trash can. My hands were not shaking now. Anger is better than fear for steady hands.

I opened it.

Inside, not papers. A photograph. The same one I had in my pocket, but not scratched. In this one, the man with his arm around my mother is visible. Young. Dark hair. Scar through his eyebrow.

Gabriel's father.

And behind them, in the background of the photo, half out of focus but clear if you knew where to look, is a girl in a white dress, watching them. Long legs. Dark hair. Fifteen years old at most.

Camille.

My mother disappeared in 2006. Camille would have been six.

Unless she wasn't.

A noise behind me. A door that shouldn't exist in the west wing opened with a sigh of wet air.

Footsteps on concrete that were not wearing shoes. Paw to foot to foot again.

The smell of woods, snow, and blood.

A voice, low, amused, from the dark between shelves.

"So you did open it. I told you he would lie."

I turned.

A man leaned against the shelf of Laurent boxes, arms crossed. Bare feet, dirty jeans, no coat despite the cold. Hair black, too long, wet. Eyes yellow, but not wolf yellow. Wild.

Rook. The expelled wolf. The groundskeeper. The one who actually likes being an animal.

He was looking at the photo in my hands. He was not smiling.

"Welcome to the family, Elise," he said. "Now you have to decide who you want to burn first."

Upstairs, the alarm for curfew started to scream.