Monstrous Mate: The Cursed Bloodline

Chapter 3 — The Groundskeeper

Curfew at Alliance is not a suggestion. When the alarm screams, the lights in the corridors cut to red and the doors lock by themselves. If you are caught outside after 22:00, Discipline takes you. Discipline is Camille. And Camille had already decided she didn't like me.

The alarm was screaming now.

Rook didn't move. He leaned against the Laurent shelf like the cold didn't touch him, bare feet on concrete that would have made my toes go numb in seconds. He smelled like outside had been brought inside — pine sap, wet dog, snow that has been walked on, and underneath that, blood that was not fresh. Old blood. Dried in a shirt.

He looked at the photo in my hand.

"Put it away," he said. "She has cameras in the vents. Little black eyes. She watches the archive when she is bored. And Madame is always bored."

I shoved the photo back into the red file. My heart was doing that loud, stupid thing again. I hated that it did that around men. It made me feel like prey even when I was not.

"You are Rook," I said.

"You know my name. Good. That saves time." His voice was rough, like he didn't use it much for talking. More for shouting at trees. "You are Elise Moreau who smells like a grave and gives Camille bruised fruit. That was funny. I watched from the kitchen window. She wanted to break your plate over your head."

"You watch a lot for a man who lives in the woods."

"I live in the woods because I watch. Different order." He pushed off the shelf. He was close now. Too close. He didn't have the manners that Gabriel had, that fake politeness that keeps a distance. Rook stood close enough that I could see the snow melting in his hair, the scar that cut through his lower lip.

Yellow eyes. Not polite grey. Animal.

"You're not afraid," he said, and it sounded like an accusation.

"I am," I said. "I just don't show it where you can smell it."

That made him laugh. Real laugh, short and loud in the archive. The lights buzzed.

"Good. Good girl." He said girl like it was an insult and a compliment at once. "They told you not to open red boxes."

"They tell scholarship girls a lot of things."

"And you did it anyway." He looked down at the box at my feet. MOREAU, S — 2004-2006 — RESTRICTED. "Do you know what red means here? It doesn't mean secret. It means sterilized. Means they cut it out."

My mouth went dry. "Cut what out?"

"The bloodline." He said it simple. Like it was a fact about weather. "Your mother was not rare, Elise. She was not special. She was wrong. Her blood didn't make animals stronger. It made them sick. Made their animal go quiet. Like his." He jerked his chin up, toward the ceiling, toward where Gabriel would be sleeping in his warm room that was not a cell. "The dragon that never woke up. Ask him what he thinks about your mother."

The file felt hot in my hands.

My mother was not rare. She was cursed and sterilized on purpose. That was one of my notes when I built this story in my head. But hearing it from a man who smells like woods and blood made it real in a different way.

"How do you know my mother?" My voice was smaller than I wanted.

"I knew of her. Everyone did. The human girl who came here and made the Laurent boy's dragon go to sleep just by touching him." He smiled, but his eyes didn't. "You have the same hands."

I looked at my hands. My grandmother's hands, Mémé always said. Small, knuckles dark, nails short. Not special.

"Why are you here, Rook?"

"Because you set off the alarm in the kitchen when you stole that apple for Camille, and I came to see if you were as stupid as you looked." He tilted his head. "You are not stupid. You are worse. You are curious. Curiosity gets scholarship girls expelled. Or mounted on the wall in Chevalier's office."

Behind us, the red light for curfew was pulsing. The door at the top of the stairs clicked. Locked.

We were locked in.

"s**t," I whispered.

Rook didn't seem bothered. He sat down on the floor, back against the cold shelf, legs stretched out. His jeans were torn at the knee. I could see the hair on his leg, the muscle.

"Sit," he said. "They will unlock at 6:00. Chevalier likes to make a point."

"I have a room. Anaïs will think—"

"Anaïs will think you got f****d by Discipline and will take your bed. Good for her. She needs the space."

I didn't sit. I stood with the file clutched to my chest. My grandmother's coat was not enough down here. My breath was making small clouds.

He watched me shiver and sighed, like I was a puppy doing something annoying but cute.

"You are cold. Humans are always cold."

"I am not human."

That made his eyebrows go up.

"No?"

That was the second secret I had not told anyone at Alliance. My file says O negative. Lie. My blood type is not in the system. Mémé took me to a woman in Marseille when I was twelve who pricked my finger and put the blood on a piece of paper that turned black. She said, You are not for them. You are for the grave. She poured Florida Water on my head and told me never to let a shifter taste me.

"I run colder than other girls," I said instead.

Rook stood again. In one movement. No hands. Like an animal. He stepped forward and before I could calculate, before I could decide, his hand was on my wrist. Not grabbing. Holding. His palm was hot. Shockingly hot.

"Your pulse," he said quietly. "It's too fast. Too... human."

I pulled away. He let me. He looked at his own hand like it surprised him.

"You smell like a grave," he murmured, echoing Gabriel. "He was right. But graves are not empty, Elise Moreau. Something lives in them."

The fluorescent light above us flickered and died with a pop. One bulb gone. Now the archive was half dark, half red from the curfew light pulsing from upstairs.

In the half dark, Rook looked less like a man and more like what he was. Wolf. Expelled. Living in the woods because he liked being an animal more than pretending to be a rich boy.

"Do you want to know what is in Room 9?" he asked.

I had been told not to go into Room 9. Second rule after don't open red boxes.

"No."

"Liar." He grinned. That chipped lip made the grin crooked. "Everyone wants to know. Even Gabriel doesn't go in there. He is scared. The great alpha Laurent, scared of a door."

"What's in it?"

"Me, sometimes." He laughed again. "No. It's where they keep the ones that didn't shift right. The ones whose animal got stuck halfway. They smell like bleach because they have to wash the floors three times a day."

The rot under the bleach. I thought of it.

"Your mother went in there," he said, soft now. "In 2006. She volunteered. For extra credit. That is what Chevalier wrote in the report."

Volunteered. My mother, who wrote They file everything. Even the things they bury.

"I need to see that report," I said.

"You need to leave." He stepped back. "You need to run. Take your file and run back to Marseille and tell your voodoo Catholic grandmother that she was right. Humans who go to Alliance never come back human. Because they don't come back at all."

He turned to go deeper into the west wing, toward a shadow that I had thought was a wall but now I saw was a service door, half hidden behind boxes, with cold air coming from under it. Outside air. Woods air.

"Wait," I said. My voice cracked. I hated that it cracked. "You said you wanted me to run away with you."

He stopped. Did not turn.

"I said I wanted you to run. I didn't say with me. Don't romanticize me, little grave. I am not one of your four popular boys who will write you poems before they try to own you."

"I don't want poems."

"What do you want?"

I thought of the photo. Gabriel's father with his arm around my mother. Camille, six or twenty-six, watching. The red stamp that said RESTRICTED and meant sterilized.

"I want to burn the file," I said. It was the first true thing I had said out loud since I got here.

He turned then. His yellow eyes caught the red emergency light and burned.

"Good," he said. "Then you will need a wolf."

He opened the hidden door. Snow blew in. Real snow, not concrete cold. The woods behind the academy were right there, a black mouth of trees. He had a path.

"Curfew doesn't apply to woods," he said. "Come if you want to not die in a basement. Or stay and wait for your fated mate to come save you. Your choice."

My fated mate. The trope. The lie they tell girls like me.

Gabriel Laurent. Polite in the way French men are polite before they insult you. Possessive. Controlled. Surgical. He wants my blood to wake his dragon. He tells himself that's all he wants.

He would come down here when the doors unlocked at 6:00 a.m. and find me with the file. And he would keep me. Exactly how it sounds.

I looked at the file. MOREAU, S. My mother who disappeared.

I looked at the open door to the woods where a boy who had been expelled waited, barefoot in snow.

I made a choice. I always make the wrong choice first, to see what it costs.

I followed the wolf into the woods.

Behind me, on my desk upstairs, the phone I had left to charge lit up.

A new message, from a number with no name.

You opened it. Now you are mine to keep. Come to my room. Block A. Or I come to the archives and I don't knock. — G

And under it, a second message, sent one minute later.

Don't go into the woods with him, Elise. He bites. — C