Void(5)

“You don’t get to refuse. You’ll help me, or it’ll be you in supernatural prison.”

My eyes widened as his whispered words sunk deep into my bones. His threat wasn’t something to take lightly. Supernatural prison was worse than death. Once you went there, you usually didn’t come back out. And if he really was a paragon, then he had the power to send me there.

I turned my head to face him, straining against his grip. My lips accidentally brushed his jaw when I moved, and I felt him stiffen against me. Loosening his tight hold, he allowed me to speak while still holding me in place.

“Fine,” I hissed. “Now get off of me.”

He held me for a moment longer, pushing his knee against my thigh and positioning his forearm between my breasts, the tension of the threat settled between us, hatred zinging back and forth between us. This close, I couldn’t help but notice how ridiculously good looking he was. There was nothing worse than having to be stuck in the proximity of an attractive supernatural who hated my guts.

“We leave in an hour. Get changed and go pack,” he said in a raspy voice before pulling away, releasing his hold on me.

I sunk back against the wall, trying to catch my breath. “Why do we have to leave so soon?”

“Why is your mouth moving when it’s your feet that should be doing the job?” he shot back.

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

He blinked at me, visibly taken aback. I guess most people didn’t call mister hotshot vampire on his shitty attitude. I smirked, counting his silence as a win, and turned the handle to the door, letting myself out. Mistress Cock was nowhere to be seen in the hallway, so at least I didn’t have to deal with a lecture from her tonight. I turned and headed toward the dorms, my feet carrying me down the long, dim corridors. The bottom half of the walls were wooden paneling and above that was blue and gold wallpaper that reeked of pretentiousness. I made my way up the stairs, taking my sweet ass time as I went. I might have no say about my summoning, but I could make the asshole wait.

At the top of the stairs, I veered off to the right and passed the first few doors. I opened it, the darkness in the room matching my insides. I looked over at the perfectly clean desk to my right and then to the messy one on my left.

One of the things this school boasted was that the “troubled” girls who attended would be taught to socialize as proper ladies—i.e., we were forced to share a room. My roommate was a London socialite who was sent here after her father remarried and her evil stepmother shipped her off. She was an anal perfectionist and had no time for me. She was working hard to win back daddy’s love. I usually made her eye twitch every time I left clothes on the floor or toothpaste on our shared sink. Her bedroom door was closed tight for the night as usual. She followed the lights-out rule to the minute. She and Poppy were best friends.

I walked into my bedroom, flipped on the light, and nearly screamed at the shadow sprawled out over my bed.

“What the fuck?”

I had one hand over my heart and the other reaching out like I’d been planning on grabbing the lacrosse stick propped against my bed frame to attack my intruder with it.

The vampire looked at me cockily from my bed, his arms propped under his head and his ankles crossed. “Do you always walk that slow, or was it a talent reserved for me?” Render asked.

Fucking vampiric speed. He must’ve gone around to the other staircase. How he knew which bedroom was mine, I had no idea.

I dropped my hands and replaced the shock on my face with irritation. “Get off my bed and get out of my room,” I hissed. I didn’t like having him in my personal space.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, and to my horror, I noticed the journal he had clasped in his hands. He flipped open the leather-bound book and started thumbing through the handwritten entries. My hands curled into fists.

He cleared his throat and started reading one. “June sixteenth: My mother wrote to me after the first time in eight months. She asked fuck-all about my life and instead informed me that she didn’t approve of the minus that I earned beside my A. She said that if I didn’t get that mark up, she’d be cutting my clothing allowance for new uniforms. She’s real maternal, that one. She even signed her letter as Council Liaison. Thank fuck I don’t have to suffer through Christmases or birthdays with her. Even though she stopped the pretenses of actually visiting me back when I was twelve. At least I have Dad. He doesn’t visit as often as I’d like, but at least he doesn’t hate me.”

My chest burned. My teeth grinded. I saw furious red awash with devastating blue. “Give that to me. You have no right to read that,” I snapped, moving forward.

Render’s smirk turned into a full-sized grin like he relished in yanking out my personal turmoil. Everything in there was deeply personal. Every time I had raged or grieved, I’d written it down in that book. It was my way to get it all out since I couldn’t tell Reed about the supernatural aspects of my life. It might be stupid and juvenile, but it was mine, and it was utterly private.

Render flipped a few more pages, and I rushed forward to yank my journal away from him, but it was laughable how easily he dodged me. He was across the room and leaning against the wall before I’d even made it a single step.

“October fourth: Mistress Cock caught me out of my dorm after lights out, but only because she was in the kitchen feeling up the janitor. That pretentious bitch always goes on and on about the importance of purity. Guess she liked to get her own purity scrubbed down by Mr. Longhorn. I’d just wanted to sneak some pumpkin pie, dammit. Now I’ll have that image of them all tangled up together burned into my retinas forever. Oh, and I didn’t even get the damn pie. I got two demerits and bathroom duty instead. And to make it all worse? Katie Jones started a rumor that I’m bulimic, and that’s why my head has been in a toilet bowl all week. I keep getting old food shoved into my bag and crushed into my assigned seats for class,” he read, a smirk on his pale, horribly beautiful face.