Virtue (Briarcliff Secret Society Series Book 2), Page 2

  These people have their edicts and the prices they pay to stay at the top of the social chain. Chewing on the fragile bones of us lower mortals is part of their game.

  Shoulders slumped more from the emotional weight of this school than Ivy’s grip, I walk with her to the edge of the lawn, but not before glancing back, one more time, at James’s gleeful maw, still spouting words like “tap that,” and “dick her down,” with Chase’s glacial demeanor beside him.

  My steps slow as I study Chase’s walled-off features, too rigid and controlled to ever be confused with apathy. His eyes smolder through his visage as he stares straight ahead, a warning sign I notice too late.

  Tempest has enough time to shoot his arm out before Chase launches and punches James in the face, toppling all three of them to the ground. Chase lands on James and doesn’t stop pummeling his best friend.

  “FIGHT!” someone bellows before a mass of prep-school-uniformed bodies jump into the brawl, arms and fists flying.

  “Students!” Marron roars, and a few other professors join him in attempting to break up the fight. Addisyn hops back and nearly butt-plants into the fountain.

  “Holy,” Ivy breathes while scuttling me through the new gaps in the crowd. “You’d think it’d be blasphemous to do this at someone’s memorial, but you know what? I think Piper’s enjoying this, wherever she is.”

  “No kidding,” I respond, my chest tight. “Her ghost must’ve possessed at least one of them. My bet’s on James.”

  “Please, she had all three of them in her clutches well before her murder.”

  I squint in Ivy’s direction but work to drown any other conflicting emotions threatening to surface. I’m not upset she’s so cavalier about Piper’s death—Piper wasn’t exactly loved by anyone except her followers. I am, however, concerned over Ivy’s tidbit that Piper had more influence over the boys than I gave her credit for.

  Don’t hope that the baby could’ve been one of theirs, not Chase’s.

  Ivy has no idea I’ve slept with Chase, and I’m not eager to confess.

  We duck through the outdoor archway connecting the East and West wings, then burst through the doors of the academy, the natural hush of the heavy architecture descending upon us once the doors fold shut.

  I take Ivy’s hand and we cut through the foyer and to the front. I’m eager to finish this shitty day with some raspberry bars, Netflix, sweet wine, and a good friend.

  Yet, Piper’s ghost has broken off from the fight, trailing behind me in the cavernous Briarcliff halls, and she’s relentless in her wails: There’s so much about this school you can’t forget, not even for one night. Don’t ignore me, Callie! Don’t dismiss my death!

  Ugh. Happy birthday to me.

  And happy birthday to you, too, Piper.

  3

  Thorne House is a modern addition to the otherwise Gothic ski lodge feel of Briarcliff Academy’s 170-year-old structures. Automatic sliding doors allow us immediate entry, and the college student manning the front desk lets us through after a careful study of my student ID card. Ivy, she knows on sight.

  You’d think I’d have an “in” with knowing one of the front desk staff of the dorms, allowing me ingress and egress well past curfew, but honestly, none of them cared enough to stop any of us.

  Not until Piper died.

  We take the elevator to the third floor, chatting softly as we hit the carpeted hallway and head to my room.

  I swipe my keycard against the hotel-style lock, and when it flashes green, push in. Ivy’s so involved in her discussion of how soothing British baking shows on Netflix are that she fails to notice my abrupt stall in the doorway, and oomphs into my back.

  It’s not enough to throw me off balance, but it does the job of jarring the reality of what I’m seeing into my brain.

  My mouth falls open. “What the…?”

  “Huh?” is all Ivy can come up with. “Is this your stuff?”

  “Uh…” I scan the main room as my brows draw in. “No.”

  A gray leather sectional, so new, the scent of leather cleaner permeates the air, plops its fancy, tightly sewn ass where my pink suede secondhand piece I found on Main Street used to be. At least 45 inches of flat screen TV is bolted to a wall where I’d just installed floating shelves to hold photos of my remaining family, and a monstrosity of an espresso machine gurgles its presence beside us through its sleek nickel finishing, a spot I’d reserved for my Black & Decker drip.

  Okay. Maybe I’m not mad at the last one.

  But, seriously?

  “I think you have a new roommate,” Ivy states behind me.

  I attempt an eye-roll over my shoulder. “You think?”

  My sarcasm is fast overshadowed by a petrified thought when the door to Piper’s old room swings open.

  Oh God, don’t let it be another Piper…

  A figure steps through the doorframe. “Hey.”

  Ivy gasps so audibly that I turn to her with a frown.

  “S-sorry,” she says while a hand flutters against her mouth. “It’s just … I didn’t think…”

  The girl smiles with a wry tilt to her thin lips and finishes for Ivy, “…that the ghost of Emma Loughrey would come back to Briarcliff to claim all your souls for the Reaper?”

  Well. That’s enough of an introduction to leave my jaw hanging. “Holy shit, Emma?”

  Deep lines form in Emma’s cheeks. “Heard of me, have you?” Her steely bronze gaze, so like Chase’s it’s unsettling, lands on Ivy. “I see the town crier still has her horn.”

  I bristle at the connotation. “Ivy’s been nothing but awesome, so if you don’t have anything nice to say about her, then—”

  Emma rolls her eyes. “Let me guess, don’t say anything at all? Nice one, whatever-your-name-is.”

  She turns to her room and shuts the door with a firm click.

  “It’s Callie!” I call through the thick, mahogany wood. “And thanks for doing what I was going to say, which was to fuck off!”

  “I don’t think that’s coming across as intimidating as you hoped it would,” Ivy mutters into my ear. “Your voice is kind of high and wobbly—”

  Clasping Ivy’s hand, I lead us into my bedroom and shut the door. I splay my back against it, while Ivy whirls in the center of my room, her arms spread wide. “Holy moly, do you know who that is?”

  I nod, suddenly antsy that some of my first words to Chase’s twin sister were fuck and off.

  Not exactly trying to fit into the family’s good graces, are we, Callie?

  “She wasn’t exactly too friendly with her greeting, either,” I say in a lame attempt to defend myself.

  Ivy isn’t listening. She continues a slow pirouette, her voice wandering and stupefied. “I haven’t seen her in … gosh, it has to be over two years. She’s changed. Like, really changed. I barely recognized her, and oh my God, do you know what happened to her before she left?”

  After a thick swallow, I nod. In a brief moment of weakness, Chase divulged a little about his sister’s assault and the resulting fire while we lay in bed together, our hands intertwined.

  A skitter of goosebumps pass over my flesh, at both the tragedy surrounding Emma and the remembrance of Chase’s warm, naked body enveloping mine.

  “Really?” Ivy asks, her high-pitched question refocusing my thoughts. “How’d you find out?”

  “Oh, uh, during my research on the founders in the new library, I think I asked someone why it was called the ‘new’ library. They told me how the old one burned down and that Emma was trapped inside.”

  And she’s the one who burned it down, but I don’t mention that part.

  “Yeah.” Ivy nods sagely. “I didn’t think people still talked about it. Chase put down a terrifying gag order on anyone who dared to mention his sister. Who’d you ask?”

  “Can’t recall,” I say, then clear my throat and move from the door to perch on my bed. “But I was warned she was … different.”

  “I knew about the b
urns,” Ivy breathes as she sits next to me. “But I had no idea she’d, um, she’d…”

  “Gained weight?”

  “Yes! She used to be…”

  “She’s still beautiful,” I whisper, recalling those bronze, goddess-colored eyes and streaming natural highlights of elbow-length, blonde hair.

  It was greasier than Ivy probably remembered, matted and tangled. Emma’s cheeks were dimpled and flushed with natural pink, but they were swollen, her jowls heavy with what I recognized not as weight gain, but a demanding, inner hunger yawning wide, constantly starving because it kept being fed the wrong emotions: anger, hate, resentment.

  Only one form of sustenance could stop the clamoring and quell that gnawing ache forever. Revenge.

  “She also came back mean,” Ivy says. “But I can understand the why of it.”

  And there it is. I take a long study of Ivy, imputing her current expression onto every other student’s face who Emma is about to cross paths with. It’s an expression of pity. Relief it wasn’t them. And while Ivy wasn’t wearing it, I knew shock and revulsion would soon follow.

  Emma chose to wear defensive armor to protect herself, but I wondered, with the wolves in this arena now led by Falyn Clemonte, how impervious Emma’s sarcastic, angry armor will actually be.

  More importantly…

  “Does Chase know?” I ask.

  Ivy shrugs. “You would think so, but, hell, I don’t think anybody knew Emma would finish her senior year here. I mean, what kind of therapist would send her back to Briarcliff?” Ivy leans closer, as if divulging a scandalous secret. “She wasn’t just trapped in the old library, Callie. She was attacked there, first. Brutally beaten. I think both her eye sockets were fractured, and her back was broken—”

  I hold up a hand, the imagery making me sick. “Let’s not judge her new self immediately, okay? This is clearly going to be tough for her, and she’s my new roommate. I’d like to maybe not become enemies with this one.”

  “Okay, sure, Miss Fuck Off.”

  “Yeah,” I mumble, sliding my laptop onto my lap. “I’m gonna have to work on that.”

  Ivy and I finally settle on Netflix’s new rom-com and not a baking show (Birthday Girl wins), but leaning back against the headboard and sharing a bottle of wine does nothing to calm my racing heart, nor does the sound on my computer obscure the noises coming from the other side of my door.

  Emma must have started her move-in process when the entire school congregated in Briarcliff’s quad. It makes sense; the campus was practically deserted. There was no one to notice the rental truck’s tires bouncing across the academy’s cobblestone driveway and to the western edge of the property’s surrounding forest, where the Thorne and Rose Houses lie. It certainly escaped Ivy’s and my notice when we wandered over here using the student paths.

  The speed in which her furniture made it inside is also unsurprising. The rich live as such, with white-gloved positioning, quiet alterations, and seamless decoration. With the gaps of quiet between wood dragging against floors and low-voiced instruction getting longer, I assume Emma is about done with her transition.

  One question remains: Where the hell did my stuff go?

  Visions of my furniture leaning against the dorm’s dumpster causes a shudder, and I shift on my bedding to escape it.

  “Meh. That was okay,” Ivy says.

  Credits roll on the movie I daydreamed through, and I move to close the laptop.

  “That part where the monkeys came and devoured everyone’s faces was cool, though,” Ivy continues.

  “Mm.” I slide off the bed and place my computer on my desk.

  “Dude!” Ivy shouts.

  I jump, nearly toppling onto my desk chair. As I right myself, she adds, “You didn’t watch a darned thing on the screen, did you?”

  “Not really,” I admit.

  “I get it. You have a lot going on. I mean—more than your usual pile of a lot going on.” After a light grunt, Ivy rises from my bed. “Do you want me to stay? I’m not sure how this will go with you and Emma.” Ivy grins. “I kind of want to spectate.”

  “Nope.” I give her a firm shove to my door. “I doubt she’ll leave her room, anyway.”

  Ivy says over her shoulder, “She has to go to the bathroom sometime.”

  “Then I’ll be in my room. Thanks for the support, but I’ll be fine.”

  “If you say so. But text me for anything, okay? If you need an escape route, I’m pretty sure I can be the Ivy to your ivy.”

  I raise a curious brow.

  “You know, out your window.” Ivy gestures behind me. “It’s unclear if all that clinging ivy will hold your weight, but I can wait down below to catch you during your grand escape if need be.”

  I can’t help but smile at the image she’s conjured. For sure my ass under this skirt would be on full display.

  “There we go.” Ivy nudges my side. “I was hoping to get a smile from you on your birthday.”

  My chest warms at her words, but before I can reciprocate, she gets there first and envelopes me in a long hug.

  “Love you,” she says. “Now you can vote and own a firearm. Happy friggin’ eighteenth, my friend.”

  I laugh into her perfumed shoulder, notes of wildflowers playing against my nostrils. “You’re the best.”

  “Later,” she says once she releases me, and when she opens my door, carefully peers around it. “Coast is clear. I’m out.”

  Shaking my head on a laugh, I pull the door wider as Ivy beelines to the front door, making a U-turn only once when she notices a line of Emma’s shoes she’s yet to put away. Ivy flutters a longing hand through the air above the Louboutins, Jimmy Choos, and Manolo Blahniks before she shuts the apartment door behind her.

  I’m also distracted by the gorgeous array of prestigious color and design, blown away that Emma’s brought such expensive footwear to school. One: where will she wear it, and two: what about her self-imposed hermit status?

  So what? I chastise myself. One can be a hermit while donning fabulous heels.

  A shuffling in my periphery draws my eye up. Emma hovers in her doorway, staring at me as warily as I was studying her shoes.

  In the fading golden hour of the setting sun through the bay windows, Emma’s features are softened, but only skin-deep. One eyelid stretches slightly more crooked than the other. Her hair, as wavy and tousled as a beached mermaid’s, is cut short around her face to obscure the pink-tinged scar trailing across her forehead. She’s chosen an oversized hoodie to hide her upper body, with a faded Briarcliff crest and two oars crossed behind it, Briarcliff Crew written underneath.

  I’m so busy wondering if that’s Chase’s sweatshirt that I almost miss the crooked, re-healed knobs of her fingers pulling at the hem to cover herself better.

  My heart swells with the need to explain my staring, but experience has taught me it’s no use when a person already sees herself as a target.

  Instead, I’m the first of us to experiment with a quiet, “Hey.”

  She nods, her lips pursed, then scuttles to pick up her shoes lining the wall of our small entryway.

  It’s a new side of Emma I’m seeing now that Ivy’s gone, and I don’t think Emma’s hesitant, uneven gait is solely due to her injuries.

  “I’m not like the rest of them,” I try saying. When her metallic stare pings against mine again, so steady compared to the way she moves, I have to force my breaths even. “I mean—I won’t bother you. If you don’t want me to. You’re here for senior year, right? We can always study together, or—”

  “Are you as vacant as you look?” Emma spits. My heels knock backward against the floorboards at her vitriol. “If so, let me sum up my newly fucked-up status for you. I’ve missed two years of classes due to nearly having my skull turned to mush by assholes who probably still attend this school. I’m starting twelfth grade late while finishing up the last of my tenth and eleventh grade papers, because my dad paid the crooked headmaster double a normal stude
nt’s tuition to allow me back in, and also had the gracious thought to put me in my murdered friend’s old bedroom, along with the empty-headed roommate that comes with it. Or, maybe you’re not such a dumbass. You were a suspect in Piper’s death for a hot second, weren’t you?”

  So was your brother, I want to retort, but bite my tongue.

  Emma sneers. “Don’t do that. Don’t stop yourself from saying what you really think because you’re sad for me, like the very thought of what I look like—”

  I storm forward.

  “If you’re trying to satisfy your hatred for this school by being cruel to me,” I say, “Consider your aim a misfire.”

  After a beat of hesitation, she lifts a scarred brow. “Putting you down does nothing to lessen how much I despise Briarcliff. Maybe I’m just doing it because I want to.”

  Ugh. She is so like her brother. “I’m not exactly a fan of this place, either, but here we are. Attending anyway, for our own reasons.”

  “And why would a girl like you hate a school like this?” She laughs dully. “This is the fast-track to the best colleges in the world. The cafeteria menu is designed by a Michelin starred chef. You’re practically guaranteed an engagement to the son of some corporate empire if you play your connections right. Or daughter, if that’s where your preference lies.” She hums in thought. “I don’t recognize you from before, and you’re not staying on Scholarship Row so … who did you sleep with to get a spot here? Someone’s dad? Headmaster Marron?”

  I ignore her goading. “Perhaps I’ve witnessed the price a soul has to pay for that kind of unlimited access.”

  Emma narrows her eyes, hopefully stumped by my honesty.

  “Can we agree to co-exist?” I ask on a sigh. “Because I have to tell you, living with a person who despises you is exhausting.”

  A whisper of a smile flirts at one corner of her mouth, but she squelches it with a glower. “I’ll get back to you on that.” Arms laden with shoes, she turns back to her room, but tosses over her shoulder, “Don’t fucking touch my coffee.”