Focus, Hazel. This can’t be happening. Trey can’t be here. How is he here? How did he get outside the walls of the school?
“Let me inside.” Not-Trey’s breath brushed against my ear. “I don’t want to risk anyone recognizing me.”
I weighed my options. I didn’t have the knife. Not-Trey had me pressed against the wall, and yet he was asking permission. Sort of. If he’d wanted to hurt me, he could’ve done some serious damage by now.
And Treydidcome to me in my dreams, back at the Dunwich Institute. Maybe this was a dream. A very realistic, very lustful dream. I bit my lip and nodded.
Trey released my hand and stepped back, panting hard. I took in the sight of him – dressed in his Derleth uniform, usually immaculate but now torn at the knee and streaked with dirt. Twigs stuck out in all directions from his dark hair.
Questions burned inside my head. Fire sizzled in my veins. Who was I kidding – I wasn’t going to tell him to piss off. I stepped back into the RV and held the door open. Maybe-Trey picked up his satchel from where it had fallen and stepped inside, slamming the door shut behind him.
“Thanks for—” he started, but I cut him off.
“If you’re Trey, how did you get outside the walls of the school?”
Trey dropped his satchel on the RV’s tiny table. It made a heavythump. He folded down the edges to reveal an enormous chunk of stone, engraved with a circular sigil about the size of a dinner plate.
“You cut this out of one of the caves?”
He nodded. “It was Ayaz who figured it out, although he doesn’t know it yet. He did a presentation for alchemy class about a magician who used a sigil to trap a demon inside. The magician then moved the sigil all over the world, bringing the demon with it so it other covens could use it in their rituals. I wondered if I moved the boundary sigils, I could extend the boundary of the school as far as I wanted.”
“Clever.”
Trey dared a smile.
“I didn’t mean you. I was talking about Ayaz.” I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. “It must’ve taken some serious muscle to chip out that sigil.”
Trey grunted. He held up his hand. I gasped at the lattice of scars across his palm and fingers. Hands that were usually smooth and soft, used to being waited on, now bore the marks of manual work. It was a sign of his desperation. “I’ve been working it free ever since I found you in your dream. I stole a chisel and hammer from the maintenance shed, but it took so long to walk out to the boundary I could only do a bit at a time before I had to head back to school.”
I touched the edge of the stone, feeling the bumps of the chisel marks beneath my fingers. My chest tightened in that way it did when I was around the guys, when one of them did something that might’ve been considered sweet if I wasn’t so completely fucked up.
I wasn’t the girl guys chisel sigils out of caves for.
But apparently I was. Because there was the sigil, and there was Trey fucking Bloomberg, standing in the RV in vivid Technicolor, and he smelledso good.
“Why did you come looking for me? I’d have thought the first thing you’d do once you were free was to go on a complete bender or apply for college.”
“Why did I come for you?” Trey rested a hand on the wall behind my head. His breath feathered my face. That fire inside me leaped and danced against my chest. “Because I heard Dunwich burned down and you’d disappeared. I had to see if you were okay, and I figured if you escaped you’d try to find Zehra. Fuck, Hazel. After everything we’ve been through, you still don’t trust me?”
His words pinched in my chest. I tried to slide out from beneath him, but his bulk blocked my path. “Zehra’sdead, and I just escaped from an asylum your dad threw me in. They were going to lobotomize me, and it was Ayaz that put me there – your best friend. I think I’ve earned the right to be skeptical—”
Trey’s lips pressed against mine, and any protests I’d been formulating died on my lips. I wrapped my arms around his neck, clinging to him. All those nights alone in Dunwich, I’d thought of this moment, of seeing him and Quinn and Ayaz again. And now… Trey’s lips on mine were achingly real. The moan that escaped his mouth tore through me like a forest fire.
This kiss… this kiss…I can’t think… I can’t…Trey pulled me under. I tore my mouth from his. He had me pinned against the doorframe. I couldn’t duck around him, so I bent my neck back as far as I could, breathing hard. My lips tingled, my body aching with heat for whatever he wanted to do to me.
For whatever I wanted to do to him.
He came all this way… for me. He chipped away at that stone so he could reach me.
“Does that answer your question?” Trey traced a line along my jaw.
“Not entirely.” I tugged him toward the bed. The fire inside me flared high, drowning out any last warning.
I had toknow. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed Trey’s scarred hands on me. I needed those lips on mine, I needed to hear him moan with need again. Maybe with him, I could erase Ayaz’s betrayal from my mind.
We crashed down onto the narrow bed in a fury of limbs. Trey’s teeth scraped my lip. I tasted the tang of blood, but it only made me press against him harder, clawing at his body, trying to crawl inside him. The fire inside me longed to burn the clothes from his flesh, to destroy every barrier that held me from him.
I restrained myself, barely, tugging his hoodie over his head and moving my hands down his chest, tearing at the buttons on his rumpled shirt. He clawed at my clothes, dragging them from my body, his hands searing my bare flesh. Trey rolled on top of me. In the tiny space, our feet pressed against the wall. Hands and mouths and skin connected. All Trey’s hard corners came apart as he unleashed himself – the desperate boy, the reckless boy, the possessive boy.
