I paused. “You’re dating a guard?”
“Well—” she started, but I cut her off.
“Isabella! Do you know what this means?” I snapped.
She stared at me, half terrified, half worried.
“What?”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Very carefully.”
“I got it!”
“Are you serious? He told you?”
Isabella nodded excitedly, shutting the door to my dorm. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to get a guy to tell you whatever you want when you promise a blow?—"
“Bella! Just tell me what he knows,” I said, sitting up in my armchair.
Isabella watched me with heavy indecision. “Okay, fine. But promise you won’t tell anyone else?”
“Fine, I promise,” I said.
She sighed and looked around to ensure we were alone.
“Devon told me they found something near where Skylar was last seen in the catacombs—by you,” she said. “It was a cuff link—with a raven on it.”
After classes the next day,I headed to my dorm, deep in thought. I was pretty sure I’d just bombed a final exam, but I didn’t even care. I couldn’t get Malakai and Everson out of my head. If the cufflink did belong to Malakai, then that must’ve been why he was obviously threatening Everson. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d hurt Skylar. Everson had to do something about it, too. But would he hurt an Initiate?
I lit the wall sconce and nearly burned myself when I saw someone sitting in the corner. Melanie was there, the shadows of the unstable flame flickering across her face. “What the hell are you doing in here?” I snapped, breathless.
“Thought we would catch up,” she mused. “It has been a while.”
I growled in irritation. “Get out of my room.”
“I know what you were doing out there,” she said. “What did you find?”
“How did you know what we were doing?” I asked. “Are you having us followed?”
Melanie’s lips twisted upward malevolently. “Don’t you have too many investigations going on?”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped.
“Are you not also trying to figure out why your mother is dead and if the scary shadows are your fault or not?” she asked.
I didn’t move a muscle.
How did she know about that?
My body was shivering, as if the cold I’d felt that night had taken hold of me again. It started in my head, seeped into my eye sockets, and down my neck to my lungs. An icy vine drove through me, forcing the chill to spread.
I thought of the Aurkai room and the files they had on all the Initiates. Could that have been in there? Those would have been sealed records, making it hard to access them within the system. And this bitch had access to it?
Heat welled up from the pit of my stomach like I might breathe fire, stifling the vining veins of ice in my chest.
“Ezreal found your account of that evening to be quite interesting. He said he once met your mother here; that her death wasn’t a great loss, be it by shadows or a mentally unstable little girl,” she said, rising from the seat and nearing me with a taunting smirk.
She only narrowly dodged my fist and caught the second in her hand, her grip surprisingly strong.
