Toward me.
I slip deeper into the aisle just as she appears.
She doesn’t see me, and I realize she’s pushing up on her tiptoes as she reaches up, pulling a book from the shelf.
My heart is still racing as she flips through a few pages before walking back to her table. For a moment everything is quiet again, but then Livy freezes.
Her eyes lift slowly, purposefully, and zero in on the case where I’m hiding.
Her voice is barely louder than a whisper.
“Not again… please.” She knows someone’s watching her, and the plea that leaves her lips makes me feel like she’s been running from someone for a very long time.
Someone who isn’t me.
My girl’s words hit me like a punch to the chest. My little songbird’s voice is so sweet it has chills running over my body. The thought of her gasping for air when I fill her for the first time has my dick hardening in my jeans, and I’m a fucking piece of shit for that.
I rub my hand over my face because I can’t screw this up no matter how much I need her. Her safety comes first, then her, then me. I silently groan at the dirty way my mind works. I’ve spent my entire adult life searching for Livingston Rhodes, and I’m about to botch this whole plan because I want to know what she feels like naked under me.
She shoves her papers into her bag quickly.
Her chair scrapes, and it echoes through the archaic building. I hear the zipper on her bag pulling, but my eyes never leave her pretty heart-shaped face. Her eyes dart around the library one more time before she rushes toward the exit.
Then she’s gone, and I feel empty inside once again. I realize that I haven’t felt truly alive until tonight.
I stay hidden behind the shelves for several long seconds after the door closes behind my girl, and the fact that I can’t follow her is the greatest tragedy I can think of at the moment.
My fingers tighten around her scrunchie in my pocket. Is what I feel for her obsession? Is it love? Toxic? Unhinged? I don't really give a shit what anyone calls it, because it's all I know and no one will change it.
Someone else has been watching her. She knows it, which means whoever has been searching for her might already be closer than I thought.
LIVY
“Livingston, you have to come with us,” Miranda yells from the bathroom of our three-bedroom dorm. When I walked by, I saw that she was plastering sage green eyeshadow across her eyelids. She wants me to go to a rugby game with her and our other roommate, and it’s just not my vibe. I don’t like crowds or to be in situations where I can’t protect myself. “You haven’t been to one game yet, and the rugby guys are seriously the hottest on campus. Don’t roll your eyes at me, I know you are.”
I laugh quietly because I don’t want her to know that she was right, and my eyes were mid-roll when she called me out. Even though I’m pretending like she might accept a no for a legitimate answer, we both know she won’t. I don’t know Miranda very well because I’ve just been moved to this dorm unexpectedly after my last roommate left campus without a word. One thing I do know about Miranda is that she always gets her way, eventually.
I’ve spent the short time I’ve been here praying I could make it through St. Killian University without stepping foot into frat parties and sporting events.
I’ve spent a lot of my life in witness protection after my parents were brutally murdered in front of me. I don’t remembermuch of that day, or really the weeks surrounding it. I was only ten, but the memories come back in flashes. I’ve been bounced from one foster home to another. Sometimes they were group homes, sometimes they were couples who had debts to fulfill. I’ve almost been killed three separate times, and became homeless when I turned eighteen. I was in survival mode for the longest time, working as a waitress and moving from one motel I could afford to the other. Finally, a few months ago on my birthday, my inheritance was finally mine according to the court ruling. I knew I needed to get out of America and go somewhere no one would think to look for me.
That’s actually the whole reason I picked St. Killian. It’s small. Private. Elite. Tucked away in the middle of nowhere in the Irish countryside. It doesn’t hurt that the research library is a renovated castle.
It felt like exactly the kind of place where someone like me can disappear. I also didn’t have any connections in America. No friends. No family. No one to notice that I’m even missing.
I hurry down the hallway and into the living room of our dorm. This place is nicer than the single room dorm I was assigned when I first arrived. I shared one space with a roommate. There was no kitchen, no living room, and the bathroom was a communal one down the hall that the entire floor of rooms shared. I spend most of my time in the research library, and not because it’s a castle, but because I know the man who killed my parents is still out there, and I suspect he’s the one who has come after me all these years. I’m trying to figure out why he targeted them so I can protect myself. I know I can’t keep running forever, and my inheritance is only going to last so long.
Juniper is sprawled out on our black leather couch, erasing something in her sketchbook. Her long hair fans around her face, and she doesn’t even glance up when she speaks to me.
“She’s going to be insufferable if you don’t come to the game,” she says flatly.
I groan, and Juniper only laughs when I say, “I know she is. I just need to decide what’s going to be worse. Dealing with her if I don’t go, or dealing with a people-y place like a rugby game.”
“People-y places are the worst,” Juniper agrees, and I watch as her phone lights up with a picture of her stepbrother. He’s frowning in the picture, which is standard for him, but he also appears to have a pink lipstick print on his cheek. Juniper looks at the phone but makes no move to answer it, and the cheeky smirk that pulls at her lips makes me wonder what’s happening. As soon as the phone stops ringing, it starts again. This time she ends the call early. Again it starts, over and over until she says to me “Aren’t you going to ask?”
“It’s not really my business,” I say honestly, and she only smiles.
Juniper has to go to the game, I think? Her stepbrother, Kalen, is apparently some kind of star player, and they’re kind of inseparable. Miranda makes jokes about them being too close, and Juniper dishes jabs right back at her. I’ve seen them together a handful of times, and he’s very intense and always seems to only have his eyes on her. It’s none of my business what they’re doing or who they’re doing it with, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s so moody because he’s fighting his attraction to the girl who grew up in his house. The one who is supposed to be his sister, but instead she’s the object of his desire.
