Page 130 of Twisting Beauty

Beside me, Nuala had gone white.

I caught her hand and pulled her in against my side.

Her fingers were ice, her whole arm shaking under my grip.

“Are you okay?” I asked her quietly.

For a moment, she didn’t answer. She just stared, eyes wide as they dragged her sister away. “They…” Her voice came out flat. “They said she had a break.”

I squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry.”

Nuala shook her head. “This isn’t right. Bridge…” Her voice cracked. “She isn’t crazy. She never had any of those kinds of problems. Never.”

Her gaze caught on something across the corridor and held, her whole face hardening, eyes narrowing. “At least not before she got involved with him.”

I followed her sightline.

Elias was halfway down the corridor, standing with Aoife and a couple of their cling-ons, leaning against the lockers with his hands in his pockets, watching the staff drag Bridgit toward the side door.

Elias smirked. He said something to them I couldn’t catch. They all laughed with him.

A strange crawling certainty settled under my skin. I had no proof. No logic to pin it to. Just the wrongness of him standing there, watching, and the way my body reacted to it before my mind could catch up.

He had something to do with this.

They dragged Bridgit through the side doors, her gaze locking on mine through the narrowing gap. Her voice shredded raw.

“Help me.”

Guilt slammed into me so hard I couldn’t breathe. I stood there, useless, as another girl was taken away while I could do nothing but watch.

I caught one last glimpse of Bridgit’s face before the doors shut her out, and the finality of it hollowed out my chest.

Her screaming faded behind it, muffled and distant, until the distance swallowed what was left of her voice.

The shocked silence around us began to unwind. Whispers turned to chatting and laughter. A locker slammed, loud enough to make Nuala flinch. Footsteps started up again as students moved between classes.

Nuala and I were still frozen to the spot even as the corridor swallowed Bridgit’s absence as if nothing had happened.

“Where are they taking her?” I asked Nuala.

Her mouth tightened.

“Magdalene.” She said it so quietly I almost missed it.

“No.” My grip on her hand tightened without meaning to.

Alistair’s drawing room rose up in front of me before I could shove it down. The velvet, the girls draped along the couches with their dresses askew and empty eyes. Maeve, sedated to the gills, her hand finding my arm before they dragged her away. Help me.

A sick certainty moved through me.

Bridgit was Alistair’s now.

If he could take Bridgit like that, he could take anyone standing in this corridor. He could take Nuala. He could take me.

I had to find a way to stop him.

Before we all became just another file in his study.