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“Now to the reason I kidnapped you from the training hall.”

Camille lifted the clothes with both hands as if she had planned an attack on me.

Chapter 32

Bayla

Becoming Aquatic

Sarah Spring

The literature seminars were what gave me my last bit of strength in all this chaos. Especially when my friends were all preoccupied with their own dramas and I was more of a burden to all of them than a help.

Alarik talked about the Victorian era in such a way that his words and the sparkle of fascination that still shone in his eyes after all his years of teaching awakened my own fascination with this literary era.

Just the way he talked about the Brontë siblings’ ideas made me want to raise my literary knowledge to a level where I could keep up with him in discussions. Something that would take me years, if not decades.

Everything was fine as long as he was talking, but as soon as we had to read and analyze texts, I slipped back into my spiral of thoughts.

I was already finished, but the others were still working, so my gaze wandered outside on its own, out to one of the overgrown courtyards of the east wing, where the first bony lily vines were sprouting new shoots, as if they ever had a chance against the radical ivy that was trying to swallow the entire Vanderwood.

The lilies that grew in Vanderwood were strange. As far as I knew, normal garden lilies grew upright from bulbs. Just as strange were the black butterflies, or the white moths, which, whenever they fluttered around my candles at night, left me with an oddly pleasant feeling in my stomach. As if there were more moths trapped inside my stomach, longing for the deceptively peaceful glow of the candles, unaware that it was the wrong light everything that had been withering away little by little in my inner darkness longed for.

The burning tingling returned to my wrists, intensifying on both sides, and I suppressed the urge to rub my fingers over the spots, blocking the aggressively swelling darkness inside my head by focusing my thoughts on the tangible, letting them glide toward all those things that were trying to devour me in my present. The whole goddamn town.

The mere thought of how these people had simply taken my mother away from me had already burned itself so deeply into my mind that I should have been able to cope with it, but the hope inside me that I could somehow get Mum out of there brought treacherous tears to my eyes.

I tried to blink them away, leaned back in my chair, and turned my gaze away from the courtyard, letting it wander around the seminar room.

I got stuck on the only ivy whose creeping proliferation did not make me feel uneasy.

Alarik's green eyes.

Until just now, he had been sitting in his seat writing, but now his focused gaze was on me.

Great. I was about to cry like the oversensitive weakling I was, and my professor caught me.

I didn't even want to know what he was thinking. Probably that Harlow had sent me death threats, that I was planning to jump off one of Blairville's picturesque cliffs...

The tingling in my wrists intensified.

I suppressed a sigh.

In Blairville, a kidnapped family member was nothing compared to all the things my friends had to endure.

Pull yourself together, Bayla. You're going to free Mum. They can't just hurt her. Everything will be fine.

It felt like a lie.

My whole life was one big lie.

Alarik's gaze turned scrutinizing, which didn't make it any better.

I forced a miserable smile to let him know that everything was fine, but his gaze remained fixed on me as if he didn't believe me.

And so I decided to skim through my analysis once more until Alarik finally went through the text with us, while I tried my best to cover up my little emotional breakdown by participating in the discussion.

But with every minute that passed, a question solidified in my mind. A question that was too pathetic, but if I didn't ask Alarik, it would resemble giving up.