And there I was thinking I was going to avoid all of this.
Now, not only do I have to find a way to explain to Wren Jacobi that I destroyed his father’s fancy boat, but I also have to tolerate this bullshit too? Urgh.
Mara Bancroft was not my friend.
I didn’t even like the girl.
She fucked around with the wrong dude—the same dude who’s boat I just sank, coincidentally—and one of our crazy teachers stabbed her thirty-eight times because of it. Mara paid the ultimate price for her infatuation with Wren Jacobi. Now, nearly a full year later, her body’s been discovered and none of us can get any peace because of it.
Riot House, the beautiful three-story architectural masterpiece my friends and I live in—just because we attend a boarding school doesn’t mean we’re lame enough to actually board there—comes into view, but I don’t stop. I fly right past the turnoff, continuing on, up toward the school. One second, I’m climbing, careening through switchbacks, drifting through the corners, forty-foot trees crowding the road to my left and right, the dense forest begrudgingly receding enough to allow for the narrowest sliver of blacktop, and then there it is: Wolf Hall Academy.
I’m a stubborn, arrogant, grumpy motherfucker, but even I can appreciate just how remarkable the place is. With its gothic turrets, pinnacles, and the crew of gargoyles chilling above the flying buttresses to the east wing of the sprawling structure, there are so many fascinating, unusual elements to the exclusive school. It certainly isn’t the kind of building you’d expect to find at the top of a mountain in the wilds of New fucking Hampshire.
The huge fountain at the bottom of the driveway sprays a light mist of water over the Charger’s windshield as I hang a left and make the final ascent up to the entrance…only to find the turning circle in front of the building choked by news vans. The place is a goddamn circus.
KTY Smile News.
Brookston Beacon.
The Daily Report.
The Dawn Chronicle.
World Report.
Half of the senior class sits on the front steps, gathered in small groups, watching the madness unfold. Two vans in particular—a Sprinter with the World Report logo emblazoned down the side and a dinged-up Ford Transit belonging to The Brookston Beacon—vie for the last open stretch of curbside right in front of a trimmed topiary. Well, fuck those guys. While they’re arguing and flipping each other off out of their windows, playing some weird game of chicken to see who’ll relinquish the spot first, I skip the low curb, cross a small patch of grass, and claim it for myself.
One of the drivers is feeling brave. “Hey, asshole! Move the fucking car!”
I get out of said car and skirt around the front of it, ready to knock the fucker’s teeth out—I will make this the worst day of his entire fucking life and I will fucking enjoy it, too—but someone grabs hold of me by the scruff of the neck, nice and tight.
“Not even back for thirty seconds and already spoiling for war?” a voice asks in a mocking English accent.
Dash.
Lord Dashiell Lovett the fourth, to be precise. One of my best friends and another resident at Riot House. Instead of greeting him, I smirk viciously at the moron who yelled out of his window, imbuing the look with as much malice as physically possible. The middle-aged punk in the ratty white t-shirt pales a little when I silently mouth the word “DIE.”
Dash lets me go. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you—”
“Naturally.”
“Naturally. But…why the fuck are you back so soon?”
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. His hair’s gotten even blonder in the short amount of time that I’ve been gone; his coloring is so dependent on how much time he spends out in the sun. I’d place money on the fact that he's been extending his morning runs in my absence, trying to level up his cardio game so that he can casually smoke me when I got home. I guess we’ll see about that.
“I sank the boat,” I say.
Dash recoils. “You did what?”
“You heard me.”
The horror on his face is borderline funny. It’d be hysterical if it wasn’t justified. “Jesus wept,” he whispers.
“I know. He’s gonna kill me. Yada yada yada.” I’ve had plenty of time to imagine Wren Jacobi’s wrath, and yes, it’s going to be impressive. I decided when I boarded the plane to come home from Corsica that I wasn’t going to worry about it, though. It’s a fucking boat. Correction: it was a fucking boat. I’ll buy him another one. Over the past three summers, I’ve accrued enough money from my modeling gigs to buy him eight super yachts, and that’s saying something. Those things are disgustingly expensive.
I doubt Wren will care about me replacing The Contessa, though. He’ll only care that I promised that I wouldn’t sink the boat and then promptly sank it.
“At least you didn’t set it on fire,” Dash mutters under his breath.
“I did. But the fire went out when it sank. The sinking seemed like the most relevant piece of information.”
Over the past three and a half years that I’ve spent living with Dash, there have been innumerable times that I’ve wanted to throttle him, but none so much as I want to throttle him now, when he says, “Can I be there when you tell him? I wanna see his face when—”
“This is Amanda Jefferson for The Dawn Chronicle, reporting live from Wolf Hall Academy in Mountain Lakes, New Hampshire—”
Dash whips around. A leggy brunette dressed in a flowy blouse and incredibly short skirt stands on the front lawn, staring straight down the lens of a camera. She clings to her microphone like she’s worried someone might confiscate it.
“This should be good,” I growl.
“—where the body of Mara Bancroft was recently discovered in a cave. Miss Bancroft was just sixteen when she went missing last year. Her friends and the teachers at Wolf Hall thought she’d gone to Los Angeles to live with a friend, though her parents didn’t believe this to be the case. James and Pamela Bancroft, Mara’s parents, were convinced that a terrible fate had befallen their daughter. Despite having searched the thick forest surrounding Wolf Hall Academy at the time, search teams found no evidence in the woods or anywhere else on this highly exclusive school’s grounds to suggest foul play.
“All of that changed two weeks ago. Sweet Mara’s body was found in a random and bizarre twist of fate by her friends, when the vicious sociopath responsible for Bancroft’s brutal murder attempted to murder them, too—”
I huff out a breath of laughter, folding my arms across my chest. “Sweet Mara? They’ve done no research on her, then.”
Beside me, Dash snorts, which earns him a filthy look from Damiana Lozano. “Don’t be an asshole,” she hisses.
“Oh, please.” Dash rolls his eyes. “You didn’t even like Mara and now you’re out here, dressed in black like you’re a Victorian widow going into fucking mourning. Such a goddamn hypocrite.”
There’s no denying it: Damiana is beautiful—blonde-haired, blue-eyed—but she’s so ugly on the inside that it’s hard to remember she’s pretty sometimes. Or at least remember to care. “Go fuck yourselves. Both of you,” she snaps. “If you must know, I got on really well with Mara.” She gets louder as she speaks, turning up the volume. Her attention has shifted effortlessly from us to the news crews. “I was one of Mara’s best friends. I loved her, and she loved me—”