If Dean tells anyone what I did, I’ll be executed, just like Ozzy’s mother. I’ll be forced to kneel before the school so the Chancellor can slit my throat.
This is the situation in which I find myself as I stand on the sunbaked deck of the ship. One wrong move, and Dean will throw me to the wolves. My only chance of survival is to hope and pray that somewhere, deep inside of Dean, there lives a spark of humanity.
Or maybe he’ll just get bored of fucking with me and move on to something else.
I can’t see any other way out.
“Cat!” Perry Saunders cries, throwing her arms around me in a hug. “How was your summer?”
Perry is blonde and bubbly, curly-haired and apple-cheeked. She dresses like an American Girl doll, already wearing the plaid skirt and jaunty academy jacket that forms our school uniform.
My roommate Rakel was likewise crossing the deck to greet me, but as soon as she sees Perry, she makes an abrupt about-face to head in the opposite direction. I grab her by the arm and haul her back, deciding that this year Rakel is going to be social whether she likes it or not.
“Perry, have you met my roommate?” I say, slinging my arm around Rakel’s slim shoulders so she can’t get away.
“No!” Perry chirps. She holds out her hand to shake. “Periwinkle Madeline Saunders, nice to meet you.”
Rakel forces a smile that looks more like a snarl and shakes Perry’s hand with two fingers in a pincher grip. “Just . . . Rakel,” she says.
“I wish the Accountants roomed down in the Undercroft!” Perry says, enviously. “All the other divisions have such cool dorms, and ours is dull as dishwater. It might as well be cubicles in our tower—we don’t even have a view off the cliffs.”
“We don’t have windows at all,” Rakel reminds her in a monotone.
“I know, but at least that’s spooky!” Perry says.
Rakel flashes her dark eyes at me in a way that clearly intimates that she will seek revenge on me later for involving her in this conversation. I smile back at her, knowing that nobody else wants to room with Rakel, so she’s stuck with me.
“Who does your nails?” Perry says, looking at Rakel’s silver-ringed hands. “They look like claws!”
“They grow that way naturally,” Rakel deadpans, while Perry’s eyes go big and round in total belief.
Anna Wilk and Leo Gallo climb the gangplank hand in hand. Anna is one of Zoe’s best friends. She was exceptionally kind to me during my first year at school when I was drowning in terror at the arcane demands of Kingmakers.
“Cat!” she cries, hugging me.
I saw Anna in Chicago over the summer, but she squeezes me like we’ve spent months apart.
“It makes me so sad to see you here without Zoe. Are you gonna come hang out with me and Chay all the time anyway? You have to fill your sister’s spot, or we’ll be miserable.”
“I would love that,” I promise gratefully. I wasn’t sure if Anna and Chay would want me hanging around, now that Zoe decided not to return to school.
“I miss Miles, too,” Leo says glumly. “Trust him to take off right when he was finally turning into a reasonable human.”
Dean Yenin is next to board the ship, flanked by his best friends Bram Van Der Berg and Valon Hoxha. Instinctively, I shrink back behind Leo’s substantial bulk, but it’s pointless. Dean’s sharp eyes alight on me at once. For the first time in memory, I see his face break out into a smile.
His smile is far worse than his scowl. The even white teeth don’t fool me for a second. That’s a grin of pure malice.
Oh my god, I can’t fucking do this.
“What’s he so happy about?” Leo says suspiciously.
“Who knows!” Anna shrugs, careless and unconcerned. “Let’s go find somewhere to sit before the whole ship fills up.”
We make our way toward the bow, where the air is fresher and the sea breeze blows directly into our faces. We’re departing from the port in Dubrovnik, sailing toward the isolated island of Visine Dvorca where Kingmakers’ castle fortress resides.
Once the ship sets out, we won’t return to civilization until the spring.
I’ll be trapped on that island with my tormenter.
Perry peels off from our group to join her Accountant friends. To my pleasure, Rakel actually sticks around. Despite despising me at the beginning of last year, she and I are slowly becoming something like actual friends.