Nightfall (Devil's Night #4) - Penelope Douglas Page 0,70

“We’d be bound together in the secret forever.”

“Yeah, well, there’s no one I want to kill,” Kai said.

Damon just stared up to the sky before bringing the cigarette toward his mouth again. “Lucky you,” he murmured.

I looked down at him, his gaze still on the clouds, and I couldn’t help this feeling in my gut.

Michael and Kai needed something to happen, and I… I already felt it coming.

The first bell rang, and we all headed indoors, students racing up the steps and trying to maneuver their way down the halls.

She’ll be in class. She never misses school.

After stopping at the lockers and dodging conversations the others got tangled in on the way down the hall, I finally dove into lit class with my book and binder, looking to see who she planted herself around, so I knew whose ass to move.

But as I looked, I only spotted Chase Deery and Morgan Rackham in the classroom. No one else.

I stopped for a moment, faltering. Fucking great. This was what I got for rushing and trying to pretend like I wasn’t rushing. Now I got to sit here like a dumbbell, and if she came in and sat far away, I couldn’t move, or else she’d know I was waiting for her.

And I didn’t want her to know I was waiting for her.

Continuing to a seat toward the windows, I took out my phone, pretending to look busy.

People drifted in, filling the seats, but I didn’t look up as Kai, Michael, and Damon surrounded me.

As the minutes passed, I barely registered the teacher talking, the papers shuffling, or the nudge on my shoulder to pass the new packets back.

There was only one thing I was aware of as I sat there.

She wasn’t here.

Maybe she was taking her time. She hated this class, after all.

But as the class wore on and she was nowhere to be seen, I barely heard a fucking word the whole time.

We started a new book. The teacher passed them out and finished his lecture, and something was due by the end of the week, but if it wasn’t tomorrow, then I didn’t care.

I didn’t give a shit. Where the hell was she?

The bell rang, and everyone rose from their seats, piling out of the classroom, but instead of turning left outside the classroom, toward my next class, I turned right.

“Hey, where are you going?” Michael asked.

He and I shared government and economics.

“I’ll be at practice,” I assured him.

And I spun around and headed toward the library.

Coach would make me run laps once he found out I’d skipped classes, but I’d run so many laps the past few years, I was kind of perfect at it.

I couldn’t sit in class right now. My head ached and heated up like a fuse, and I refused to look for her, because even though I told myself it would be just to make sure she was safe—make sure everything was okay—it was because I was pissed.

She really went to any length to avoid me, didn’t she?

Rushing into the library, I made my way through the tables of students working and jogged up the open stairwell all the way to the third floor. I tossed my binder and books onto a table and pulled the group phone out of my pocket, heading down the long aisle and turning right down the fifth row. I reached up to a line of books and pulled out a fat, navy blue text, titled Data Entry and Transcendental Curves of Non-Regular Polytopes, something we know no one on this planet would even be interested in touching.

Opening the cover, I punched in the combination to the lock box inside, stuck the phone in, and closed it, placing it back onto the shelf. The communal phone that recorded all of our pranks had to be hidden somewhere no one would look and all of us could have ready access to it. Not sure why, since I ended up being the one to fetch it and record most of the videos.

But then I heard someone’s voice. “That title makes no sense.”

I turned my head over my shoulder, seeing a glimpse of brown hair through the bookcases.

I clutched the disguised lock box in my hand, pausing. Had she’d seen what I put in here?

I let go, peering through the bookcase and seeing Emory lean against the back wall, her head down with her hair and glasses covering her face.

“You weren’t in class,” I said.

Her chest shook, and I thought I saw