up are going to come tumbling down at some point.” He winks at me before bounding off to find his next sparring partner.
Hmm. Maybe I am making progress with Dmitri after all. I’m starting to wonder if the reason he doesn’t like me has less to do with me and more to do with the reaction he gets around me.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m overestimating myself. It’s kind of arrogant to think a guy’s being all dickish because he secretly wants to sleep with me, isn’t it?
After class, the other students linger and chat while I make a beeline for the locker rooms, still thinking about what happened earlier. I’m not quite sure what to do. I see Dmitri all the time; we have classes together, and now we’re rooming together too. Should I say something? Ask him what’s going on between us? What his deal is? That was definitely his cock I felt in his pants, and it was definitely hard. Women don’t have such an obvious giveaway of their arousal as men do, but he had to feel how turned on I was too. I was squirming under him, practically humping his leg. Surely—
I open the door to the showers and freeze, all thoughts of Dmitri’s cock flying from my mind.
There’s a girl lying on the floor.
Her body is sprawled awkwardly on the tile. She’s fully dressed, one side of her face bruised… and she’s not moving.
My heart leaps into my throat, and I dart forward, going to my knees beside her to check her pulse. It thrums a steady beat beneath my fingertips, and now that I’m closer to her, I can tell she’s breathing.
Not dead, thank fuck. Just knocked out somehow.
What happened? Who did this to her?
“Help!” I yell. When a response doesn’t come fast enough, I run out of the locker room into the hallway. “Hey, somebody help! There’s an unconscious girl in there!”
One of the practical magic professors, an older man named Nathan Perkins, jerks to a stop several yards from me. His bushy brows draw together, and I’m about to start yelling again when my words finally seem to penetrate his brain. He springs into action, calling for the campus medics and staying with me while we wait for them. It only takes them five minutes to arrive, but by the time they do, several other students have entered the locker room, gaping and whispering in scared voices.
The medics lift the unconscious girl onto an enchanted stretcher that then rises to hover about three feet off the floor. The gathered students part like the Red Sea as the medical staff carts her out of the locker room.
Perkins turns to follow them, but stops and turns back to me, squeezing my arm. “Thank you for raising the alarm, Miss Sinclair. I’m sure Miss Walt will be fine.”
I nod numbly, and he slips out of the locker room, seeming relieved to get out of here.
Miss Walt.
My brows draw together as I try to remember the girl’s first name. I think she’s a third year; I vaguely recall seeing her around, but I don’t have any classes with her. There are several different sections of the Combat class—since it’s a mix of first through third year students, it would be unwieldy to have us all in the room at the same time—and she’s not in my section. Aside from passing her in the hall a few times, I haven’t really had any interaction with her, and I feel oddly bad about that.
This isn’t a huge school, so I could theoretically know everyone’s name even if I’m not friends with all of them. But I haven’t put a lot of effort into getting to know the whole student body.
Not that my knowing her would make any of this better. I’m not the one who attacked her, after all.
But who did attack her? And why? Was it an assault gone wrong?
She was in the showers, so I could almost buy that—but she was fully dressed. And I didn’t see any rips or tears on her clothes, so it’s not like someone was trying to get in them. There were just those weird bruises on her face. A prank that didn’t go the way anyone expected?
Over the next few days, the whole school buzzes with talk of the attack. Everyone’s got theories about it, but nobody’s got any answers. The administration isn’t saying anything either. Cam tells me the rumor is that the girl—whose first name turns out to