Page 108 of In Prey We Trust

But it is a bonus that this girl seems to have issues with the group I am focused on. Her baseless claims will distract everyone for quite some time and I will work without being detected for so much longer. They may even forget whatever the cheetah told them if they have to devote all of their energy to keeping the rabbit safe.

Love makes us all fools and in the end, we always pay for the privilege—I certainly did.

It took my life.

Dark Horse

Delores

It’s been four days since the admin stormed into the cemetery to break up the off-campus bash that led to a swath of missing students. Their laissez-faire attitudes from last year and earlier this semester disappeared when children of much more well-connected families disappeared in plain sight. We were all herded back to the campus, and they canceled classes while they scrambled to figure out how to pacify people like the Hopewells. We’re on a complete lockdown—no students are allowed off-campus unless parents pick them up. That caveat sent ripples through the rich, as most of them are nowhere near the campus their adult children attend, and sometimes, not even in the same country.

Which meant everyone, despite being over the age of adulthood, is now firmly trapped within the gates of Cappie.

It filled the atmosphere with the stench of fear and outrage. Exam results were posted automatically on Friday—I suppose someone in IT wasn’t told to shut that off—and it only heightened the tension across the grounds. My exams went very well except for the Cs in Shifter History and Diplomacy I didn’t deserve. My evil professors knew Aubrey would monitor the grades and scanned exams, so Blitzen and Rakoto had to be cautious about how heavy-handed they were with their bias. They hurt my average, but it won’t be unrecoverable with the finals. I don’t have to be fretting over my class rank, so I can focus elsewhere until they re-start classes next week.

To help distract the students, they gave extracurriculars special permission to practice or rehearse to help keep people’s minds off the situation, but having to be around one another made the shitty people worse and the angry outbursts more frequent.

The Plastics lost their shit on production assistants at the last rehearsals for #Viral—likely because the crowds for it next week won’t be worth posting on social media. The lockdown means only immediate family may attend and since many of the kids here have famous parents off doing their celebrity shit, barring cameras and press means the theater won’t even be filled. Their ire spilled over to the Games practice when they got into it with the obviously attention grabbing Heathers who made a scene about practicing without Purple. It devolved into a brawl before Coach Z and the Wicked Bitch of the Guidance Office pulled them apart.

I’ve stayed as far away from my enemies as possible because their shenanigans are serving no one but their egos.

There are real, dangerous things going on again and I can’t be bothered with this bullshit ‘pick me’ crap, so I’m keeping my head down and my six covered as I move around. Rennie assigned the Captain’s crew double team shifts to escort me from place to place when one of them isn’t available. I’d be surprised if he changed that when classes resume, but he’s not the only paranoid one. Felix insisted we start our days at five a.m. on weekdays to spar in the gym—a plan that has everyone irritable and grumpy.

Since it’s Saturday, I got a reprieve today—lucky me.

Fitz is curled up on the couch, hacking into every camera feed he can find that might clue us in to how the kidnappers infiltrated the party and disappear with the missing kids. They obviously didn’t come in their stupid mink-like hoods or someone would have noticed them—especially us. They also had to know specifically who they were looking for to identify costumed people and know they’re from a higher tier of families. They didn’t go for simply rich kids or even ones of super famous celebs like Selene. They targeted this at the next ring of Council kids and at least one major family. He’s convinced he can find them if he keeps scanning local and private security systems via his hacker bullshit. I don’t know if he can, but we all want to feel like we can do something.

I look over at the kitchen, sighing as I inhale the massive amount of food Chess is making. He’s stress cooking; I can tell. We’ll have to package a lot up for later in the week, but it’s keeping his cheetah calm. Aubrey took off for the Smithsonian to visit his experts after a growling row with Rennie, who has been haunting the bell tower for days. This recent attack has made him withdraw into himself and I know he’s struggling—we all know—but he won’t let anyone help. Even Aubrey doesn’t know what to do with him and their tiff this morning made that very clear. They snipe and spar, but I have yet to see them actually yell. It’s worrisome, especially since General Felix is off battering bags at the gym as if it will somehow thrash the enemies we can’t see.

I don’t want to add to their problems, but I’m on the struggle bus, too.

Guilt over feeling like karma did its job punishing both Purple and her arranged beau, Todd, has me in an ethical quandary. I know I shouldn’t feel so good about the Universe smacking them down and that she might be in real trouble but… I also remember the look in Todd’s eyes when he hunted me and the cackling laughter of the Heathers when Gold instructed the rest of the crowd to help him. I remember having to delete all my accounts because of the abuse Silver encouraged random people I didn’t know to come for me. The videos Pink posted for months until I left for Apex that fanned the flames. And the way Purple sat there and watched them all do it with a satisfied smirk because she was still on the inside so no one would dare cross her.

All of it runs through my brain like an audio-visual flashback when I try to talk myself out of feeling the schadenfreude consuming me. I’ve been healing slowly over the past year and a half; I even let Aubrey and Rennie hunt me without having an episode. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a part of me that can’t stop watching them whenever they’re nearby, worried about what scheme they’ll come up with to attack me next. They’ve spent a great deal of time since I emerged trying to punish, ruin, and even get me expelled simply because they treated me like shit and we aren’t friends anymore.

It doesn’t matter that I finally accepted we weren’t ever truly friends and Todd never liked me, much less love me. The hurt and trauma is still inside me, rearing its head when I least expect it and making me question every inch of progress I’ve made.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror, I can hear the taunts and see the things they said online, and it transports me to the months I spent locked in my room while they manipulated the rest of the world to spread ugly rumors and threaten to harm me. When you add that to the bullshit that happened at Apex—like Chess almost dying—I have a host of shit that I’m working through and much of it is their doing. So, yeah. I’m shamefully happy that someone who helped abuse and batter me might get what they deserve, even if it isn’t very evolved for me to feel that way.

I’m exhausted from being the bigger person and having it not count for shit.

“Baby Girl?”

Fitz’s question pulls me out of my head and I give him a grateful smile. “Yeah, big bad?”

“I love it when you talk about my dick when it’s not even out. Chessie, she called him ‘Big Bad.’ That’s even better than—”

“Fitz,” the cheetah says with a chuckle. “What were you going to say? I think you jumped the wheel, babe.”

He rolls his eyes and grumbles for a moment, then brightens up as a ding emanates from his laptop. “Ha! There we go. I was going to say Z is having a practice today and getting sweaty might help our girl work some of that tension out. At least, until after, when we can work the rest of our tension out from watching.”

I snort at the way Fitz’s mind draws a direct line from watching me fight other chicks in the ring to him and Chess fucking the shit out of me. His candor always makes me laugh and if I could steal even a tenth of his ‘IDGAF’ attitude, my morose shit about my exes would disappear. Fitzgerald Khan is one hundred percent authentically who he is at all times and he absolutely doesn’t notice—much less care—if people like him or not. I think a lot of my confidence started building just from being near him all the time last year and I didn’t realize it.

Huh. I’ll be damned.

Climbing across the cushions, I grab his laptop and sit it on the tabletop in the middle of our nest. He beams when I straddle his legs, looking at his face as my hand cups his cheek. “Fitzgerald Khan, you are the psycho sunshine in my world and I will never ever regret talking to you on prom night or letting you stalk me ever since.”

“Did you hear that, Chessie?! That’s as good as an ‘I love you’ from our girl. She admitted she knows. I told you assholes I wasn’t being intrusive; she likes it.”

---