Page 61 of An Academy for Liars

Claude’s mouth twisted into a rictus. “You’re just so smug,” he said. “You open a gate, and you think you have the answers to everything. But you don’t know. You don’t understand.”

Lennon kept her gaze on her book. “You should rest. You’re tired.”

He tore the textbook out of her hands and hurled it across the room. “Look at me.”

Empty-handed, afraid, but too prideful to show it, Lennon raised her gaze. “What is it, Claude?”

“He was murdered. I don’t care what anyone says. He was murdered, and Dante did it.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” said Lennon, trying to stay calm even as her heartbeat quickened. “Dante didn’t know that Benedict was dead. He was just as surprised as I was. I saw it on his face.”

“He’s a good liar.”

“Not that good,” said Lennon. “No one is that good.” But even as she said this, she wasn’t sure it was true. After all, wasn’t it Dante who’d called persuasion a great lie well told?

“He could’ve been lying,” said Claude, seizing on her uncertainty. “You know he could have.”

“Let’s assume you’re right,” said Lennon, keeping her voice low and soft and as sweet as she could manage. “Why would he take me to Benedict’s house if he knew Benedict was dead in there? If he had killed him, wouldn’t he have wanted to cover his tracks?”

Claude made as though he hadn’t heard her. He struggled so much with the words he attempted to say next that for the briefest moment Lennon considered the possibility that he was fighting a tongue tie, an advanced persuasive trick that prevented victims from saying specific words or pieces of information. “Because Ben told me he was scared of him before he died. He told me that Dante said horrible things to him. Ben wasn’t afraid of anyone, but he was afraid of him.”

“Look, I don’t know what it is you know about Dante, but I can assure you he wouldn’t just…I mean, he wouldn’t—”

“He wouldn’t what?” Claude demanded, cutting her short. “Spit it out. Tell me how surprised he looked. Tell me how he wept. Tell me something that makes him seem anything less than guilty.”

Lennon replayed the moment of Benedict’s discovery. Dante had remained composed, sure, but Lennon had expected no less of him. Stoicism wasn’t a damning offense. Just because he didn’t look as shocked as she felt didn’t make him a murderer.

“Benedict is dead,” said Lennon, and it seemed a risk to say those words aloud in front of someone who grieved him so acutely. As though he would blame her for his advisor’s undoing because she’d simply dared to give voice to it. “At some point you’ll just have to accept that.”

Claude seemed ready to slap her. Gone was the poised young man Lennon had met months ago. He was all grief and malice now.

He began to rage. The way he did every night. He put a fist through the wall. Cleared his bookshelves, textbooks and notes toppling to the floor. He kicked his bar cart and tipped it sideways.Somehow, he broke a window. Lennon didn’t see it happen—she was too busy backing away—but when she turned, Claude was half out the window, screaming terrible things about Benedict and Dante and everyone else. He forced himself through the break in the glass, carving up his forearms and stomach as he leaned outside.

Lennon screamed for help, and Sawyer burst through the door seconds later. The two of them attempted to pull Claude back, grabbing tight fistfuls of his shirt. But Claude wasn’t small or weak, and he was even stronger when he was drunk. He struggled for a few minutes and threw them both off his back in his desperation to get at the window. Lennon fell against the bed. Sawyer, however, fell harder and cracked the back of his head on the corner of Claude’s nightstand.

Lennon had had enough. She cast out a hand and caught Claude in a vicious psychic hold, seizing his limbs and forcing him back away from the window and onto the floor, where he thrashed and struggled and spit at her. So she locked his jaw shut to quiet his screaming.

“Stop,” said Sawyer, face screwed with pain, clutching the spot where his head had struck the nightstand. “You’re hurting him, please—”

In Dante’s class they had spent the past two weeks learning a skill calledanatomical persuasion. It involved careful interference with bodily functions—orders from the brain that could trigger a variety of symptoms—anything from sneezes to fevers or hives. It was amazing to Lennon just how many symptoms could be induced mentally. This type of persuasion seemed, to Lennon, the closest to real magic. And perhaps that was why she was so damn good at it.

Claude’s lips peeled away from his gums in an ugly sneer. “Let me go, you fucking bitch—”

Lennon knocked him out. One moment Claude was thrashing and screaming threats, the next he slumped lifeless to the floor.

Sawyer pressed unsteadily to his feet. “Oh my god—”

“He’s fine,” said Lennon. “I was gentle.”

Emerson, hearing this commotion, appeared in the doorway of Claude’s bedroom. If she’d been sleeping at all, she certainly didn’t look like it. “Enough,” she said, and applied a pressure to the words that cleanly severed Lennon’s hold on Claude, something that Lennon was formerly unaware was even possible.

Lennon broke to her knees.

Emerson peered down at her, something in her eyes that was not unlike fear. As if Lennon had been the one raging and breaking things and not Claude. As if she were the violent one, even though all she’d tried to do was subdue him. “Help me get him to the infirmary,” Emerson ordered.

Emerson and Lennon dragged a near-catatonic Claude to a bed in the infirmary, where he would remain for the duration of the semester, under a psychiatric hold.

“When he’s stable, he’ll be released into the care of his family,” Dr. Nave assured them on his way out of the infirmary. It was late, and with Claude now sleeping soundly, he looked ready to return to his own bed. “He just needs time to grieve and sober up.”

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