Page 104 of Gothikana

They must have said yes.

His jaw worked as he cut the call, turning to Corvina in his investigator mode, one that weighed lead in her stomach.

‘They just identified the body we found in the shack,’ Ajax told her, his eyes sombre. ‘Five-foot-three female, died two years ago from blunt force trauma to the head, burned post-mortem sometime in the last two months to make her harder to identify.’

‘Okay,’ Corvina drawled, not understanding where this was going.

‘The dead woman is Jade Prescott.’

CHAPTER 28

Corvina

Corvina stood, stunned.

‘That’s impossible,’ she heard herself gasp, her hands going to her head.

‘She was in the system,’ Ajax informed her as her mind spiralled, trying to make sense of what he was saying.

Suddenly a thought chilled her to the bone. She hadn’t been the only one to see Jade, had she? The idea briefly ran through her mind before she shook it. No, others had seen her. They had talked to her. She remembered it vividly. But were her memories wrong? Had her mind truly warped itself to the point where she had hallucinated memories for herself? Had she been so starved for a friend that she’d imagined the bubbly white-haired girl?

Corvina felt her heart pound, not knowing what was real and what wasn’t real at that point, her own narrative so unreliable she didn’t know what to think.

‘You saw Jade, too, right? My roommate?’ she asked Ajax desperately. ‘The girl with short white hair and green eyes?’

To her great, great relief, he nodded. ‘Yeah. Which begs the question, if the real Jade Prescott is dead, has been dead for two years, who the fuck is that girl?’

Corvina didn’t know.

Who had she been living with every day for months? Who had she befriended and cared for? Who was the girl who had hugged her every day and lit up her life with her light?

How could her instincts have gone so wrong? Was she wrong about Vad, too?

‘I’m going to go and figure this out.’ He ran a hand over his other palm. ‘Come find me if your boyfriend isn’t back in an hour.’

Corvina nodded, watching him go to the admin wing, and stood under the moonlight, confused beyond belief. Who was her roommate?

A sound from her left had her turning.

It was the caw of a crow from above her tower.

And it was odd because crows couldn’t see well in the dark, so they always returned to their nest to sleep at night, foraging for food after dawn. So why the hell was one flying around the tower and cawing?

Her eyes drifted down to her window, and she froze as a shadow moved inside her locked room.

Was it Jade?

Just as the thought crossed her mind, something slammed into her head from behind, and everything went dark.

‘Wake up, Vivi.’ Mo’s voice and the sandalwood scent were the first things in her consciousness.

The first thing she saw after opening her eyes was the moon.

As Corvina struggled to keep her eyes open through the fog in her brain, a pounding ache radiated from the back of her skull into her head. She took a second to realise she was lying on something concrete, somewhere high because the wind was forceful on her skin. Throat dry, mouth as though full of cotton, she tried to sit up.

And failed.

Panic swelled in her as she tried to move her arms again, feeling their leaden weight, and couldn’t move an inch, even though she couldn’t feel anything tying her down.

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