Page 84 of Gothikana

Corvina didn’t believe all the rumours, mostly because the voices in her head had been quiet. Yet, a sense of relief wasn’t what she felt as they got closer to the Black Ball. It was a sense of doom, a sense of something being terribly, horribly wrong. Dr Detta never called back and that was even more frustrating.

‘I can’t explain it,’ she told Vad as she sat in the library armchairs after an intense, blissfully orgasmic round of sex early in the morning. ‘It’s like… my instincts are screaming at me. Something bad is going to happen and I don’t know what it is.’

Vad poked the wood in the fireplace, sitting on his haunches, his arresting face lit up by the firelight. The weather had definitely taken a turn for the better during the daytime, but early mornings were still too cold.

‘Is there anything in particular that triggers it?’ he asked, taking a seat in the plush red and brown armchair beside hers, buttoning up his shirt that was missing a button somewhere on the library floor.

Corvina paused to consider his question, trying to think about when she got the feeling. Her heart sank. ‘It’s always the strongest afterwe’re together. I… I think it might have something to do with you, or maybe your family?’

He put a hand on her restless knee, stilling it. ‘It could entirely be hormonal. I’m not saying it to be a dick, but your hormones are high when you’re with me. You feel more intensely. That could be a reason.’

He made entirely too much sense sometimes. Corvina sighed. ‘Then we’re back to square one, of me having zero idea about anything.’

A squeeze on her knee. ‘Ajax came yesterday. Told me they’ve identified ten of the victims. Four remain unknown.’

‘But there were fifteen of them, right?’ Corvina remembered from the empty graves.

‘Yes.’ He stood up. ‘They could’ve been disposed elsewhere. Given these woods, we may never know.’

‘Are you leaving?’ Corvina tilted her head back to look at him, seeing his tall, broad physique covered in black, his hair swept back from his face with that white streak shining in the firelight, highlighting his beautiful cheekbones and those searing, stunning silver eyes that hadn’t lost their intensity one bit. God, he was as magnificent as she’d found him that first night months ago.

‘I’m finishing my thesis today.’ He bent down to close his lips over hers, giving her a hard kiss, before pressing a kiss to her piercing, his eyes blazing. ‘Be good.’

She smiled. ‘When am I not?’

His lips twisted, before he picked up two books from the desk he’d fucked her on, and went out.

Corvina exhaled, turning back to studying critical theory, the knot in her stomach never truly dissipating.

It was in that moment that for the first time in her life, Corvina opened her journal and uncapped her pen, and began to let the thoughts flow.

The wind in the walls

Echo secrets and sins

Whisper to me

Urging me

To listen

And I try

Fail

Not hearing the death

That is coming

She looked down at what the fuck she’d written in her stream of consciousness, closed her eyes, and tore the page off, throwing it into the fire. It devoured it, the ink melting in the flame, consumed, one with the ashes that would remain in the end.

Stroking a hand over her journal, she quietly began to write the story of a girl who had died in a castle, haunting the walls for a lover who never came.

Jade found her a few hours later, sitting in the armchair and scribbling furiously in her notebook, as though the floodgates had opened.

Jade dropped her bag on the floor, looked at Mrs Suki’s empty desk, and fell into the armchair Vad had been sitting in hours ago.

‘I can’t study anymore,’ she complained in a tired voice. ‘If I have to read one more date for History, I will do something drastic.’

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