Page 16 of Gothikana

‘Can I have a quick word with you?’ Mr Deverell didn’t wait for his reply, simply gave Corvina another intense look that made her stomach tighten, and walked out.

Dr Kari followed and the two men stood in the hallway, speaking for a quick second, their body language alone telling Corvina who had the upper hand in whatever conversation they were having — Dr Kari was agitated, defensive; Mr Deverell was relaxed, authoritative.

Dr Kari came back to the room, looking angry.

But he didn’t look at Corvina all through the class again.

And she wondered, in a dark recess of her mind, if it had something to do with the silver-eyed devil.

CHAPTER 5

Corvina

There was somethingwrong with the castle.

Something very, very wrong.

Or maybe it was her. Maybe it was her mind slowly splintering.

Corvina looked at the corner of the classroom where she’d seen the light flicker in broad daylight. Her heart was racing, galloping like a horse running from an unseen enemy chasing it. It could have been a trick of the light, something in her vision, anything but what she was thinking it to be.

‘You can leave the class if we’re boring you, Miss Clemm,’ the hard, gravel voice broke through her perusal. Sheshifted her eyes to Mr Deverell sitting on his desk, tapping a pen to the side, his silver attention focused on her.

It had been a week since she’d encountered him in the woods that morning, a week since he had addressed her directly. She had bumped into him in the corridor one day, and he had simply looked into her eyes and given her a greeting, ‘Little Crow,’ in that deep voice of his that had left her hot. And over the week, he’d watched her. He’d been around her classes, going up the stairs when she’d been going down, passing through the hallways when she stopped to admire a sculpture, just been present more. She’d felt his eyes on her, she’d felt them a lot. She’d felt them in the dining room when she ate with her new friends, on the grounds when she walked all alone, in the class when she took notes and kept to herself. And she’d liked it, though she shouldn’t.

He might not have been speaking to her verbally, but his eyes said a lot. His eyes had been giving her words that only fanned the flames in her blood. His eyes had been whispering dirty things that made her skin flush just imagining them. His eyes were what she imagined on her when she touched herself in the shower, just his eyes, watching her as he did. She’d never felt it for a man who hadn’t existed between the pages of a book. Raw, animalistic attraction, that’s what it was.

Right then though, his eyes looked pissed. And that somehow made her want to fan her face even more.

‘I—’ She began to speak before he raised a dark eyebrow, inching it toward that streak of grey in his hair, and sheshut up.

‘You can sit with me if you’re bored, Purple,’ Jax, one of Troy’s boys, called from the front with a smirk. ‘I’ll keep things interesting.’

A few snickers sounded around the class but her eyes, which were still on Mr Deverell, watched as his jaw clenched. He broke their connected gaze and looked at the boy who’d just spoken.

‘And what makes you think this kind of bullshit is okay in my class, Brown?’ Mr Deverell asked, putting his pen down on the desk and turning the full force of his attention on the boy.

The boy sat up straighter. ‘My name’s not Brown, Mr Deverell. It’s Jax.’

‘Oh, my mistake,’ Mr Deverell said with what Jade called his ‘resting bitch face’. ‘I thought we were calling each other by the colour of our eyes and not given names.’

That shut the boy up.

Corvina felt something warm take root in her stomach, fluttering in her belly as she watched the silver-eyed devil casually defend her. Her eyes had always been something she’d been teased or taunted about. No one had ever defended her. Even with her mother, she’d been the one doing the defending. This felt new, unfamiliar, yet enlivening.

‘I don’t like him but swoon,’ Jade whispered from her side.

Swoon indeed.

‘He’s defending you.’

Yes, he was.

‘Anyone else have issues referring to people by their names?’ he askedthe class.

No one moved.

‘And am I still boring you, Miss Clemm?’ he asked her directly, his mercury eyes on hers again.

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