Page 68 of Gothikana

‘Correct.’ He got comfortable on the desk behind him. ‘You mean why no one else knows that?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do I get in return for answering your questions?’ His head tilted in a move she was beginning to recognise.

She swallowed, her choker ribbon right against her pulse. ‘Me. However you want me.’

‘I can have you however I want you anyway, little crow,’ he reminded her, and she knew he was right. ‘But it pleases me that you offered. So you’ll get your answers.’

God, he could sound like a dick sometimes, and it still turned her on.

‘Why doesn’t anyone know?’ She leaned against the window behind her, the knowledge of nothing but the glass between her and the cliff secretly thrilling.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I have time.’

He nodded, sitting up on the desk in a sleek move. ‘My father paid my mother off to get rid of me. She dumped me somewhere and they sent me to the boys’ home, where I stayed for a very long time.’

Her heart ached for the little boy this man must have been, discarded so coldly like trash.

He took out a cigarette and lit it up, taking a deep drag in. ‘When I was thirteen, an old man showed up out of nowhere and adopted me.He took me to his really nice home and told me I was his grandson. His son had told him about me on his deathbed. He said he’d spent years trying to trace me.’

‘That was good of him.’ Corvina felt her chest lighten at the story taking a better turn.

He gave a dark chuckle. ‘You’d think that. He didn’t have another heir, you see. He was getting older, and the Board was taking more and more control of the castle, and he didn’t want that.’

Corvina watched him blow a ring of smoke up at the ceiling, his body relaxed as he regaled his tale.

‘He began to tell me all about Verenmore,’ Vad said through the smoke. ‘Put me in a private school, made me learn all about the properties and controlling them, about taking on the Board. He taught me a lot of things, the only good one of which was the piano. And that had only been done as a way for me to control my wild side. To train me to sit still and think alone.’

Corvina turned to open the window behind her, to let the smoke clear out, and moved to the nearest desk, hopping onto it as he continued.

‘Verenmore became this huge, elusive treasure to me,’ he explained, his eyes on the view outside the window. ‘It became this ancestral heirloom that rightfully belonged to me, a boy who’d never had a single thing of his own. I wanted it, as perfect as it had been in the stories.’

A wind caressed the back of her neck, sending a shiver through her body as she stayed silent, letting him talk.

‘The night I turned eighteen’ — Vad finished his cigarette — ‘my grandfather told me about the Slayers.’

‘He told you the legend?’ Corvina asked, and he gave her a dark smile.

‘He told me something worse.’ Vad crushed the cigarette under his boot, his eyes chilling her. ‘The truth.’

Corvina felt her breath catch. ‘Tell me.’

He considered her for a long minute, just studying her, gauging her. Taking his glasses off, he ran a hand through his hair, messing it up. ‘My grandfather was a student here when the disappearances began. The castle had been empty for years before the school started here, and there were secret passageways, dungeons, woods that nobody knew anything about. Nobody except my grandfather, who had a map that’s been passed down our family.’

Corvina encouraged him to go on.

‘His girlfriend at the time had allegedly been a witch,’ he told her wryly. ‘Or so she told everyone. I don’t think anyone believed her except him. No one knows. He believed it.’

The skies darkened a shade outside with both the approaching evening and the clouds.

‘He and his friends took one of the maids at the castle into the woods because his girlfriend told them she could make her do things. They wanted to experiment. So, they took her to play with, andsomething happened. The girl died, they hid her body, and they got drunk on the power of it.’

Goosebumps covered her arms, her jaw slackening as realisation hit her.

‘They were the Slayers.’ The words escaped her in a whisper, her hand going to cover her mouth immediately.

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