Page 15 of Soulless Rivalry

It was both mortifying and comical.

Sinem had spilled the entirety of her drink on Royal Volkovic. His white uniform shirt was drenched in pink lemonade, clinging to his skin. His hair was drenched too, sticking to his forehead as droplets of the sugary drink ran down his face.

Oh, fuck.

Royal was a fucking psycho.

Well, you had to be if you wanted to be friends with the Korolovs. I once saw himpuncha guy because he had bumped into him in the corridors.

He would eat Sinem alive??—

“It’s okay.”

My eyes left Sinem’s apologetic expression to focus on the giant’s face. He stared at her with an indifferent, almost soft gaze that took me, and everyone else, by surprise.

Even his friends, Asher and Rhodes, seemed taken aback by Royal’s reaction. Konstantin looked like he couldn’t give any less fucks about the whole thing.

“Oh no, you’re drenched.” The little weirdo definitely didn’thave the codesas she stated earlier, because she started touching his shoulders and running her hands down his arms,assessing the damage she had made. And, incidentally, making everything worse.

Someone in the room gasped in surprise and I couldn’t blame them.

“I’ll pay for your dry cleaning. Or a whole new uniform. I’m Sinem by the way.” She extended her hand towards him, and I was just glad she didn’t hug him the way she’d hugged me earlier.

Royal looked at her hand before taking it slowly, like he himself was wondering what he was doing. Both of them stayed like that, staring at each other, her hand in his.

What the fuck was going on?

Briar cleared her throat. Our new friend didn’t seem to notice how everyone was staring at them, but we did. And we needed to get going.

“Okay, I think it’s time to go. We had this… thing that we needed to do.” Gently, Briar pulled on Sinem’s arm to get her out of the room.

“Don’t forget to send me your dry cleaning bill. I’m room 4C.”

I mentally face-palmed myself because now the whole school knew where to find her. And given how beautiful she was, she would attract quite a few suitors.

Our new friend didn’t seem to get the memo and sent Royal one last trusting smile before strutting out like the whole dining hall wasn’t staring at her.

When she saw us gaping, her usual grin slipped a little. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Deciding there was no use in telling her how unusual what just happened truly was, I just shook my head. “Nothing. Let’s get back to our dorms.”

We let her and Briar step ahead of us and Sinem immediately went back to her usual yapping.

As I turned around, I caught sight of Royal looking out towards us, but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were drawn to a certain Turkish girl who could not, for the life of her, read a room.

ELYSSA

Aweek into the school year, I already felt like I could barely breathe. I lost myself in the flood of studying and homework and it was a blissful reprieve. I had fallen into a peaceful although fast-paced rhythm, waking up early and going on a run with Briar, attending classes and doing my best to ignore the Russian monster in most of said classes, spending my free time at the library, then eating dinner with my friends and calling it an early night.

But today was Saturday and Mia decided I should ditch the library and go with her into town.

Longfield village was as small and quaint as you would imagine it to be. All buildings were made of stone and dated back to the mid-seventeenth century. From what I had read in history books, the village was initially made to house all of Seamus Longfield’s staff because that asshole thought there wasn’t enough room for them in the giant castle he had built.

Nobody knew exactly what he built it for. He was just a rich guy from England who randomly decided to ostracize himself to the end of the globe on a small island off the coast of Oregon.

As we walked, arms entangled, people stared at us unabashed. Townspeople didn’t exactly like us, even though we kept most of their small business afloat during the school year.

Longfield was not touristy, and if it wasn’t for us, it would be dead.

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