Page 16 of Soulless Rivalry

We arrived in front of Foams, the only coffee shop on the island, and Mia pushed the wooden door open. Immediately, the smell of ground coffee beans and sugar wafted to my nostrils. I loved coming here, despite how grumpy the owner was.

“Fuck, I need coffee so bad. I have no idea how I managed this past week.”

Coffee was forbidden at the Academy. As were alcohol and cigarettes, but I didn’t care about those, as I didn’t rely on them to study.

The most courageous of us bought ground coffee here so they could make it illegally in their dorms, but I was not risking the administration calling my grandfather for caffeine.

“Take a seat, I’ll order our usual!” She beamed and I listened, grabbing a spot before more students could come in and take all the seats.

Foams was the hangout spot during the school year. The only way getting in and out of the island was by boat and it was completely forbidden by school rules. Even getting off school grounds wasn’t permitted if you were a first or second year.

Looking around, I was glad to see the whole place was pretty empty, just old furniture and a fire going on in the fireplace. Then my eyes caught sight of a poster right on top of it, with the face of a smiling girl on it. She had blond hair and fair skin, and the words MISSING were written in bold right underneath. I frowned.

Longfield was a small island, so small in fact that you could walk around it in ten hours, so the idea of someone disappearing was scary. It obviously meant one of two things: either thegirl simply ran away, which wasn’t impossible given how little opportunities there were on the island, or she had been taken, and that second scenario was scarier for obvious reasons. One of them being that, given how small the island was, it had to be someone she knew. Someone everybody knew.

“I got you a vanilla latte with double espresso.” Mia’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.

I watched a little startled as she set the drink down in front of me.

Noticing the way my eyes kept going back to the poster of their own, she said, “Damn, there’s two of them?”

“What?” I frowned.

Mia gave a nod towards the bar. “There’s another poster there. I saw it when I was ordering, another girl. I swear Lewis was in an even more sour mood than usual when he served me.”

“Makes sense. They know most students at the Academy are from… sketchy backgrounds.”

“Yeah, well,” she took a sip of her coffee. “It’s not like we had anything to do with those girls going missing. We’ve only been back for a week. Plus, they probably ran away from this hellhole. God knows I would have.”

I couldn’t say she was wrong, but still, it seemed weird. It was quite a common occurrence for younger people to leave the island once they reached eighteen. There was no reason for them to run away unless, of course, they were from bad homes.

Still, it didn’t sit right with me.

The door chime echoed around us as a new customer entered the shop, and the soft patter of dog paws could be heard. A smile stretched on my lips as I immediately recognized Buxley. Buxley was kind of an institution at the castle, unlike his owner. Charles Leroy was a scrawny kid from my psychology classes. He was reasonably smart, but kind of a bore—and that was coming from someone who thought spending her Saturday nightat the library, reading about the castle’s history, was a blast. But Charles had one advantage in life: he had Buxley, his service dog.

He was there to sense and warn his human of an upcoming epileptic attack, and he did a great job of it.

Everybody at the Academy loved Buxley, especially since he was the only animal allowed at school.

“Oh, look at that beautiful boy!” Mia cooed, pouting comically at the well-trained dog who didn’t move from his owner’s side. “So well-behaved too!”

I chuckled, finally taking a sip from my coffee and doing my best not to chug it all in one sitting. Lewis might have been a pain in the ass, but his coffee was honestly better than some coffee shops we had at home.

“Hey, guys.”

I hadn’t even realized I’d shut my eyes to enjoy the taste of coffee after a week without it. When I snapped them open, Charles was right next to our table and Mia took it as an opportunity to get in some cuddles with Buxley.

“Mia!” I hissed, gently chastising her. “He’s a service dog, he’s working. Stop distracting him.”

Charles chuckled and awkwardly ran a hand through his hair. “It’s okay. He loves it. I mean who wouldn’t like the attention of two pretty girls like you.”

Mia laughed and Charles didn’t know her enough to know it was a fake one, but I did. While I had been almost totally kept in the dark from the public eye by my family, Mia had always been under the spotlight. She attended all the family functions, all the galas, and fancy dinners they didn’t want me at. And she hated it too.

So, over the years, she managed to craft this cool girl persona; she knew when to laugh at people’s jokes and how to make a guy feel like a king even when he was nothing but a measly jester.

Charles gained in confidence as she smiled up at him, deciding to strike up a conversation with her.

And just like that, I had been forgotten.

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