Page 22 of Soulless Rivalry

His tone left no room for discussion, and soon everybody scattered away, whispering among themselves about what just happened.

Mia grabbed my hand and led me away from the courtyard, still visibly shaken.

When we sat down in class, her gaze was still lost in the distance.

She shook her head, confused. “How could someone do that to an animal? It has to be someone who had beef with Charles; this was meant to hurt him.”

“I don’t know, probably. This school is filled with crime lords’ spawns. It could be anyone.”

She sniffled, silently agreeing. “I’ll miss him. I’ll always remember the sound of his little paws and the way he liked his tummy scratched.”

Her words made everything around me blur and I froze.

The sound of his little paws.

I was transported back to the night before when Konstantin and I were hiding in the staircase from the people in the hallway. There was a dog with them.

I had immediately assumed it was the guards but it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been: they had a strict schedule and had stuck to it for the past two years. There was no reason for them to start straying from it now.

Bile started to rise in my throat when I remembered the sound of the footsteps in the corridor. There hadn’t been only one person leading Buxley last night, but at least four.

Just as the thought passed through my brain, Konstantin entered the classroom, late for the first time since I’d known him. The teacher didn’t seem to mind as she sat on her desk, chatting with a couple of girls who were telling her about earlier’s morbid discovery.

When Konstantin’s gaze met mine and held it, it dawned on me that he had put the pieces together too.

We both knew something malicious and disturbing was brewing within these walls.

ELYSSA

Buxley’s death was all everyone was talking about. It took abysmal proportions when Charles’s parents heard of it; they were livid and planned on flying here, which was normally totally prohibited.

Like all kids in the Academy, Charles’s parents were rich as fuck and influential. His dad was some fancy district attorney whose pockets ran deep thanks to all the bribes he took from people like us. His mother was some kind of Swiss heiress with a knack for organizing useless charity balls.

From the rumors I’d heard, Dean Taylor managed to talk them down, saying there would be an investigation and that he was sure this was all a bad and cruel joke from the townspeople.

In fact, the last part was something that was actively circulating through school and it ate at me not being able to deny it.

I’d heard those people. I knew that they weren’t villagers: they couldn’t have had access to the castle, and a group as large as them would’ve been discovered in a second by the guards.

No, whoever did that knew about the guards’ schedule and was clearly familiar with the layout of the school.

It had been an inside job.

Hiding out at the library, I was still trying to figure out what to do with what I knew.

I needed to see Dean Taylor and tell him all about it but he was out of office for the day after what happened.

When we got out of class, the body had been cleaned up and there wasn’t even a drop of blood left. I had no idea where it had been taken but it looked like it had never even been there in the first place.

Frustrated with myself, I shut the book on Macedonian art I had desperately been trying to read for my Art History class. Mia had forced me to take it as an elective even though I was a business major and couldn’t give less of a fuck about art.

The reason she was so adamant about being in this class was because every two weeks, it was taught by master’s students as a way for them to win credits. One of them was none other than the man she was so certain would be the father of her children one day: Dominik Korolov.

I rolled my eyes just thinking about it, taking advantage of the fact that I was alone with only books as witnesses. If anyone back home caught wind of Mia’s infatuation, there would be hell to pay.

Italians and Russians didn’t get along, but for the sake of mafia etiquette, we coexisted. Officially, we were in peace. Some families even had treaties and small alliances in place to make sure one didn’t cross the other.

The thing was that, even though my family tolerated the Bratva, the Korolovs were not part of the Russian brotherhood. Actually, I was pretty sure they would take great offense in being called Bratva.

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