Page 104 of Wicked Games

“Yup.” I hitched one arm under hers and reached over to adjust her lopsided cap. “Let’s go and graduate, baby.”

We left the room and headed down the hall, arm in arm. When we stepped outside, we saw Jasmine, Zach, and Brooke standing by a fountain, faces harried.

“Oh my god!” Jasmine said when she spotted us. “We’ve been looking for you guys everywhere!”

“You know the ceremony starts in ten minutes, right?” Brooke added, wide-eyed gaze flicking between us.

“Yeah. It’s fine.” I grinned. “Plenty of time.”

“Wherewereyou?” Zach asked.

“Um…” Carey lowered her eyes and rubbed her chin. “Just walking through the halls. Reminiscing.”

Zach’s brows lifted. “Hm. Okay.”

“I saw two people sitting in the chairs with your surname on them. Is it your parents?” Brooke asked.

“It must be,” Carey replied. “They told me they’d come, but I wasn’t sure they actually would.”

“That’s good. That they’re finally trying with you, I mean.”

“Yeah. All it took was me almost dying in a murder mansion last year,” Carey replied, rolling her eyes. “But you’re right. It’s good.”

I dropped my arm so I could squeeze her hand. Her parents weren’t the greatest people in the world, but ever since we escaped Icarus Hall last October, they’d started making a serious effort to improve their relationship. Her father had even managed to last seven straight months without getting arrested for whatever dumb shit he usually got up to back in Oakfield. As for her mother, who usually got through ten bottles of wine per week, the devastating realization that she’d almost lost her only child had shocked her into near-sobriety. She’d barely touched a drop of alcohol since all the shit went down, and she’d started calling Carey once a week to talk and catch up.

Baby steps, but it was better than nothing. Carey deserved it. Deserved a real family who loved and cared about her. And hey, even if her parents never managed to fix their shit and make up for all the years of neglect, she’d always have a family with me, because she wasn’t just my girlfriend.

She was my whole world.

“So, um…” Jasmine looked down, briefly gnawing at her bottom lip. “Does this mean our little survivor’s club is over and done with? Seeing as we’re all heading off to different parts of the world?”

Zach patted her on the shoulder. “We can still do Zoom meetings, right?”

Jasmine’s shoulders sagged with relief, and a rare smile lit her face. “Sure. That’d be great.”

She’d changed a hell of a lot since the Garrick family imprisoned us and forced us into those fucked up games. She was no longer the school Queen Bee, ruling the girls of Babylon with an iron fist and venomous tongue. Instead, she’d mellowed out and thrown herself into her studies, raising her GPA to a level no one ever thought she could achieve. She’d also organized weekly meetings for the Final Five—as the media had annoyingly dubbed us after our rescue—so that she, Zach, Brooke, Carey,and I could talk things over and help each other out with the mental trauma we were left with after our time at Icarus Hall.

I knew she and Carey would never be best friends, given Jasmine’s toxic treatment of her in the past, but everything our little group went through together had forged an unbreakable bond between us, so they treated each other with respect and even smiled and waved whenever they spotted each other on campus. Sometimes they even shared exam notes or texted each other funny stories they read online.

Zach glanced at his watch. “We should really get going now. We’re down to eight minutes,” he said.

He was doing okay, too. He’d lost a ton of weight from depression in the weeks after our rescue, but the weekly survivor’s club meetings had really started to help him after a while. By spring break, the weight had come back, along with the color in his cheeks.

After graduation today, he was hopping on a plane to Singapore. An international university had offered him a place there, and he’d snapped it right up, telling the rest of us that he needed to be as far away from California as he could possibly get for the next few years. Maybe even forever. We all understood, and we were happy for him.

Brooke nodded, lips turning upward in a sad half-smile. “Yeah, I guess we should head off,” she said, looking around the courtyard. “Never thought I’d miss this place, but I think I actually will.”

Brooke’s life had been hit the hardest in the aftermath of the now-infamous Garrick Games, because everything that had been revealed in our time at Icarus Hall had instantly become public knowledge when the media got wind of the case. From there, the Babylon staff found out about her past exam cheating, along with the drug-cooking operation she’d shared with Tate.

In any other case, she would’ve been charged by the cops and instantly expelled from school. However, the police decided not to file any charges over the drugs, figuring the suffering she’d endured at Icarus Hall was punishment enough. The school was much the same, allowing her to finish off the year with the stipulation that she could never be alone in any of the chemistry labs. On top of that, none of the teachers were allowed to write her recommendation letters for college, and the mark she received for the big exam she cheated on was changed to a zero, lowering her once-sky-high GPA.

It didn’t matter too much in the end, though. Now that we were all household names because of the Garrick Games, colleges all over the country had been champing at the bit to convince us to pick them, leaving Brooke with multiple offers despite the lack of school support. She was going to be just fine.

Carey smiled at her. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “I hated this place when I first started here. But now I really think I’m going to miss it. Weird, huh?”

The others nodded and murmured their agreement. I squeezed her hand again and leaned down to plant a kiss on her forehead. “Ready?”

She nodded, and the five of us headed over to the Babylon auditorium and made our way to our seats on the stage. Jasmine was the first of us to graduate, and we all cheered our lungs out as she walked across the stage to accept her diploma.

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