Page 13 of Wicked Games

I opened my own curtain and promptly screamed bloody murder. Dangling from the light fixture above my bed was a crude effigy of me, dripping red all over the duvet from the throat area as it swung in slow circles.

“Shit!” I placed a hand on my chest, surprised my heart hadn’t jumped right out of my ribcage from the shock. “God, Maverick, you’re such a fucking asshole!”

He appeared next to me. “Huh? What the—” He stared at the effigy, eyes wide. “Oh, nice. That looks cool as fuck.”

“Cool? I almost had a heart attack!” I snapped, narrowing my eyes at him. “Although I guess that’s what you wanted, right?”

“I didn’t do this.”

I scoffed. “Are you seriously going to pretend it wasn’t you?”

Over the past couple of weeks, Maverick had made my life at Babylon hell. He’d spread a ton of nasty rumors about me, destroyed my already-tenuous reputation, and made numerous threats about reporting me to the school administration for plagiarism and cheating—which he couldn’t prove, because it wasn’t true—but this was the first time he’d taken things this far, with what essentially amounted to a death threat hanging over my bed.

“It wasn’t.” He folded his arms. “It was probably your friends.”

“Huh?”

“Your friends,” he repeated. “They were here earlier.”

“Bullshit. April, Brooke, and Zach were all with me in the library until five minutes ago.”

Maverick sneered. “Notthem.Hudson and some other guys. Can’t remember their names.”

My heart froze. “Hudson Calloway?”

“Yeah.”

“He was here?”

“That’s what I said.” Maverick rolled his eyes. “He knocked earlier and said you guys were supposed to hang out, so I let him in. He and his buddies hung out in your section for a while, and then they said they had to go. I figured they were going to find you.”

“You didn’t hear them doing anything while they were in here?”

He scratched his jaw. “Uh… I heard them laughing.”

“And that didn’t tip you off that they might be doing something like this?”

“No.” He lifted a brow and cocked his head. “Most people laugh with each other when they hang out. Maybe you’d know that if you didn’t have a stick up your ass all the time.”

I gritted my teeth. “Listen. Hudson Calloway isnotmy friend. Don’t ever let him in here again. Okay?”

I assumed Maverick would smirk and make some comment about being allowed to do whatever he wanted in his dorm. Instead, he casually shrugged, face settling into a neutral expression. “Okay,” he said before turning away and heading back to his side of the room.

I wasn’t sure I trusted that ‘okay,’ but I figured it was better than the alternative.

Before I could formulate another thought on the matter, someone rapped on the door. I headed over and tentatively opened it a crack, worried that Hudson and his cronies were back for more. Instead, I saw Jasmine, tapping one foot impatiently on the floor as she waited.

“Uhh… are you here to apologize to me?” I asked.

She looked genuinely surprised by my question. “Apologize for what?”

“Never mind. Stupid question,” I muttered. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to study with Mav,obviously.” She pushed past me and stomped over to Maverick’s bed. “You know, I can’t believe that dirty little bitch is still here,” she went on loudly enough for me to hear as she pulled the curtain around their section of the dorm. “My parents complained to the school about her criminal history, but they don’t seem to care.”

I couldn’t make out Maverick’s muttered response, but I didn’t care. I closed the door, strode back over to my side, and began the arduous process of cutting down the horrible effigy of me from the chandelier. After that, I scrubbed as much of the ‘blood’ off my duvet as I could—it smelled sickly-sweet, so I guessed it was actually corn syrup—and then I whipped my curtain back around my section and settled at my desk to get started on some research for a history essay.

I put some headphones on so I could listen to music while I browsed journal articles and web results, but that didn’t stop the occasional noises from drifting over to me from Maverick’s section. For the first fifteen minutes or so, it was mostly just Jasmine’s annoying voice cutting through, but eventually I heard loud moans and grunts through my tunes.

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