Page 35 of Of Heathens & Havoc

There’s a boy on every side of me. The lone girl in the group stands with her arms crossed, the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up to reveal tattooed, muscular forearms. She snaps her gum between her blood red lips with dark liner, watching through kohl-rimmed, sullen grey eyes as the boys circle me like sharks scenting blood.

“I heard someone in a sheep mask left your room last night,” Bain says, leaning down to speak into my face, like he wants to make sure I can read his lips so I don’t miss a single word. “Was that you? Or your roommate?”

I try to step back, but the boy orbiting behind me shoves me back into Bain’s grip.

“So? Who was it?” he asks. “Who went to the game and enjoyed a little havoc of her own last night? Because if it’s your roommate, I’m going to need her name.”

“I don’t have a roommate,” I blurt.

A cold smile twists the corners of his lips into something vicious and terrifying. “So it was you,” he says. “I was hoping you’d been ruined and your brother would lift the ban.”

“What ban?”

One of the others chuckles darkly. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“No one on campus is allowed to speak to you,” he says. “Didn’t you wonder why you didn’t have any friends?”

I glance around the courtyard, where everyone is silent, watching the exchange. A few have drifted closer, but they drop their gazes without meeting mine.

My stomach knots, and I think of the girls I awkwardly tried to make conversation with in class. I assumed it was my social ineptitude that drove them away. After four years of living as a recluse and being homeschooled, I didn’t expect to make a lot of friends. It’s hard to trust people after everything that happened with the last group of friends I had, but I thought maybe I’d at least find someone to eat lunch with in the dining hall.

Now I know why I haven’t.

“If the ban is lifted, we’d be happy to be your friends,” says a Sinner who’s shorter but just as fierce looking, with black hair combed back to highlight his widow’s peak and devastatingflint grey eyes. His words don’t match his voice, which holds an edge of threat like friendship has a very different meaning to boys with pretty faces and wicked souls.

“I have a question,” says another one of the boys, this one so heart-stoppingly beautiful that it’s hard to breathe when my eyes meet his dove-grey gaze. “Did you tell your brother you’d entered HAVOC? Were you allowed to wear a special sign so he knew not to fuck his sister?”

“Maybe they’re into that,” says another boy with a shrug.

“Or maybe she is,” Bain says, smirking down at me from his giant’s height. “Did you wear the mask the whole time, so he never knew he fucked his own sister?”

“What?” I ask, trying to step back.

“If it were me,” the girl says. “I’d have taken it off when he was mid-climax. I’d give my trust fund to see the look on his face for the cum shot.”

“You—are diabolical,” says one of her brothers, throwing his ropy arm around her shoulders and beaming down at her.

She grins back at him with her vampire lips and then resumes chomping her gum.

“If she was the sacrifice, then he’d have to fuck her,” says the Sinner with glasses.

“Oh, that’s true,” muses the beautiful one, stroking his chin and looking me up and down. “What a conundrum.”

“Do you think the Hellhounds’ precious Saint knew he was fucking his sister?” asks the mean one.

“What if he still doesn’t know?” asks the girl with a sly little smile.

“I heard the heathen fucked his sister too,” says another. “They ran a train on her and tossed her in the river afterwards. I heard her corpse was all full of cum when they found it.”

My heart punches up into my throat, and my knees threaten to buckle. Where did they hear that? Is it justdisgusting gossip, or do they know something—something about her disappearance? Suddenly, I see them with new eyes. What if I’ve been looking for answers in the wrong place, the wrong fraternity?

“Did you like knowing your brother’s cock was among the twelve?” the beautiful Sinner whispers against my ear, sending a wave of hot shame through my body.

“Did you know it was him?” asks a voice from my other side. “Or did he keep his mask on, so you had no way of knowing which man fucking you was him? Did that make it better for you, you freaky little nympho?”

“What does the Bible say about incest?” asks yet another. They’re circling me so fast I can’t keep track of them, can’t breathe. I think I’m going to faint as one of them looks me up and down with the grey-eyed gaze of some silent majestic predator, a snow leopard on the prowl, before darting back into the blur of them moving around me in a dizzying pace.

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