Page 268 of Blood & Betrayals

My gaze snaps to his, and I hold my hands up. “What do you want from me? It’s looking right at me!”

“It’s the one-eyed monster, certainly.” Max chuckles.

My gaze drops back to it as if compelled, and I tip my head assessingly.

“Summer!”

I spin and look at the door. “Fuck sorry!”

“You’re killing me,” Max groans.

“What did I do?” I ask, peeking at Max’s face from the corner of my eye.

Max mimics my extreme stare and my voice. “Max, your dick is looking at me.”

“Well, it is!”

I look away again as Max adjusts himself in his pants.

“I should go,” I say with a decisive nod.

“Summer, it’s an involuntary reaction. Just ignore it.”

“So you don’t want to stop training with me?” I ask, careful to keep my gaze trained above his shoulders.

“No,” Max says with a deep, exasperated sigh. “Just give me a few minutes.”

I study Max’s face for a moment. “Max?” He lifts his eyebrows at me. “I think I know the answer to this, but… you don’t have,” I grimace, “feelings for me, right?”

Max rolls his eyes. “You are very much not my type.”

I nod. “Okay. So you’re just aware I’m insanely hot. Cool.”

“Please. I couldn’t be less interested in you if I tried,” Max grumbles and crosses his arms over his chest.

The venom in his voice surprises me. “Max, I was joking.”

“No, you weren’t.”

Disappointment swamps me, and I shake my head. “Whatever, Max,” I say. I slide my sai back onto the shelf and stalk past him out the door.

Connor sleeps peacefully next to me, and I stare at the ceiling. I’ve not been sleeping right since theycaughtthe killer. My stomach grumbles, and I think about the leftover pizza waiting for me in the kitchen. I kiss Connor’s cheek and clamber over him to slip out of bed. Grabbing the pizza box from the fridge, I sit on the couch with it. I’m about to start flicking through channels when I decide a little doom-scrolling would probably be more entertaining than middle-of-the-night television.

AnEverydayEmryspost from the previous day piques my interest. I tap on the photo of the headmaster and expand the caption.

There are over five hundred comments on the post, and I scroll through them. Most of them are theories about theheadmaster’s whereabouts, some denounce a potential love interest for him, and a couple are just downright thirsty.

“You’re not into that garbage too, are you?” Alice’s voice makes me jump as she drops onto the couch beside me.

I shake my head. “Just came up on my feed.”

“How come you’re out here?”

“I was hungry,” I say, giving her a half-truth, scrolling through the comments again.

“These comments are insane.” She points to one and reads, “I’d let him discipline me harshly.Weirdo,” she scoffs. “Huh. There are even bots commenting.”

I frown, looking at the comments more closely, and I see what she’s talking about. There is a bot account called@eladan, and the comment is simply the letterS. I frown and tap on the profile, bringing up all the posts. Similar to the stranger’s account, it’s blank, and I wonder briefly how they got past the system. We scroll through the comments on the second photo and eventually find the same bot with another post. This time, it’s just the letter E. Alice and I share a look, our brows drawn. I select another post, tracking the bot, and after a while we have twenty-nine letters. Alice and I look down at the scrambled letters, none of which seem to make any sense.

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