Page 304 of Blood & Betrayals

From the mountains to the sky. I’ll make their blood run down her face.

A chill runs down my spine. As if the words summoned it, the memory of how I found Alicia flashes into my mind. I can still feel that poor girl’s blood covering me and her dead eyes staring at me accusingly.

I walk faster, and I am nearly running by the time I get to Kelpie Hall. I slam the door behind me and bolt up the stairs, bursting into our dorm, out of breath and trembling. Alice’s small body slams into me, pulling me from my terror.

“Hi!” she yells, wrapping around me. When she pulls back, her smile falls into a frown. “What’s wrong?”

I shake my head and squeeze her tight, not wanting to let her go.

“Oof,” she groans. “You’re not freaking out about the engagement, are you?” she asks, her voice muffled against me.

I release her and pull back to look down at her, slowly relaxing. “What? No!”

Alice takes a deep breath, reclaiming the air I had squeezed out of her. “Okay, good. Tell me everything. Wait.” She hurries into the kitchen, and I take off my jacket. Alice comes back with two margaritas and hands me one. “Have a drink and then tell me everything. Now that it’s just us, I need the nitty gritty.”

My lips twitch, and I take a deep drink. The tequila burns a trail down my throat. As the heat pools in my veins, muscles I didn’t realize were tense relax. Alice grabs my hand and pulls me to the couch.

“Okay, first of all, who do I kill about you getting engaged without me being there?”

A laugh bubbles in my throat, and I take another drink. It figures that Alice wants to be as involved as possible. “Well, if you were there, it would have been considered a threesome. I don’t think Connor is comfortable taking the wife sharing that far.”

“Ew. Gross. Okay, whatever. You guys did it the mushy, intimate, only-the-people-directly-involved there way. Leave out those details, but tell me everything else, and start at the very beginning.”

I nod and take another sip of my margarita. “Okay, well, it started with a pretty huge fight.”

Alice chokes a little on her sip of margarita. “You and Connor… fought?”

I nod, swirling the cocktail umbrella around my drink. “A big one. Like we almost broke up.”

“Fuck. Okay. Why?”

I exhale heavily. “Well, I don’t think this information has been circulated yet, but… another body was found.”

Alice’s breath hitches. “Fuck. When?”

“Friday night.”

“Fuck,” Alice says again, slouching back on the couch. “And Connor found them?”

“Yeah. He was with Rafe. I don’t think Rafe let him go in, but they were the first ones there. Anyway, Headmaster Emrys told Connor that I’m the target. Connor realized I knew and had been keeping it from him. He was… devastated.”

Alice lifts her glass to her lips and gives me a hard stare over the rim. “Huh. Who could have predicted that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, shooting her an annoyed look. “You were right, but it was seriously rough, Al. I thought he would end it, and things were really awkward. But he surprised me once again and forgave me. And then he proposed.”

Alice stares at me for a long moment. “Wait a minute. Just like that?”

“After sex. He was still balls deep,” I say.

“Ew, but damn, you really do have the twenty-four karat pussy. Only you could go from almost breaking up to being engaged the next day,” Alice muses.

“It’s Connor. He’s too good for me. He’s so forgiving.”

Alice snorts. “Well, he is an angel.”

I roll my eyes. “Anyway, I’m not keeping things from him anymore. Well… mostly.”

Alice lifts a questioning eyebrow.

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