Page 53 of The Knight

"You won't be alone," Cole says, brightening a bit now that I've given in to his strength of will. "The Rosalinds will be here, and some of the boys from Hadley and Lawrence too. Oh—and DuPont. His parents are out traveling Europe on business, so he decided to stay back and study." He shakes his head, making a disgusted noise. "Sometimes he's a stick in the mud."

Lukas will be here. I don't know why, but that calms me considerably. Something about his blue eyes has always made me feel safe and secure, even when we were standing on the opposite side of a line drawn in the sand. Even though I don't understand why he stays friends with the other three, who are so different from him.

"I'll stay," I tell Cole, already planning what I'm going to tell my mom. "But it's the last time I do something you tell me. After this is all over—"

"You'll ride off into the sunset and never see us again. Right, right. We're all looking forward to it. Just try not to get eviscerated in the meantime."

I roll my eyes, then watch him turn on his heel and walk away, done with me completely now that he's gotten what he wanted. As he strolls down the path towards Hadley Hall, I can't help but notice the way people react to them: girls sway closer, boys dodge out of the way, and even the trees seem to twist their branches around to follow his passing.

The whole world bends to Cole Masterson's whims.

Including, apparently, me.

Chapter 22

There's nothing like a New England campus in spring, emptied of all the teachers and pressure of class, the air fresh and light, the sun drying up the last of winter's passing. Getting up the second morning of spring break, I throw off the covers, pull on relaxed clothing—no uniforms all week—and stroll towards the dining hall without a care in the world.

Somewhere down the path, Holly is no doubt jogging in her athletic wear, hair pulled up in a tight ponytail at the crown of her head. She broke up with her boyfriend recently; apparently Leo Cooper couldn't take the pressure of visiting her family's Chelsea home and having his picture splashed across the social pages. Holly has been mourning in the way only she would, by dusting herself off and going out jogging every morning before the sun rises.

The truth is, she doesn't seem that broken up. I think I know the reason for that: she never really loved Leo.

Not like she loved Cole.

And Cole, for all his glaring flaws, loved her too. Maybe that's why he's been more of an ass ever since they broke up. Without her calming presence like a balm in his life, he's all rough edges and flares of temper. I didn't used to get their relationship before, but now that I'm back in Holly's good graces, I at least understand it from his side.

No one can light up a room like Holly Schneider. And there's no girl in the world that makes you feel as if you could be a better person, just for her, if only to make her proud.

He must have really loved her.

He'll probably never be the guy he was with her again.

Shaking the thought off, I pad towards the dining hall in my slippers, reveling in the ability to walk this stately, stuck-up, old and moneyed campus without a care in the world or stuffy rules to keep me in line. Hardly anyone stays here for spring break—even Holly will be flying out to Paris for a few days soon—which means no line for the breakfast buffet, which has been moved out of the residence halls and into the Coleridge Center to consolidate things while there are so few of us to feed.

Glancing around at the faces at breakfast, I see only one familiar to me: Lukas DuPont himself, head bent over a familiar laptop screen. I reluctantly let him have it overnight, making him swear he'd take it absolutely everywhere with him and never let it out of sight. Apparently he listened, because he's got a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast beside him even as his fingers fly over the keyboard.

I grab my own favorite—a bagel with bacon, cheese, and eggs—before I join him at his table, sliding a tray across from him and watching as he slowly reacts to my presence. "You were really into whatever you were doing there. Playing Minecraft?"

"Actually," he says, his body practically vibrating with excitement, "I think I finally cracked it."

That gets my attention, and I find myself putting breakfast down so I can lean forward and stare at the screen. "What was it, some kind of absurd password?"

"I used all the information you gave me about your brother to try to figure out how he would encrypt something this important. And eventually I realized we were going about things the wrong way. I was trying to enter through the front door, you see, or break down the back. But the whole time he had tunnels underground to lead us right to where everything was. It was ingenious of him."

I stare at Lukas. "Can you explain that with fewer metaphors? But also don't make it confusing."

"Right of course. Uh... basically, I noticed this old text-based game on your brother's computer. It didn't seem to fit the style of the other games he's downloaded and played, so I booted it up, and as it turns out, the game has a back door into the hard drive partition. It unlocks it."

"Wow." My hands shake, and I fold them together to keep them still. "How?"

"At first it was like a maze. Then I realized he's hacked the game and customized it. Instead of being set in a fictional city, it was set in Wayborne. I just had to use a little map of your town, and walk the character to your house. Once I did, I tried all the rooms, and the one that unlocked the partition is, I'm pretty sure, your brother's room."

"Show me?"

He does, turning the screen so I can see as he walks a tiny text-based character through the front door of a simplistic version of my house. The character goes up the stairs, and the screen erases the image, then builds the upstairs. It's just like I remember it from before the tornado turned our lives upside down: my room, Silas's room, the long hallway, and our shared bathroom. Lukas nudges the character into the room on the left, which makes the game quit and a window with the contents of the hard drive partition pop up.

"It wasn't his room." I have to pinch my hand to concentrate on the present, and keep myself from crying about the past. "Silas programmed the back door to be through my bedroom."

"Ah. I wonder why."

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