Page 15 of The Preacher's Pet

“Oh, darn it,” she says softly.

Darn it?I’ve not heard anything like that in ages. It’s kind of endearing.

When she’s finally got her stuff together, she walks quickly out of the room. I glance at what she’s wearing as she goes. A long, plain dress made of material that looks a little scratchy, and flat shoes. The kind ballerinas wear.

No makeup. A dress and flat shoes. I’m no expert on women’s clothes, but I don’t think those things are what most girls are into. She looks like she came from another time.

As she closes the door behind her, she turns to the small glass window in it and looks back in the room for a brief second. Her gaze finds mine and, I swear, I shiver. She stares at me, blinking only once, then she’s gone.

That split moment in time, when she looked back, had the hairs on my nape tingling. Her gaze felt like a judgement against my skin.

Who the fuck is this girl? She knows Cain, yet she ran from him. She doesn’t know me, but she looked at me as if she knew my deepest secrets. For a tiny tear in the fabric of time, she looked at me in a way that stripped my skin from my bones. Laid me bare.

Not even thinking, just reacting, I stand and scoop up my belongings.

“Now you. God, at this rate the class will be empty,” Gerald observes, his tone bored rather than annoyed.

“Forgot I had something important I need to do,” I reply. “Can I grab the notes and catch up for next week?”

“If you must.” He rolls his eyes but says nothing more. I can leave if I wish, and he’ll put the notes in his mailbox for those of us who need them tomorrow, the way he always does. I can get them then.

“Something important that’s small and blonde,” a male voice says snidely as I head to the front of the room. I turn and see Saint, one of the Vipers, smirking as he watches me go. Fuck him. He’s a moron.

He’s not wrong, though.

I do need to find that petite blonde, because something about her has me in a chokehold.

9

OPHELIA

I thoughtI’d be able to do it.

I’d thought I’d be able to sit in a classroom with other students and learn something other than how I was supposed to be meek and subservient, and how my soul would be tormented forever if I wasn’t.

I’d been wrong.

The moment I’d walked into the room, the walls had felt like they were closing in. Everyone had been staring at me, and I’d wanted to vanish. I can’t imagine there will ever be a time when I’m not going to feel like a freak. Perhaps I don’t do myself any favors by refusing to copy the styles of the other girls, but even if I wore what they did, I still wouldn’t blend in. People can sense when there’s something different about a person, how they don’t fit in, even if they’ve tried their hardest.

Besides, even if I wore the most expensive jeans and encased my torso in the tiniest of strappy tops, I still wouldn’t look the part. The raised, twisted white scar running from my temple, down past my eye, and ending just below my cheekbone makes sure of that. Maybe if I’d been a man, the scar would make me look tough, but being a woman means I just appear wounded. Broken.

My heart had started to race before I’d even sat down, and I’d fought to control my breathing. Then one of the men who’d been with Cain—one of the other Preachers—had moved to sit behind me.

I might look like a freak, but then so does he.

The difference is that hechoosesto look the way he does. What’s with the black clothes and the nail polish? He’s covered in tattoos—all up his neck and the backs of his hands—and I was sure he was even wearing eyeliner.

Where I am pale, he is dark. Every way my opposite. He’d scared me so much I’d had no choice but to get out of there. For a moment, I’d felt paralyzed, torn between the terror of him there, moving to come sit right behind me, and the terror of getting up and leaving as everyone watched me go. In the end, the panic in my body made it impossible to sit and be still. I simply had to move.

I rush through the corridors, my feet slapping on the floor, until I reach one of the doors that leads to the outside. I’m always running, and most of the time, I’m not even sure what—or whom—I’m running from.

It’s my greatest fear, that I’ll never be able to escape, because I’m forever carrying that place and that man with me.

I burst into the fresh air and come to halt. I press my back against the cold stone of the old building and try to catch my breath. My head is spinning. The sunlight is too bright out here, and I squint and turn my face. There’s too much space. Where a moment ago, I’d been filled with panic at the enclosing walls, now it’s the seemingly endless expanse of the grounds and surrounding woodland of Verona Falls that’s making me panic. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, the fear always wins.

The door I’ve just exited from opens, and the guy from class steps out. I try to shrink back, to become invisible, but there’snowhere to go with the wall behind my back. He notices me right away.

“Ophelia?”

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