Page 28 of Validus Vale Academy 1
Months. Months I’ve spent picturing this; every delicious way I could break this bitch, and now I have her, in my territory, mine to destroy however I please. A red flush is staining her pale cheeks, and I grant her the smallest sliver of air, just enough to keep her conscious.
I can taste the potent mix of terror and fury leaking through her pores, and I fucking love the way her eyes are focused on mine, showing fear and hatred in equal measures. My father, that psycho fuck, tries to squeeze that expression out of me; I give him the hatred but not the fear.
It’s intoxicating, this absolute control. Being the one inflicting the pain. Theodora’s face is darkening, her pupils blown wide,and those tell-tale little red dots are blooming in the whites of her eyes.
Enough. For now.
A flick of my wrist, a mental release, and she drops like a puppet with its strings cut, becoming a broken doll on my floor. I stalk around her limp form, savoring the sight of her ruin from every angle. Delicious.
While she gasps for air, I make her kneel, forcing her chin up, her head tilted back at an uncomfortable angle, her gaze pinned on mine.
“Where. Are. They?” The Elite intonation gets me a truthful answer every time.
The flush on her face is receding, leaving behind her usual pallor, but my question whips the remaining color away. “I-I-I don’t know.”
That’s not what I’m expecting to hear. Donovan and Wes followed her to England, leaving me behind—the fucks. If their little ménage à trois had gone to shit, why haven’t they come crawling back to the Academy? To me? We always fight, yeah, like any damn brothers, but that last battle—that wasn’t something we couldn’t come back from.
Was it?
I weigh my next words carefully. The petty drama of their love-sick bullshit doesn’t interest me. I just want my brothers back. “If you don’t know where the Harts are now, where were they the last time you had contact?”
Like a slack-jawed idiot, she opens and closes her mouth several times.
Oh, right. “Speak,” I command, releasing the invisible grip on her vocal cords.
“I-I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she whimpers. I narrow my gaze upon her, trying to detect any lies, but findnone. She truly doesn’t understand my question. Have I brain-damaged her? To quote Pride and Prejudice,‘I am not a man to be trifled with’. And yes, I may identify with Darcy for the first half of the book, but not the latter.
“It’s quite simple.When was the last time you saw the Hart Twins, and when was the last time you had contact with them?” I can’t be more straightforward than that.
“November 1st, last year,” she replies instantly. “At the airport here—Havengard International. That’s the last time I saw them,andthe last time I heard from them,” she answers, her voice trembling.
My mind stutters to a halt. The day the little bitch went back to England? That doesn’t make sense.
Dono and Wes had dropped her at the airport, then came back here fucking moping around like idiots. For twenty-four hours, they’d paced back and forth until the supposed ‘agony’ of being away from her had become too much.
I’d told them to get over a piece of mediocre ass. Wes had seethed, but Dono just looked at me with this wounded puppy-dog expression. “We don’t want to hear from you until you can accept that Theo is ours and will always be so.”
Then, much to my disgust, they’d chucked their belongings into storage and hopped across the ocean like a pair of pussy-addled idiots.
I won’t lie, there have been moments when the urge to reach out and drag them back has been a sharp claw in my chest. But I was convinced they’d snap out of it once the novelty of her cunt wore off.
Now I’m unsure what to think. They’d left the academy, but not gone to their little English slut? That didn’t make sense.
“So where are they?” I say more to myself than to her. “What’s their deal?” I slide my cell phone out of my pocket, and my thumb hovers over Wes’s name.
Fuck it. I hit the call button.
The phone line rings, but no one answers. After a minute, the automated voicemail cuts in. I punch out a text to Donovan’s number that simply reads ‘SOS’.
Silence. No reply.
A cold finger of dread trails down my spine. The twins may have been furious with me, but if I called for help, I know, justknow, they’d pick up. I’d bet my life on it. “What happened, dud?” I snarl at the trembling girl. “Tell me fucking everything.”
Wilson’s hair is a tangled mess across her tear-streaked face. She pushes it back with a shaky hand. “I-I left to go home, right? The guys said they’d see me at winter break, but they never got in touch again. I got back to England and called, emailed, texted—everything. They just ghosted me.” Her voice is now a raw whisper. “I thought… I thought they’d changed their minds, or it had just been a joke to them all along. But is that not true? Are they really not here? Where are they?”
Fucking hell. Eleven months. Neither of us has heard from the twins in eleven months. So what the actual fuck? Did something happen to them when they stepped off that plane in London? Where else could they fucking be?
Could they be with family?
