Page 20 of Ruined
Either way, I was going to tell him.
“He was one of my first regular members,” I said. “Brought me back to the Terrariums for my first time. He likes certain things that a lot of the servers don’t find agreeable.” Which was a nice way of saying very few of the servers trusted him with knife play. Now, I knew why. “But he’s nice enough.”
“Certain things?”
My stomach rolled. If I told him the specifics, it was a lot more revealing than sharing vague information.
“He likes to pressure us.”
“Pressures you?”
“He doesn’t always take ‘no’ or our terms for the final answer.”
Lucas’s stare turned cold. “You never answered the question. Whatthingsdoes he like?”
“Knife play,” I blurted it out before I could stop myself. I wanted to talk tosomeoneabout it. Someone who listened. Someone who didn’t dismiss me. And for the first time in a long time, it seemed like someone was actually listening. That Lucas was curious.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then cracked his neck.
“How do you know Aldrich?” I asked.
I regretted the words as soon as I said it. I guess this was the first time that a club member was truly listening to me, and it seemed natural to let the conversation move wherever it wandered.
And maybe I wanted to know more about him.
“I worked at Aldrich’s firm when I first graduated,” he said. “He was my mentor.”
So they had a history. They even shared careers. And yet they were so completely different.
“I want to know more about you,” he said. “Tell me. Why were you at the academy?”
I didn’t care about the members’ privacy—not really—but I did care about protecting my sister.
“Not this again,” I said.
He tilted his head. “Ready to divulge a billionaire’s private sexual interests, and yet guarded about your own. Not fair, is it?”
I rolled my eyes. “It has nothing to do with what we’re doing here.”
“Were you volunteering?”
An admirable accusation. “No.”
“Were you selling drugs?”
I laughed in his face. “Are you really asking that?”
“Then you’re fucking one of the teachers. The headmaster.”
“Wow,” I said, lifting my eyebrows. “Really?”
“You went to the academy as a young woman and started a relationship with a teacher against the rules. And now, you keep the relationship, but only by meeting on campus. Otherwise, Dahlia wouldn’t allow it.”
The staff at Sage and Ivy would never let that happen. And it helped that the school was mostly run by women.
“Clever, but no.”
“You’re blushing,” he said. “Tell me.”
