Page 20 of The Kiss Of Death
“Alright. I’ll speak with you after class.”
I nodded and sat down again, wishing I was invisible. The following hour of the class felt like an endless curse. I didn’t know where to put myself, and I avoided all the glares, begging for the bell to ring.
“Next week,” the professor said, “you’ll all introduce yourself through music, much like Miss Mercier failed to do today.”
The bell put an end to my misery, and summoning my courage, I approached him behind his desk. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Yes,” he replied, lowering his glasses. “I have concerns about your place in my class.”
“I promise I can do better. I’ll work harder than anyone.”
“Sometimes work isn’t enough. Maybe you’ve reached your full potential, don’t you think?” He hummed, and every muscle in my body tensed, bracing for his ultimate judgment. “You may go. That’s it. For now.”
I offered a tentative smile that he didn’t share and left the classroom.
They saidkindness will heal even the darkest souls, but maybe I wasn’t interested in healing Levi’s soul anymore. As a child, I used to admire him and wanted to be like him. He seemed so fearless, owning the silence I was so afraid of, but now I would win over his respect in the only language he could understand: payback.
I raced toward the gardens, calling Grandma, who immediately picked up.
“My beautiful flower, how was your first day?”
“Dreadful.”
“Well, welcome to real life, dear. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows,” she chanted, always joyful.
“Yeah, I know. Promise you won’t tell Dad a thing, but I need you.”
“I hide many things from your dad, like the plants I’m growing on your bedroom windowsill.”
I shut my eyes. She’d never change. “Grandma, I need your family recipe for the horrible cake you baked for Grandpa’s last birthday.”
Not that I’d remember—I was three years old. But to stop my tantrums, Grandma, as the delicate woman she was, had decidedto scare me with her tale about how that cake had fast-tracked Grandpa’s trip to the afterlife.
“Oh, the Horror Cake?” She laughed. “That idiot dared to smile at that skank Gertrude. Well, it never happened again, even if she still gloated about it, but he picked me, not her, and—”
“Yes, that one.”
Grandma was one possessive woman, and Grandpa was probably the only man on earth who’d ever been able to love her with all her eccentricities. I had always envied their love. He’d loved and accepted the darkest parts of her, and she’d remained faithful to him even after his death.
“But I want it to be even more awful than that, Grandma,” I commanded. “Like puking worthy, but not too awful to the point of poisoning someone. And don’t let the smell alert the victim this time.”
I needed to be precise since Grandma didn’t have boundaries.
“Did you make enemies, dear?”
“I did, Grandma.”
“I’m proud of you!” she screamed. “Nemeses make us grow. I’ll send the recipe right back to you, my flower.”
I hung up. I had a payback gift I wanted to send to Levi with all the kindness in my heart.
“There’s a cake in the common room.” Cillian was pretty unapologetic for someone who had let himself into my dorm uninvitedagain—probably seeking refuge from Kay’s unpredictable mood swings. It was ironic for someone with a Dukelorm title who grew up in a household where his mom hosted the most extravagant charity balls across Europe.
“And what am I supposed to do with that piece of information?”
I had fallen half asleep in my computer engineering class, so I needed a distraction worthy of my brain, meaning revenge scheming on a certain white-haired girl or messing around with some new software since coding was the only language I enjoyed. None of those activities included killing my neurons with sugar.
“It has your name on it in a blue sparkle,” Cillian added with a thin, mocking smile, and that bastard never smiled. “You’ve got an admirer.”
