Page 90 of Kings & Corruption

She was nervous, tapping her bare foot on the linoleum, her eyes darting to the door like she expected Melody to burst in at any second.

“You were with Emma at Aventine,” I said. “Not the night she went missing, but before.”

“So?”

“You lied,” I said. “To us. To the police.”

She picked at a thread on the comforter on her bed. “Like you said, I wasn’t with her that night. I didn’t think it mattered.”

She was lying. I could see it in the way she wouldn’t look me in the eyes, in the manic tapping of her foot. “If it didn’t matter, why did you lie?”

She looked up at me, her eyes cold. “You came up to visit Emma, what, twice?”

My skin prickled with the need to defend myself, my guilty conscience about the distance that had grown between Emma and me roaring back to life. “I was a senior in high school,” I said. “I didn’t even have a car.”

“Still,” Nikki said, “you have no idea what it’s like here.”

“So tell me.”

“You just started at Aventine this year right?” she asked.

“How did you know that?”

She shrugged. “Blackwell Falls is a small town. The campuses here are even smaller. The daughter of Frank Russo and sister of Emma Russo at the college where she went missing? Word gets around.”

Great.

“What does my attending Aventine have to do with Emma?”

“The year just started,” she said. “You don’t know what they’re like there, what they do.”

“I know about the games,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “The ones they talk about,” she said under her breath.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

She met my eyes, really looked at me, for the first time. “Did you know Emma was the fourth girl to go missing from Bellepoint in the past four years? And that another girl went missing last year?”

I felt like I’d been slapped. “What are you talking about?”

I’d basically lived online the year after Emma went missing. I’d spent more hours doing research on Bellepoint and Aventine — although I admit the latter was buttoned up pretty tight — than I could count. I’d even dug into the history of Blackwell Falls.

“Every year one girl from Bellepoint goes missing. It’s why I stopped going to Aventine with Emma,” Nikki said.

The words spun through my mind. I was opening my mouth to ask another question when the door flew open. A tiny redhead burst into the room wearing a backpack, carrying a takeout bag with a logo I couldn’t make out, and staring down at her phone.

“Oh. My. God. If I ever see that tool — ” She stopped cold when she saw me sitting in Nikki’s desk chair. “Oh! Sorry! I didn’t know you had company.”

“Could you give us, like, five minutes?” Nikki asked.

“Uh… sure. Let me just drop my stuff.”

Clearly this was Melody, Nikki’s roommate. I watched as she dropped her bag on the other bed in the room. She set the takeout bag on the second desk and I caught a whiff of cooked meat and onions.

She glanced sideways at me as she hurried back out the door.

I refocused on Nikki. I needed to cut to the chase. “I did a lot of digging after Emma went missing. On Aventine, but on Bellepoint too. I never saw a single news article talking about missing girls.”

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