Page 55 of Made in Malice

While I’m walking toward the rear exit to see if her car is still here, I send a text off to Nox, asking if he’s seen her.

My phone rings in the next second. I think about ignoring it, and if it were anyone else, I would. “Hello?”

“She didn’t come out of the class?” he questions after reading my text.

“Yeah, but I got distracted, and she got away.”

“What?” He sniggers softly, and it does something in my chest. It’s such a strange sound coming from him. I feel like it’s been ages since he’s found much joy in anything, even my fuckups.

“Yeah, and she fucking knew it was me before I even opened my mouth,” I admit.

“I told you,” he crows. “Did you get her to admit how she knows?”

“No, she walked right past me. Her car is still here though.” I search the parking lot and grounds for her, bouncing my gaze over the students sitting under trees and on benches, and come up empty.

“You checked the Union?” he asks, and I can tell he’s walking by the way his voice sounds.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll check the upper floors. You check the library,” he instructs.

“Fine,” I snarl, then hang up. I don’t let anyone other than him tell me what to do, and even then, it grates on my nerves.

The moment I enter the library, I remember the last time I was here, and I know she won’t be found hiding in the stacks. I need to ask her what happened that day in the study room and force her to tell me, but every fucking time I get around her, I get lost because I’m too busy pissing her off so I can stoke that fire that always seems to burn in her eyes.

I weave in and out of the shelves just to be sure, then head upstairs two at a time. In one of the study rooms, I find a guy fucking a girl who’s bent over the table. I see red for about a millisecond before I notice the long black hair spilling across the wood table, not my lamb’s honey blonde.

“Shit,” he curses, pulling out of her and reaching down for his pants in the same breath.

“Get out,” the girl starts, but her words fall short when she realizes who’s at the door, and suddenly, she doesn’t seem to mind being ass up over the table.

I walk away without bothering to close the door, so I hear when she calls, “Come back,” to which the guy spits, “Jesus, Ainsley.”

“That was a Morningstar,” she hisses, pushing past him as if she might follow me down the hall to the back stairs, but when she realizes I’m not slowing, let alone stopping, she stays put outside the door of the room.

After exhausting all the areas she could be, I leave the library behind, but the image of my lamb bent over the table, looking back at me as I watch myself sink inside her inch by inch, is a sight I can’t easily get rid of.

NOX

I know I’m in the right place before I even get up to the third floor. She’s the only one around here who seems to cause a commotion everywhere she goes.

“And it takes both of you to tell me this why?” Her words greet me as I step onto the third-floor landing. This is the same area where Lucian introduced her to me. Not many people hang out here, which is why we chose it. In the back of my mind, I’m wondering if that’s why she’s here, because we showed it to her, but that thought disappears when I see Nova backed into a corner with two girls in front of her and a guy standing a few feet away, watching.

“What the fuck?” I don’t have to work to sound like my easy to anger brother. I’m pissed just from seeing them teaming up on her, because that’s what this looks like. Everyone turns to look at me, and that’s when I see Grace and realize I was right.

Lucian and I have both fucked her on occasion, but we cut her off when she got territorial. I can’t say I’m surprised she picked up on the fact that Nova has our attention, but I’m shocked she’s trying to stake a claim, especially after Lucian warned everyone that Nova was off-limits.

Grace’s eyes slit as she flashes me a smile. “We’re just introducing ourselves.”

“Is that what you were doing?” Nova laughs incredulously.

I watch Grace’s full lips pinch. She probably wants to tell Nova to shut her mouth but knows she can’t do that with me standing here.

“I thought you were warning me off Nox and his brother when you said, oh, what was it? ‘Stay the F away from them, or else.’ Did I get that right?”

Grace runs her eyes over me quickly. I bet she’s responding to Nova’s ability to identify me and trying to see if she’s correct, but she would never be able to tell. She didn’t even know which one of us was fucking her.

I stroll past the guy standing to the side, who looks like he’d rather become part of the woodwork than be here, making sure I clip his shoulder as I do. Instead of wasting words on Grace, I speak to Nova. “You left something at the house last night.”

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