ARABELLA
The pranks start the next day after I walk in on the founders’ boys in the clinic and carry on well into the next week. They cover my car in cowpats and slash the tires, leave roadkill on my desk, they even put used condoms in the laundry bag with my clean clothes. It’s not just Romain and his club. It’s the whole school.
Wolf whistles and gropes in the hallways have become the norm.
Death threats and lewd messages shoved in my pigeonhole happen daily.
It all becomes a blur of boys being cruel—fucking heartless.
I have no idea what they want from me, except that Zane Holland and Carter Blackwood keep giving lewd stares, blatant ones, whenever we happen to be in the same room. All the senior boys seem to hate me. The girls look at me with disdain, especially the ones wearing the collars. Even the teachers are confused at why I seem to be getting so much attention, giving me sympathetic looks, secretly glad it’s not them.
I don’t cry or show any emotion until my cat goes missing. I brought her to the halls because I needed her. I can’t sleep otherwise. And now she’s been gone three days. I usually keep her locked in my rooms because she’s the type of cat who is scared of her own shadow, or was when I adopted her in LA.
If anything has happened to Ravenclaw…
It may not be the founders’ boys, but they’re responsible all the same. They’re getting back at me for tattling on them, even if their punishment was hardly one at all. Helen escalated it to my stepfather, and then nothing. What’s clear is that I’ve become a target. The boys, the entire school, hates me.
Wednesday morning, I lose it and pull a junior boy up in the hallway for having his shirttails out. When he doesn’t tuck them in, I promptly add his name to the detention list and tell him to go see the head.
I should have let him off with a warning. He’s not the only one with his shirt untucked, but he’s the first student I bump into after Romain, looking down his nose at me, passed by me in the corridor earlier. He had a girl on each arm. One of them happened to be Lacey. She was wearing a cuff on her wrist that jingled—a blue leather one with a bronze bell and tag. I knew when I looked down what the name tag would say…
Ravenclaw.
The final stab in the gut. Fuel to the fire that lit an inferno within me. To make matters worse, heat still filled my cheeks when Romain’s blue eyes burned into mine, and I remembered every second of his thrusting inside me. Then Zane laughed, and Carter winked, and that was that.
I wanted to punish him—all of them for the torment, the malice.
Heartless boys and their lewd fucking games.
Instead, I take it out on a kid with a wardrobe malfunction. The junior calls me a bitch afterward. He’s right. I am one. I’m letting Romain get to me. I’m allowing my emotions to control me. I just don’t know what I should do. Do I go to Helen again? My stepfather? File a complaint? Ask to leave?
Does any of it matter? You slept with a student, Bella. And then you did the worst thing you could ever do. You deserve this.
I toy with what to do all day when I finally decide I can’t let this slide.
Ravenclaw doesn’t deserve whatever those fucking boys are doing to her.
I findout from a few students that Romain is always in the library during the senior study period after lunchtime. It’s sports today, so only a half-day for lessons. Later he’ll be off to play cricket. I need to catch him before he does.
He’s sitting at the table furthermost away from the entrance, in a sort of alcove, when I enter. Norton Astor and Benjamin Pennington are with him, heads in books when I approach.
I’m surprised this is where he hangs out. But to give Romain his due, his grades are excellent, and he’s top in almost every subject. I may have asked a few of his teachers, in case there was some leverage I could have over him, to get him to stop his boys from hounding me. But Romain is a star pupil at Reynard. Which probably goes a long way to giving him the immunity I see from most of his teachers. They don’t care what he does, as long as he keeps his grades. The more students we can send to prestigious universities, the better, so I’m told.
Well, I’m about to bring that crashing down around him.
Romain doesn’t look up, even when I stand beside his chair.
“Montford, a word,” I say when he doesn’t acknowledge me for the longest minute of my life.
He sweeps a look my way, taking me in from under his dark lashes. “Can it wait? We’re in the middle of a timed paper.”
I glance down at his neat, cursive handwriting and the test paper beside it.
“No,” I snap.
He sighs and gets to his feet, gesturing to the lads at the table who put down their pens. “No, carry on. This won’t take long.”
I walk through the library with him following me and everyone watching. I do not want to talk where everyone can hear us, so I carry on until I get to the row of private study rooms on the next level. He follows me into one and leans against the wall, hands in his pockets, blinking at me with his big blue eyes—every bit a picture of innocence.