When Sinners Play (Sinners of Hawthorne University 1)

I turn toward the door once more, but before I reach it, Elias’s voice stops me.

“Blue?”

I bite my lip, not looking back. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

The tight ache in my chest squeezes, and I can’t tell if it’s pain or relief or… or what.

My throat tightens around a lump, and I try to swallow it down, dipping my head in a nod of acknowledgement before I leave the room. When I step outside the men’s dorm building, the campus is dark and quiet, just a few people walking across the manicured lawns. The cool air feels good on my flushed skin, and I try to gather strength from it as I head slowly back toward my building.

I text Max on the way.

Maybe I’m strong enough to face this without men I don’t even know if I can trust by my side, but I need someone with me.

Max is a blaze of pure fury by the time she meets me outside my dorm. “What the actual fuck, Sophie? You have no idea who did this?”

I shake my head. My certainty that it was the Sinners has bled away, leaving nothing but blank confusion in its wake.

She pulls me into a tight hug, and I go stiff in her embrace for a second. I’m not a fucking hugger, never have been, but the fierceness of her hold eases something inside me. I wrap my arms around her, letting myself draw a deep breath for the first time since I left Gray’s dorm.

“Do you want me to handle it?” she asks. “I can bag everything up before you go in.”

“No.” I shake my head, stepping back from her. “I need to do it. I need to see.”

Her lips pull to the side in a grimace, but she nods understandingly.

It doesn’t take us long to clean up. I force my mind to go blank as we shove pieces of paper and shredded canvas into several big garbage bags. They’re not pieces of me anymore, I remind myself. They’re just hunks of trash now.

Max stays over all night, and we barely sleep, drinking cheap whiskey and bullshitting about absolutely nothing. It helps, even though the eerily blank walls around us feel oppressive and strange.

The last time I fucked Gray, he was the one to pull away after, going cold and distant as if he wanted to pretend it had never happened.

This time, it’s me.

I keep all three of the Sinners at arm’s length over the next week, not searching out Declan in the stairwell or meeting Gray’s gaze when he stares at me from across the dining hall. When Elias catches me after class one day and tries to talk to me, I brush him off.

Whatever he wants to say, I don’t think I’m ready to hear it.

They didn’t wreck my art. I’m almost sure of it. But the missing pieces, the blank spaces on my wall, are fucking with my head. I feel raw, vulnerable, and exposed, like I’ve lost every scrap of the armor I spent years building up around myself.

I still don’t know who did do it. Max confronted Caitlin the day after everything was destroyed, and the two of them almost got into a fucking brawl—but Caitlin insisted she didn’t have any idea what Max was talking about, and her confusion seemed genuine.

So that leaves me with no solid leads. On a campus of a few thousand students, one of them tried to hurt me more than anyone else ever has.

One of them broke into my room.

One of them has a brutal vendetta against me.

My dreams have stopped. My body and mind are edging back into numbness. I try to paint, to replace the pieces that got destroyed, but I can’t do it. I stare for hours at blank canvasses, unable to add a single brushstroke of paint to them.

I’m afraid to put my heart outside my body a second time.

Not after it was nearly destroyed once.

Whatever needed to be let out of me when I painted them, whatever I poured out onto the canvas as a way of processing my emotions, it’s gone now. I feel… incomplete.

Thank fuck for Max. She doesn’t let me retreat entirely into myself, but there’s only so much she can do. I keep studying, and I keep going to class, but everything else becomes a sort of blur. Everywhere I go, my shoulders stay hunched and tense, and my eyes dart around suspiciously. I’ve started to hate this school, to hate everyone in it—to believe the little voice in my head that’s been whispering from the start, you don’t belong here.