King of Cups (Stormcloud Academy 2)

He gritted his teeth, bit his lip, and decided there was no way he could keep whatever intel he was hiding. “It’s probably nothing,” he muttered.

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Look, I’ve been following him like you said. Saturday, Schmidt is on campus, and I’m tailing him. All pretty boring: office hours, meals, a jog through the hills. And I lose him, just for a minute, while he’s jogging. I slip into the woods to try to head him off at the pass, but as I’m moving through the trees . . . I hear whispers, like a conversation. So I creep in further through the woods and, bang! There’s Schmidt, still in his running skivvies, and he’s talking, I’m pretty certain . . . to Sol.”

I couldn’t believe it. Literally. I did not believe the shit Arvo was telling me. Sol was not, could not possibly be, a snitch.

“What were they talking about?”

“I don’t know. I must have snapped a twig or something because as I got close, Sol—or whoever it was—made a break for it.”

“And you’re just telling me this now?”

I was fucking livid.

“I wasn’t sure it was him. I’m still on the fence—”

“A percentage, then. How certain are you it was Sol Stamos that was talking to the Dean?”

He thought for a moment, blinking from the strain. Then he settled on “60 percent.”

“Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess. Are you sure Schmidt was talking to someone, though? Middle of the woods, secret talks?”

“Yes,” he jumped, hoping to assure me that this was not an irredeemable screwup.

My eyes were scanning the courtyard, the trees, the windows of the manor house. I felt more exposed at that moment than I’d ever felt at Stormcloud. We needed to move.

Without a word, I took Arvo by the elbow and led him to my new Aston Martin DBS. Dad had pulled it right off one of his ships as a surcharge to a delinquent freighting company. It had no papers, and the plates were forged. Only me and the guys at the factory had been inside of it for more than five minutes; there was no way it was bugged.

We rolled out of campus to take a long drive through the mountains. Arvo looked nauseous like maybe I was taking him to a secluded spot to put a bullet behind his ear. Good. At that moment, I wanted everyone around me just a little scared.

“Here’s the thing,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road. “Whoever is feeding info to Schmidt needs to be shut up, and I mean permanently.”

“Agreed.”

“You don’t need to respond. I want you on Schmidt’s tail going forward. Not anyone else—you. I need 100 percent unambiguous proof if it’s Sol. Confirming that is your job.”

Arvo nodded. The DBS purred underneath me. For a moment, I felt fine.

“And if it is Sol,” I said to myself, “we’ll take him behind the woodshed and give him the strap.”

CHAPTER 10

THEO

I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t gotten more than four hours of rest for days, and that was broken up into a hundred small moments of unconsciousness when my mind shut down more out of self-preservation than anything else. Then after twenty or so minutes, I was up again, staring at the ceiling or pacing or reading.

This couldn’t go on. My focus was shot during the day. My emotions were either crazy or catatonic. Thank god, I had no one to talk to; they would have thought I was insane.

What was it Othello said? It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—It is the cause.

I’d lost her. Well and truly, I would never get her back. For some reason, it became instantly apparent to me when I saw Arvo Hurley in Amelia’s office, smirking and sauntering out, perjuring himself to save her. Under Zephyr Williams’ directive, no doubt.

Until that moment, I had looked at Biba’s . . . what would you call it? Entanglement with the Kings as foolish—dangerously foolish. A petty act of rebellion. I’d pitied her. But I had also understood her. We were both lost orphans in this horrible school, trying to find our way through the brambles because, on the other side, we had been promised a better life. I had dedicated the first half of my Stormcloud tenure to resisting the injustices of this place. Biba had allied herself with them.

I’d thought she was mistaken, but when Arvo saved her life with one bald lie, I understood that I’d been the fool all along. The Kings were not some nasty distraction for Biba; they were her home. They kept her safe and protected. With Zephyr and Sol and Arvo watching over her, she would make it out of Stormcloud and, probably, end up a billionaire. A minted member of the leisure class.

Biba had figured it out, I found myself thinking again and again. In less than two months, she’d figured out how to survive at Stormcloud Academy. And you, Theo Brant, don’t have the balls to do what she did.