King of Cups (Stormcloud Academy 2)

Amelia had sighed then. I offered you this opportunity because I see promise in you. You aren’t a vapid trust funder skulking about these halls, looking for a rich boy to take care of you—despite your rather perplexing affinity for Zephyr Williams.

Nothing makes a first passionate love affair seem gross like hearing a teacher talk about it. I’d felt my cheeks redden.

Zephyr has a sweet side, I’d muttered, thinking of how sweetly he had caressed and kissed me the night he and Theo saved my life.

I suppose he keeps it well-hidden. Now, listen, Biba: you don’t get to be in my position at Stormcloud Academy without understanding how it works. The students change, but the system remains the same. I will teach you the secrets of this place at my own pace. And believe me, the morsels of academic knowledge I give you are just as important as the sordid goings-on in the school. Now will you give me the benefit of the doubt and let me teach you?

I had nodded. That was in June, and for two months, Miss Amelia did just what she’d promised, taking me through the school’s five-hundred-year history—its enigmatic founders, its countless wealthy and powerful alums. She even touched on the Kings in a glancing sort of way.

Each generation has its kings, Biba, she had said, not just in Stormcloud, but everywhere. Still, this Academy has seen more than its fair share of ruthless, untouchable royals. The same ones keep coming back, decade after decade, through the centuries. It is a symbiotic relationship, you understand. Stormcloud Academy feeds these Kings a steady diet of pleasure and opportunity. In return, the Kings imprint themselves upon it.

I’d asked her what that meant.

The very walls of Stormcloud, she’d replied, remain upright only through the benevolence of the Kings. Unfortunately, we must all keep that front of mind.

Amelia had never said, in plain terms, who had been a King of Stormcloud Academy. She’d spoken of barons, members of Parliament, industrialists, dictators, and great minds—all might have been ancestors to Zephyr and his clique. I didn’t know, and she didn’t say, and that was that.

After a time, Hegelian philosophy and molecular biology began to merge with the famous alums and institutional secrets, as if life and Stormcloud were inseparable. Certainly, they were for me. My old life in Seattle, my hopes for a Harvard admission, my despair at being an orphan . . . all these concerns seemed to belong to another girl. Even my remorse over Gail’s death and the fluttery feelings I had thinking of poor, lost Theo started to vanish.

The Biba that made it through her first term at Stormcloud learned to block these emotions throughout the day. It was a coping mechanism, a means of survival.

The feelings came back when I lay in my bed at night. Actually, it was Zephyr’s bed. The Kings had the best rooms in Stormcloud—huge, sprawling suites meant to house four students, but they had them all to themselves. And they didn’t move between terms like the hoi polloi. So after Zephyr had tried and failed to convince me to join him for the summer at his family’s estate in Cote d’Azur, he’d gotten over his saltiness and tossed the key to his grand suite to me.

Stay there for the summer, he’d grumbled. I can’t believe you’re choosing that bony old gull over me.

It’s an opportunity, Zeph.

You know what’s an opportunity, Biba? Three months in the perfect Mediterranean summer with the richest families in Europe. Whatever. Stay in the mountains with Miss Manners. But sleep in my room. If I can’t have you to myself, I at least want to imagine you touching yourself on my sheets.

It was goodbye, cramped dorm room; hello, luxury living. Not that I spent much time there, as busy as I’d been all summer.

This had been Amelia’s objective, I think, in taking me under her wing. For whatever reason, she seemed to like me and wanted me to be okay. Perhaps she had lost someone like I did, a parent or a friend or a lover. She never talked about herself, anyway. Her goal seemed to be to keep me busy and active for the summer so that I would not think about all I’d lost and all that had been denied me. And somewhere between the tutorials, the gossip, and the drilling of Academy history, I suddenly became, for the first time, comfortable in Stormcloud Academy. To the manner born, as they say.

My assistant role became a real job once July turned to August and, one morning, Amelia announced that the “fun” was over for now. We had to get things ready for the first day of class.

That meant processing applications and tuition payments, assigning rooms and class schedules, ordering food, books, and other provisions. It broke down cleanly: Amelia did all the critical thinking, and I did all the grunt work.

Amazingly, in a world of cloud storage and wireless internet, most of this work required taking stacks of papers all over Stormcloud’s labyrinthine campus. Folders for the bursar. Folders for the professors. Folders for the security guards. And always stacks and stacks of sealed documents for Dean Schmidt, many of them stamped with literal wax like papal decrees.

I’d worn out a pair of tennis shoes tramping all over the school’s unyielding stone and oak. Yet all the tidbits about Stormcloud’s history had lodged in my brain, and I now had a GPS-quality understanding of its countless secret doors and passages.

On that particular morning, I let myself out of Amelia’s portico office and turned onto the blessedly soft runner that led toward the women’s wing. My endpoint was the infirmary at the far end of the East Wing. A newbie would think I was heading the wrong way.

They didn’t know that if you tapped the gilded rose on the wainscoting four rooms down with your foot, a secret door would pop open, leading to an iron spiral stairwell. Take that up, and you’d find yourself in a dimly lit corridor that runs parallel to the student auditorium on the fourth floor. There’s a panel you could slip around that would take you under the stage, then a trap door you’d pop out of next to the dressing rooms. The story went that a mezzo-soprano on loan from Munich did a masterclass at Stormcloud in the mid-1800s, and the headmaster at the time began an affair with her. He built the secret fourth-floor corridor to give himself access to her after performances.

Anyway, once you were backstage, you could step up to the catwalk, shimmy past a false wall to a covert door that leads to the roof. From there, you could walk across to the extreme eastern edge, back in through the service access, then through two masked sliding partitions. The first would take you into a secret surgical amphitheater that I didn’t dare ask Amelia about. The second led to the office of the school’s physician.

I dropped the files on his desk. The whole trip took less than five minutes. Using the regular route, with its winding hallways and hand-cranked elevator, would have taken twice that time.

I decided to spend my saved minutes taking a hidden stairwell down to the blossoming courtyard and enjoying the fresh late-summer air.

With a sense of true self-satisfaction, I stepped out into the light. I was, at last, a legit student of Stormcloud Academy. To hell with the haters and the naysayers!

So it took the wind out of my sails when the first thing I saw when I entered the courtyard was a familiar pair of serious gray eyes set below a shielding brow and a swoop of sandy blond locks.

It was Theo, newly arrived, tanned, and refreshed. Of all the people I could run into, he was perhaps the one I was least prepared to see.

Even so, the moment he saw me, he flashed a perfect smile of gleaming white teeth. He was smitten, as always, and I fought hard to contain my own joy at seeing him. I didn't want him to know I was as happy as he was.