If ever there were two opposites ripe for attraction, it was Jill Jekel and I. Beauty and the literal beast. Yin and yang. Pure light and pitch black.
I groaned again in the dark room.
How unlucky it would be for Jill if she were ever to start feeling the same powerful, insistent need for me that I had begun to experience for her.
Not just unlucky but tragic. For although I had the promise of rescue tucked away on my bookshelf, the clock was ticking. And even if I earned salvation, I was nowhere near redemption. No, as the pieces of my life’s puzzle began to click into place, I was increasingly certain that I had committed a sin back in London that a good girl like Jill Jekel would never forgive.
Hell, I couldn’t imagine ever forgiving myself.
Chapter 33
Jill
“JILL?”
I looked up from my sociology book to see Darcy Gray standing across from me with her arms braced on the cafeteria table.
I swallowed my bite of peanut butter sandwich and tried to greet her, but it came out too nervous, almost like a question. “Hi?”
Darcy never sought me out. She was going to turn me in for breaking into the school . . .
“I’ve been thinking about last night.” Darcy seemed to confirm my worst fears, narrowing her eyes. With her sharp-edged haircut and designer clothes, she looked like an angry boss about to dress down me, her employee. “Thinking about what I saw.”
The peanut butter stuck in my throat. “You—you have?”
Darcy glanced around herself, making sure we were alone. Which, of course, we were. I almost always ate by myself in a far corner of the caf, using the time to study. Satisfied that we had privacy, Darcy leaned closer. “Look, Jill,” she said in a quiet but warning tone, “I saw you and Tristen come out of the school, and unlike Todd, I don’t think you two were screwing on the wrestling mats.”
I stared up at Darcy, scared—and curious about this second reference to the mats. Was that something people actually did? Was sneaking into the gym another part of sex, a local mating ritual that I didn’t know about? “Darcy, we weren’t—”
I had no idea what I was about to say.
Darcy didn’t wait to hear excuses, anyway. “I think you two are teaming up for that scholarship and hiding your work.”
I choked harder on the peanut butter that I was still trying to get down my throat. “What?”
Darcy leaned down even farther, crouching like a wolf about to pounce, her blue eyes icier than I’d ever seen them. “I think it’s pathetic that you’re afraid to compete with me in the open,” she growled. “It’s totally underhanded, teaming up behind my back. Did you think I would steal your ideas? Or that you’d lull me into doing less than my best because the brilliant Jill Jekel and Tristen Hyde are forming some powerhouse brain trust? Because if you remember, I told you from the start that I didn’t want to work with you or your violent, loner boyfriend.”
“No, it’s not like that . . .” We weren’t working against her. Not maliciously. And Tristen wasn’t my boyfriend. “We . . . We . . .” What could I tell her?
“You’re just like your criminal father,” Darcy spat, rising and crossing her arms. “Sneaking around late at night, working in secret. It’s uncanny! Unbelievable! You’d think you of all people would have learned a lesson from what happened to him!”
I sat in stunned silence, ears ringing with Darcy’s words.
“And with Tristen Hyde’s propensity for violence,” she added, “you’d better watch that you don’t end up like your dad.”
With that, Darcy spun on her heel and stalked away, leaving me sitting alone, my open book and my half-eaten sandwich in front of me, not quite sure what to do. Run and cry? Act like nothing had happened, even though it felt like the walls were closing in?
How could Darcy have said those things? Thrown my dad’s murder in my face?
I got up the courage to look around the crowded room, sure that the whole school must have heard. That Darcy’s words must have been projected over the loudspeaker. But everybody else just kept eating and talking and enjoying their blissfully normal lives.
Everybody, that is, except Tristen, who I spotted at the opposite corner of the caf. He was alone, too, but as usual solitude didn’t seem to bother him. He was leaning back, balancing his chair on two legs, his long legs propped on another seat, seeming absorbed in a book, his hand absently reaching now and then for a tall Styrofoam cup of coffee that featured the logo of a nearby gas station.
Darcy had called Tristen my boyfriend. But she was wrong. He didn’t want me that way.
As I watched, he yawned and stretched, which made him seem even taller, more imposing.
Violent loner. Darcy had called Tristen that, too.
Although I knew a different side of Tristen, a sweet side, I hadn’t been able to defend him against her charge. And as for Darcy’s prediction about me ending up like my father . . .
I watched as Tristen flipped his coffee cup into a nearby trash can, remembering the feel of his hot palm against mine on the night he’d threatened to tear off Todd Flick’s head. I’d felt safe with him in the school. But then he’d snapped.
Tristen stood now, stuffing the book into his messenger bag, which seemed like a bottomless pit for possessions that were treated with the same casual disregard he offered Mr. Messerschmidt and all authority.
Tristen and I were distant . . . but getting closer, in a weird way. He didn’t lust after me, but we had a connection. A connection rooted in bloodshed and grief.
Darcy’s words echoed again in my brain. With Tristen Hyde’s propensity for violence, you’d better watch that you don’t end up like your dad.
Feeling suddenly hotter, queasier, I turned my back on Tristen and wadded up my
