“Let’s get you inside,” said Wes, taking my hand. “We should clean up those scrapes.”
Once inside the apartment, I peeled off my clothes to tend to my various wounds in the bathroom. The rash on my stomach would heal quickly, but my knees had bled through my jeans. Franklin sat honorably beside me as Wes dabbed the cuts clean with a warm washcloth.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked Wes, watching as he applied antibiotic cream to a gauze pad and stuck it to my left knee.
“I don’t know if I can tell you that, Nic.” He secured the gauze with a few strips of medical tape. “Don’t get me wrong, I want these assholes to get nailed for their crimes just as much as you do. I just don’t want you to sacrifice your safety and sanity in order for that to happen.”
I pondered this. On one hand, the idea of dropping my investigation into BRS was heavenly. It would get the society off my back, and the people around me, like Wes and Jo, wouldn’t have to suffer any more setbacks on my account. My conscience, however, would not be clear as long as O’Connor’s body rotted away undiscovered.
When Wes finished patching up my knees, I hobbled out to the living room in search of my demolished messenger bag. I dumped the contents out onto the couch and sifted through them, hoping that none of my notes were still on the loose on campus. After a couple of minutes, I realized what had gone missing.
“Shit!”
Wes rushed in from the bathroom. “What’s wrong?”
“They took the puzzle box!”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” I said, lifting my bag off the couch to make sure I hadn’t lost the puzzle box somewhere beneath it. “The cyclist or someone else. Oh, my God, it was all staged.”
“What was?”
“The fucking bike crash!” In a fit, I threw what was left of my messenger bag across the room. My thesis notes went flying and floated down to settle like ashes on the living-room floor.
“Are you sure?”
I reached for my laptop, opening up the documents that I’d saved my thesis work to. Every one of them was blank.
“No, no, no.”
“What?” asked Wes urgently.
I ignored him. Blood rushed to my head, and my field of vision narrowed as I typed in the passcode to my phone and accessed the camera. All of the pictures—of the clubhouse, the police reports, everything—were gone. It was like I had never even been to BRS’s underground room. They’d wiped everything. All that I had left were O’Connor’s original notes. Furious, I hurled my cell phone too. It hit the far wall of the living room and shattered.
“Relax, Nicole!”
Wes trailed behind me as I rampaged through the living room, flinging aside papers and folders in what I knew was a fruitless search for the puzzle box.
“They hacked everything, Wes!” I shouted. “My phone, my computer! My thesis work is gone! All of it!”
“So you’ll do it again.”
“Oh, God.” I halted my assault on the living room as another thought hit me. “My grades.”
I rushed back over to my laptop and logged in to my academic account. My heart throbbed in my throat as the page displaying my grades fought against the shitty Wi-Fi to load. When the tab finally appeared, I nearly chucked my computer across the room too.
I had Ds and Fs in all of my graduate courses.
“I am going to kill Catherine Flynn,” I said through gritted teeth.
Wes peered at the laptop screen over my shoulder. He seemed relieved that my aggressive display of mania had faded into a quieter, seething rage. “As a police officer, I really can’t condone murder, Nic.”
I turned around to face him. “Do you think this is funny? They’re ruining my entire career, Wes.”
“I don’t think it’s funny, but I do think it’s naive of you not to have expected it.”
A wave of indignation washed over me at his response, but Wes was right. I’d been warned from the beginning. O’Connor, Jo, and even Stella St. Claire had all notified me of the ramifications of getting involved with BRS. I’d ignored them, too stubborn and headstrong, but I refused to place the blame on myself. If the Black Raptor Society didn’t exist, I’d have a finished thesis and a graduation gown to order by now.
“Where are you going?” asked Wes as I walked to the bedroom and wrenched on a fresh, unbloodied pair of jeans.
“To Flynn’s office,” I said, pulling a sweater over my head. “She has to be the main BRS member behind this. There’s no way she’s getting away with it.”
“Let me come with you.”
“No.” I donned my winter coat, which now had threadbare patches on the front thanks to BRS’s bike messenger, and stepped into my boots. “I want to confront her alone. I’ll call you if I need you.”
“You better. If you’re not back in an hour, I’m coming to check on you.”
“Fair enough.”
I crossed the Waverly campus in record time, fueled by the fury still boiling inside me. I stormed up the staircase to Flynn’s office with every intention of kicking her door down, but when I reached the fourth floor, I discovered it already unlocked and open.
Tentatively, I edged inside. Flynn was nowhere in sight, and I hadn’t seen her on the other floors of Research Hall either. On the bookshelf, the crow sculpture had been moved. The books it usually supported lay toppled over, as though Flynn had disrupted the crow in a hurry. With one last glance down the hallway to ensure that I was alone, I shut the office door, turned over the crow, and arranged the puzzle pieces.
When it popped open, my stomach twisted. The ring inside was gone.
The empty velvet insides of the crow felt like an omen. I put the sculpture back
